The New Mood Therapy — David D. Burns, M.D.

<aside> 🧭 This page presents some notes and highlights from the book "Feeling Good". You can find the book here. To read a summary of the book's content, you can click here.

</aside>

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• Table of Contents

Part 1 | Theory and Research

Chapter 1 — A Breakthrough in the Treatment of Mood Disorders

• The first principle of cognitive therapy is that all your moods are created by your "cognitions", or thoughts. Your thought actually creates the emotion.

• The second principle is that when you are feeling depressed, your thoughts are dominated by a pervasive negativity.

• The third principle is that the negative thoughts which cause your emotional turmoil nearly always contain gross distortions.

• There is a difference between feeling better, which occurs spontaneously, and getting better, which results from systematically applying and reapplying the methods that will lift your mood whenever the need arises.

Chapter 2 — How to Diagnose Your Moods: The First Step in the Cure

here there is an assessment table containing some simple statements concerning your recent thoughts and feelings, to be completed in a checklist fashion.

Chapter 3 — Understanding Your Moods: You Feel the Way You Think

• When you are depressed, you possess the remarkable ability to believe, and to get the people around you to believe, things which have no basis in reality.

DEFINITIONS OF COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS

1. All-or-nothing thinking forms the basis for perfectionism. It causes you to fear any imperfection because you will then see yourself as a complete loser, and you will feel inadequate and worthless.

   Absolutes do not exist in this universe. If you try to force your experiences into absolute categories, you will be constantly depressed because your perceptions will not conform to reality.

2. Overgeneralization. When you overgeneralize, you arbitrarily conclude that one thing that happened to you once will occur over and over again.

3. Mental Filter. You pick out a negative detail in any situation and dwell on it exclusively, thus perceiving that the whole situation is negative. All that you allow to enter the conscious mind is negative. Because you are not aware of this filtering process, you conclude that everything is negative (selective abstraction).