Self-Help

Progress in therapy requires that we make small changes in our lives on a daily basis. People are generally more likely to accomplish this by writing down their thoughts and insights after each therapy session.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) helps us learn to evaluate our thoughts and beliefs by gathering evidence, developing alternative explanations, decatastrophizing and using other “Socratic questions” to help us more clearly and realistically analyze our thoughts. It is the hallmark of critical thinking.

Conducting a Cost-Benefit Analysis is an essential tool of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT). It’s a good way to identify the pros and cons associated with keeping a particular coping strategy (“holding on to my current belief”) versus using an adaptive coping strategy (“adopting a new belief”).

When it comes to making decisions, there’s perhaps nowhere more important to make the right one than in space. When you’re cruising above Earth, a bad decision can have some pretty hefty consequences. We can leverage this approach to our own personal lives so that we don’t “make things worse by guessing,” especially in a crisis.

When we can describe our emotions, we have a perception of control. Otherwise, we end up acting-out, or “behaving”, our emotions. The goal is to give ourselves a better emotional vocabulary. Pinning an emotion with a name work because once you have a name for it, it doesn’t become so overwhelming. You actually get off the emotion rollercoaster ride and you look at it rather than being in it and it becomes much easier to figure out why you’re feeling it. The pressure actually starts to go away.