Episode #113

Existential Dread & CBT

Many people feel anxiety over aging and death, searching for the meaning of life, and their own personal purpose.

What is the difference between existential therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy?

How can you feel in control of your life?

How can CBT help you with anxiety around existential dread?

Join me, Dr Julie Osborn, as I share with you the CBT tools that can help you cope with existential dread.

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Full Episode Transcript

Hi, this is Dr. Julie. I'm a Doctor of Psychology and a licensed clinical social worker specializing in Cognative Behavioral Therapy. I'm here to bring the power of CBT into your own life.

So welcome and thanks, as always, for joining me. I'm going to start off with an email I received that gave me my idea for my topic today. So let's start off with the email.

It's titled ‘How to cope with existential dread.’

“Hi, Dr. Julie,

I frequently feel terrified about aging and death. And when I stop to think about it, life feels like a pointless sick joke. Everyone is bustling around and competing to make money and reach milestones, but it feels like everyone is deluding themselves. What does anything matter when we'll all be dead and as if we were never here?

I thought I wanted kids, but it seems a bit cruel to bring a new person into this game knowing they will suffer and die. Do you have any thoughts on how to try to deal with this?

I feel alone in it, and I don't understand how other people just don't care about this rather large elephant in the room.

I suppose I'd rather feel less depressed, though, so I'm really curious what you'd have to say about this.

Thank you very much, podcast listener.”

So thank you for sending that email. And I've had actually a few clients recently talk to me about this. There are issues, I should say, of this existential dread, trying to find the meaning in their life and what's going on. So I thought after I got this email, this would be a good one. I think we all have these thoughts sometimes, but I want to put it in perspective and talk about what is existentialism versus CBT and how do they overlap? Because they do overlap, and we can address this. I will share at the end of the podcast my response to my listener. So for somebody, talk about what is existentialism. So what it is that explores the issue of the human existence. It's more concrete, right? So when you're doing existential therapy, which there are therapists that focus on that, they do focus on free will, self-determination, and the search for meaning, and they're offering centering more on the individual rather than their symptoms. So the approach emphasizes on a person's capacity to make rational choices and to develop to their own maximum potential.

So that all sounds good. Sometimes people get stuck, though, because the questions that come up, their existential questions about what's the meaning of life, they never get an answer to, and it feeds their anxiety. But let me continue on here. So the principal method of existential counseling and psychotherapy is to implement a philosophical approach, which is an effort to help a client to cope with the inevitable adversity and uncertainty, aka anxiety, in life. And they're interpreting the client's personal meaning of their world to help them understand their issues in living, right? So it's addressing issues, but it's helping them come up with meaning behind it versus, again, addressing symptoms, where CBT focus a lot more on the symptoms, right? And what are your thoughts that are creating them to have more of that balanced thinking? But both approaches, meaning CBT and existentialism, do focus on the concerns and the impact, how an individual is helped to understand and change their problems, right? That's some of the overlap. They are focusing on the client, obviously, and how they can actually help their client and decrease the problems they're having or get rid of them. They also both suggest that once habits and certain ideas have become established, a person can find themselves in a vicious cycle where their actions often support the problematic belief systems they're carrying.

So by exploring with their clients, their experiences, and then identifying their core beliefs, I'll talk about it in a second, and how they are affecting their lives and their perceptions. So they both focus on that. So you guys have heard me use the word core beliefs a lot because it's a big factor in making changes in your life. And I do have a podcast just on core beliefs, and I share my personal story of my core belief and how it's able to change and how it affected my life. So let me just review what core beliefs are, right? That they're at the core of who you are, and they tend to be absolute thoughts, right? So say, like with this existential dread, it may be that there's no purpose in life as a core belief, right? Or like my client, not my client, I'm sorry, my listener, they wrote me the email said, We're just going to suffer and die. So it's a very absolute thought, right? And if I believe that, then my assumption is that I'm not going to have joy in life. My assumption is why even bother with anything because I'm just going to suffer and die?

Why would I bring a child into this world? Right? So that's the core beliefs. And the core beliefs are what creates the thoughts, right? Our thoughts are thoughts that aren't 100 % true, that we want to identify and be able to change. And I want to say with the comments that my listenered or talked about is that even though life can appear meaningless or even absurd at times, you can create your own meaning and purpose, right? And that's what it comes down to that, again, when life is really hard, I've met people that have had multiple losses in their life, lots of grief. It's easy to say, what's the purpose? I have a lot of people share with me someone young and vibrant and giving back and just a wonderful person dies young. And then there's someone who's smoke and drinking, never gets out of their chair, and they live to their 95, right? I just have a lot of people say, What's the purpose? I mean, why is the world just so cruel? Why is the world so cruel? Why would they take this person, this person is just live in life and not taking care of themselves or giving back in any way and is miserable all the time, and they live long.

And again, that's that existential. I don't know. I don't know why that is. I don't know why certain things in life happen, but I can easily get caught up in that, which will make me very anxious and depressed, because that'll make me believe that I don't have any control in my life to my destiny, to the choices I'm making, to the meaning in my life, right? So I don't believe someone's going to tell me what the meaning of my life is. They may want to tell me. I might not accept it. I need to decide what is the meaning in my life, right? How do I want to look at the world? We've all had difficult things that we've gone through on all different levels, and some are bigger than others, but it was still difficult for us to go through. It's not about measuring who's is worse or who's is easier, right? And we can either walk away from that, being depressed and anxious and angry at the world, be like, What's the purpose? Or we can say, Okay, what can I take from this? What can I take from the experience I had?

So I share in my podcast calledwhen everything falls apart, part one and two, when I had ovarian cancer and I had to go through chemo on that, that was depressing, very difficult time in my life. And what have I taken from that is I really need to be present, right? I say yes to more things. I get myself centered more quickly when I'm going through difficult things because I think back to that time. And I'm just grateful that I'm still here because there's a chance that I couldn't have been still here. I not survived that. So I could just be depressed. That was my second cancer I've had in my life. But where does that get me? And thinking about where life's meaning and why did I have to suffer and this and that, I don't even want to go there because it'll just feed my anxiety. So I want to think about what is my perception of my meaning in my life and how am I going to live that? I do want to think those things. So I'm not saying not to ask yourself, but to give yourself or keep yourself in this perpetual state of these existential questions without getting any help or direction, you will just feel anxious and depressed and feel life is meaningless and that we're going to suffer and die like my listener wrote to me.

So it's important to be mindful if you're feeling stuck in this place. So existentialism and CBT both address your meaning and your purpose in life. All right, existentialism and CBT both address self-awareness by helping you to identify and reflect on your thoughts, your feelings, and your behaviors, right? That's what CBT is all about in my mind. What are your thoughts that are creating your negative feelings, which affect your behaviors, and then obviously your physical reactions, right? And how is your environment affected with all of that? Having the freedom and identifying your choices that each of you have, and you can make for yourselves, and seeing the importance of those aspects in your life can create the life that you do want. So I think that, and I know from experience working with thousands of people, the lot of the negative thoughts about that create anxiety and depression and fear and hopelessness is that we can't do anything to change our lives. We're going to continue to suffer. Bad things have happened to me before. Bad things will happen again. I don't have a partner in my life. I'll never find somebody. Very absolute black and white thinking.

And those are the thoughts we want to identify. What are your existential thoughts? And again, it's not that it's not okay to have those thoughts. It's okay to have whatever thoughts you have. The problem is if you just let them ruminate and you make decisions based on them, right? So the email I wrote to you guys, if he's thinking life is just about suffering and dying, so I'm not even going to have a kid, even though I've always wanted one. But he's making a huge life decision based on a hot thought, right? All we do is suffer and die. That's not true. There is suffering, and sure, we are going to die. But there's a lot in between, right? There's a lot of gray that we want to look at instead of the black and white. So why I wanted to address this is that I want you guys to take some time to reflect and see if part of your struggle, if you're struggling with depression, anxiety, anything else, is to be able to identify those hot thoughts and understand how they're affecting you negatively and ask yourself, Do I want to just ruminate on this and look at life as negative and make assumptions about the future?

And what we call fortune telling, that you know what's going to happen already, so you make decisions not to follow through or work church things. Using the words never and always, I always say, are red flags and clues to having thoughts because there's not many things that are never, is an always. And maybe those are the thoughts that are getting in your way, these existential thoughts. So I think it can be a fun conversation to talk about with other people. How do you see the world? What do you think your meaning is? What is the world about? It's just so vast that you're going to get many different perceptions from different people. And those are fun conversations to have, I think, to understand other people's perceptions and how they see things. I find that interesting. And being able to understand them and to understand where that even comes from. What are people's life experience, people's cultures, people's religious beliefs or faith that brings them to the beliefs that they do have? So speaking of faith, let me just address that for a second, is the definition of faith is believing in something you have no evidence for, right?

So that's existentialism in its way of we don't have an answer, but I'm going to decide if I'm not going to just get stuck in those thoughts, some people have their faith that they have beliefs that help them give meaning to their world. But you don't have to find a faith to address your existential thoughts. It's just that that is a source of support for a lot of people and comfort. But if faith is in a part of your life, you can still address this because you can decide, What is my meaning for my life? What do I want to address? I am here. I'm living my life. So I can sit here and be depressed and think I'm going to suffer and die, or I can say, Okay, while I'm here, how do I want to live my life? How do I want to give back? What meaning is important to me in my life that I'm going to focus on? So while while I'm here, I can be happy and understand that just because I think something doesn't mean it's true. And if I allow myself to stay in these thoughts, these negative thoughts, I am going to be depressed.

So if you remember in the email, he says, I guess I could be less depressed. So it sounds to me like he wants to be. He just doesn't really know where to go. And maybe he's getting stuck in all of these existential thoughts. He doesn't know how to make those changes. And that's where the CBT comes in, right? Because you guys tools. We need tools. I need tools. I use tools all the time. I practice CBT every single day because I have all those thoughts, just like you guys do, that can get caught up and make me worried and fearful and stressed out. And so I can identify, okay, what are my how thoughts? And how can I come up with a more balanced way of thinking? Because I do want to be happy. Because for me personally, I always say, you know what? This is the life I know, and this is the one I'm going to focus on. And wherever I go after I die, that will be another experience, I suppose. But I'm not going to live my life waiting for that or assuming what that's going to be because I know this is happening right now, and being present is all I have.

And that's the control I do have in my life is how am I going to live my life on a daily basis? Or am I maybe going to say yes more than I didn't before? What relationships do I want to work on? Maybe there's some relationships I need to walk away from. What do I need to do to make myself the healthiest I can be? What's going to feed my soul and make me feel good, right? And then that takes away from all this unknown and all these questions that just would leave me sad if I was just like, what's the purpose in life? What's the meaning in life? The meaning in life is my meaning and whatever that is and whatever your meaning is and whatever it is, that's okay. So I'm going to share with you what I wrote back to my listener. And I just said, Thank you for reaching out. I'm sorry I didn't get back to you sooner. Existential dread is definitely difficult to bear and obviously gets in the way of the life that you could have. My thoughts are that because we can never truly answer or have answers about the world, it will lead to feeling depressed and hopeless.

Although there are many people going through life focused on material things and appears to be deluding themselves, there are also many people who find a purpose in their life that they find meaning in and do get back to the world. I believe it's very important to be as present as possible in this life and remembering all we have is today and ask yourself how you want to live it. If you can be present and then see that how you live, what type of person you are, and how you can give back does matter. If you can do this, then even when we are gone, our lives will matter because we have loved and cared for each other, and that can affect many lives and many generations that are to come, even if we don't know about it. I hope this helps in a small way. Working with the therapist can be very helpful to help you to continue to work through this. All my best, Dr. Julie. So that was my response. And I think the part I didn't talk with you guys yet about that I said to him was that it is focusing on the meaning in our lives here, but also understanding how the way we live our lives and how we give back to each other and being and the person we are does affect generations to come, right?

So what's an example of that is the love I felt from my parents and the way that they parented me affects how I've parented my kids and how I show them love, right? And the meaning I have found and how I do it the same and how I do it differently, right? And they will pass that on to their children if they choose to have children at some point or how they react in their relationships, right? The example that my kids see from my marriage will affect their marriages. So it doesn't just stop with you, right? That your meaning can be really much bigger than that. I mean, you can talk to lots of people who talk about having a really close relationship with a special friend, a mentor, a parent, a grandparent, an aunt, or uncle that really affected their lives in a positive way. And even though that person may not be here anymore, that they still are affected by their relationship. They still can look back and find value and direction and how they want to handle things in their lives. So that's big. That's a lot of meaning in the world.

So it's not so small that it's like, just me, me, me. What am I going to do? That's where it starts, right? What's important to you, but to understand that just as others have had positive effects on you, even if it's a moment or a day or just one teacher in your life, maybe, right? That that's going to help you think in a different way and make certain choices in your life. And so the way you are in relationships will affect others, and that can live on forever. So that's that existential part, right? That what's the meaning in life? It's big. We don't know what's going to come. We don't know exactly how we'll affect others, but we can try to be as positive and loving and caring as we choose to be in the life we do have because we do affect each other, whether you like to think it or not, no matter what, right? And that's why we need to be mindful and clear with ourselves. Who do I want to be? How do I think about things? What are my thoughts about handling things with other people? I've talked a lot about it in my podcast about relationships.

What are good relationships? What are unhealthy relationships? When is it time to walk away? When is it time to set boundaries? Because all of that is going to affect your life and how you react to others as well. So just like existentialism, there's lots of different layers here, but you just can't get too caught up in it, my perspective, because you can get lost in it, not find the answers you're looking for because you can't prove the questions you're having. And then you just are like, Well, life sucks, and we're going to suffer and die. That's a really depressing thought, as far as I'm concerned. And I don't want you guys to get stuck and you don't have to get stuck, because if you use the CBT tools, right, and say, Okay, what are my negative thoughts? What are my thoughts are keeping me stuck here? I don't want to be depressed, right? I want to be able to feel joy and find meaning and be happy with my life. But it doesn't just come to us. It's not just an automatic thing. We got to work to have the lives that we want, right?

That I don't believe anybody just gets handed things, right? That the life you have is the life you've created. And if you don't like the life you've created, then you need to do things differently. And it's not that bad things don't happen to good people, right? But what do you do with those experience that have happened to you when it hasn't been your choice? How can you take that and walk away and find the meaning and create the life that you want? So I think it can be very empowering, which is a very important aspect in our lives for us to feel empowered that we do have some control. Can't control everything, but what can I control? And the things I can control, what am I going to do about taking hold of those and continuing with what I'm doing if I'm happy with that? Or what changes do I need to make? So again, using The Mind Over Mood or any other CBT book out, Feeling Great is a good, great one by Dr. Burns as well. I use The Mind Over Mood, using the tools in there really walks you through. There's a chapter on the core beliefs for you to figure out what are my core beliefs that might be getting in the way about myself, others, the world, right?

Your world core beliefs can be those existential questions, and how are they affecting my life? And do I want to change them if they're causing problems? And how can I find that more balanced way of looking at things? So I hope this got you thinking. It's all we talk about is thoughts, right? I hope this got you thinking about what your thoughts are, what are your questions about the world, and explore those. I'm not saying not to do that, but don't get stuck at them. And I don't want you to feel hopeless, right? The world is just so big. It can be scary. And we're one little person here, but we can really make a difference and live the life that we want, which can also affect the world, right? So it's all happening at the same time, but I got to be centered and present so that I can feel good about what I'm doing today. So again, think about your thoughts, figure out which ones are hot, which ones are keeping you stuck where you're at. You want to make changes and start to explore that for yourself. And if you're in therapy or you want to go find a therapist, these are great questions to bring to your therapist as well.

They can help you separate what's working, what isn't working, help you come to a place where you can find more peace so you can move on with your life and find that happiness and that meaning that you're looking for.

So as always, I appreciate you guys being here with me.

You know where you can find me - on my website at mycognitivebehavioraltherapy.com.

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