Episode #100
Mind Over Mood
ft. Dr Dennis Greenberger, Ph.D
As a special treat to celebrate the 100th episode of My CBT Podcast, I’m delighted to be interviewing Dr Dennis Greenberger.
Dr Greenberger is the co-author of the Mind Over Mood book that I’m always recommending to you. He also studied with the Father of CBT, Dr Dennis Beck.
In this rare interview, Dr Greenberger shares how Cognitive Behavioral Therapy changed the world and how he’s seen it help people across his 45+ year career in CBT.
We’ll also look at some key CBT tips and techniques in the Mind Over Mood book that you can start using right now.
Join me, Dr Julie Osborn, in this very exciting conversation with Dr Dennis Greenberger.
Click to listen now!
Reference Guides:
Full Episode Transcript
Dr Julie
Hi, it's Dr. Julie from My CBT Podcast. I'm a Doctor of Psychology and a licensed clinical social worker, specialized in cognitive behavioral therapy. I'm here to help bring you the power of CBT into your own life. So this is a really special podcast for me, you guys! And it's all because of you and listening to me over the years. But this is my 100th episode and I got a phenomenal surprise for you because I have the honor to have Dr. Dennis Greenberger, the co author of Mind Over Mood, that I refer to you guys all the time, that he agreed to let me interview him today, just talking more about CBT, and we'll talk about Mind Over Mood book, and just get his phenomenal insight and his years of wisdom working with everyone that he's worked with and how he got into CBT and his experience and his thoughts. Thanks again, Dennis, for being here with me.
Dr Greenberger
It's my pleasure, Julie. Thanks for having me.
Dr Julie
So can you first share with the audience your background and how long you've been doing CBT?
Dr Greenberger
Sure. I am a psychologist and I've been doing CBT since probably the mid 1980s or so, and more formally since probably the earlier mid 1990s in more of a traditional higher fidelity way.
Dr Julie
Can you tell me your training? How did you get into it? How did you decide to.
Dr Greenberger
Do CBT? Sure. Well, the longer story, I guess, is that I have always been very practical just by nature. I remember when I was in college, sitting around the family dinner table and my family asking me about what I was learning. I realized that a lot of the things that I was explaining were really pretty incomprehensible to my family. But the thing that was not as incomprehensible was really explaining what cognitive behavior therapy was and how it worked. My family really was very practical in many ways. I find that part of my attraction to CBT was that it really was a very practical treatment that was easy to explain, easy to understand. More importantly, for me, it was in the process when I was younger of just being proven. It was just coming out of the psychological laboratory. It's just coming out of the people that were doing the original research, Aaron Beck or Albert Ellis were producing some very impressive results which further attracted me to CBT. Then the third thing I think that really drew me closer to CBT was that some of my early therapy experiences where treatment was done in a very time limited way. So the question was, how can we have the most impact in these limited amounts of time? I was working in an inpatient psychiatric hospital hospital where people came in the midst of a crisis and they may have been there for two weeks or three weeks or three days. And so how can we have the most impact in that time? Or I was working at a major HMO for an internship where we were limited to 12 sessions a year. So how do we make the most impact with those kinds of limitations? And so further drew me to treatments that could work in that short period of time.
Dr Julie
Okay. And you worked with Dr. Aaron Beck, didn't you? Did you do training with him?
Dr Greenberger
Yeah. I think back in the late 1980s, initially, and then into the 1990s, I had the opportunity to train at the Center for Cognitive Therapy, initially at the University of Pennsylvania and then later at the Beck Institute. I worked initially with Aaron Beck and then with Judy Beck as well. Aaron Beck was really a mentor of mine and Judy was a supervisor. He then later became involved as a consultant to an inpatient CBT program that I was running, a local CBT program over here in a psychiatric hospital in Orange County, where we trained the staff, all the nurses, and all the occupational therapists, and the recreational therapist, and the individual therapist to really come from a similar theoretical model. Dr. Beck was a consultant for me and for the program for probably a year, a year and a half. It's really where the second phase of Mind Over Mood was written as well. We got Christine Podeski as a consultant to the program as well. And we were looking to develop materials that could be utilized in the program.
Dr Julie
Okay. So one of my other questions is why did you decide that that was something that was needed, the Mind Over.
Dr Greenberger
Mood book? That's a good question. It's a good question. So initially, I was doing the therapy individually in the office, and then I became involved in working at a local hospital. It was St. Joseph's Hospital in Orange. I was running two groups on an outpatient basis. On Monday nights, it was an anxiety group, and on Tuesday nights, it was a depression group. I was putting together material from a lot of different sources. How am I going to run this 10 week or 12 week or 15 week group, whatever it was at the time? How do I put together a psycho educational and a therapeutic intervention group in a structured way? And as I looked around for material, I realized there was none. There was nobody that had really put together a program in that way where in a structured step wise fashion you could teach and learn CBT skills. So I started putting this together in three ring binders at the time, week one through week 15 or 12 or 15 or 18. We did it in all kinds of different time frames. And then that was real... And some of the material I wrote myself, and that was really the very beginning of creating this structured program that would structure the sessions to some degree, but also structured the in between homework assignments that people would be doing from week one to week two or week seven to week eight as they build these skills in a stepwise fashion. And then I took the same material and began utilizing it in the psychiatric hospital because most of the people that were psychiatrically hospitalized at that time were being hospitalized for significant depression or suicide attempts. And we're there for a limited period of time, usually a length of stay of about 10 to 15 days or so. So we were trying to build the similar kinds of skills in that period of time as well. So those were really the origins of the book. The third reason of writing the book was to try to maintain fidelity to the CBT model for the therapist. So it could be used as a self help book. It could be used to guide therapy as an adjunctive therapy, to structure therapy. But the third reason was we wanted to maintain therapist fidelity to the CBT model because what Dr. Beck found in the outcome studies that he was doing was that the higher the fidelity to the model, meaning the more the therapist adhered to the CBT model that he had created, the better the outcomes. But there was often drift from the model for some reason or another. And so we put together Mind Over Mood to allow therapists and patients to stay on track and maintain fidelity to the model that we knew produced the best outcomes.
Dr Julie
Okay. So that's how you met Dr. Podolsky was you guys were in the program together, you were saying?
Dr Greenberger
No, she wasn't in the program. Once I was in the program, Dr. Beck introduced us and knew that we lived close to one another. We're both in Orange County. And so, yeah, it might be a good idea for you guys to meet one another.
Dr Julie
And for our listeners that don't know, Dr. Beck, is he considered father of CBT?
Dr Greenberger
Yes. Yes, right? Considered the father of CBT. He's really a landmark figure in psychiatry and in mental health. He passed away in the last two years.
Dr Julie
But I think he was.
Dr Greenberger
100, wasn't he? He was 100 years old, right. One of the only two psychiatrists who's ever been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Dr Julie
Wow, I did not.
Dr Greenberger
Know that. Yeah, very huge figure in the history of psychiatry and really ushered in what they called the cognitive revolution, which has taken for granted now the importance of thoughts in our reactions to life events that happen to us. But at the time that he introduced that idea, it was novel and revolutionary, and the field was really dominated by psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy. And this was really a radical departure from the way that people thought about psychological problems at the time. So the other piece of the equation that made him so important was that he really was one of the first to really empirically validate the treatments. So psychotherapy had never been subjected to the rigorous outcome studies that he was doing and could prove in a scientific way that this was working and to really modify the treatment based on what he found was working and what.
Dr Julie
Wasn't working. Yes. And I know my clients love when I say there's all this research back in because I have found over the years that clients are getting much more educated on what therapy they want. And I've had people say, Oh, I went to someone that said they specialized in CBT, but they did a lot of other things and they didn't really specialize. And I want to come see you because I know that's a specialty that you have. So do you find that, too, the people are getting more educated about therapy?
Dr Greenberger
Yeah. I think it's one of the great things about the internet, number one. And there's a decreasing stigma to mental health problems, number two. But it's very easy if somebody is depressed or anxious or has panic attacks or obsessive compulsive disorder. Very easy to go to the internet and get a lot of good information through the research that you do. Once people begin to do the research, they will realize that there are a few empirically validated treatments, and they almost all fall under the umbrella of CBT in one form or another. Once people realize what the research says, they can be more informed consumers. And so when they make the phone call to a therapist, they can learn to ask the right questions about what treatment that therapist may be providing, what their training and background is, and make a more informed decision about what door to walk through.
Dr Julie
I've told people many times on my podcast and just my clients how grateful I was that I fell into CBT with you. So to remind you guys, I met Dr. Rienberg at UCI, and he was running a CBT group where he trained the psychiatry residents. I got hired there as a therapist, and I was told I had to take the group over. And I really didn't have. I was just a general therapist. And at first, I laughed because when I first was learning CBT, I'm like, This is a little anal. We got a situation, your mood, your thoughts. But it was really a life changing for me in my career that I feel so much more confident as a therapist that I have tools to offer. I remember back in the day, at UCI too, a woman came in and she was having a panic attack in my office, and I really did not know how to help her. It was a horrible feeling as a therapist. And that was before I met you and was doing the group. And I remember thinking, I need to learn more tools because I wasn't really taught that in graduate school. Right, exactly. So when we met, I would sit in the groups and Dr. Greenberg was running them. And I always share one funny story. I don't know if you're going to remember this because I know it was 25 years ago because I was pregnant with my daughter. That's how I remember how long we met. And we were doing the group and there was a guy in group with OCD. And in the middle of the group, you took him out and you took him down to the bathroom and you didn't let him wash his hands. And then you made him wipe the bottom of his shoe and come back into group. Do you remember that?
Dr Greenberger
I think I do remember…
Dr Julie
He sits down and the whole group is like, Oh, my God. We felt so bad for him. I remember seeing there going, Oh, this guy is just going to freak out. He's going to freak out. You just continued with group. Then 20 minutes later, you checked in and you're like, How are you doing? He's like, I'm okay. I'm doing all right. I was like.
Dr Greenberger
Whoa.
Dr Julie
This is…
Dr Greenberger
Powerful stuff. Right. Yes. And so it is. Just to clarify, it's really exposure therapy is one of the most powerful treatments for OCD and one of the most powerful treatments for panic disorder and for most of the anxiety disorders. And so the question is, how do we modify exposure therapy for these different disorders? And although it sounds unusual, the situation you just described, it really isn't in that treatment. And so we're exposing to the situations or things or ideas that are most frightening to people. And it has to be done in the context of a good, solid, warm, therapeutic relationship, number one. If it's built on that, then you can do those kinds of interventions. I just want to clarify that it wasn't the first session with this person, and I'm sure it was that in the context of a good relationship. But the idea is that with exposure therapy, we want to show people that they can tolerate their worst fear and the anxiety is not going to overwhelm them. Nothing horrible or catastrophic is going to happen with the exposure and that they're far more capable than they may seem. And that the cognitive piece of it will follow, the cognitive change of understanding all of that, will follow the exposure and the gut level of exposure gut level experience as opposed to changing the cognition first and then doing the exposure. But I'll also say there's a larger context to the exposure, and that's teaching people some of the more anxiety management strategies to learn how to reduce their anxiety, to learn how to tolerate their anxiety, to learn something like, say, progressive muscle relaxation or deep breathing or mental imagery so they can reduce anxiety. But the exposure piece of it is to show and teach and have people understand that they can tolerate more anxiety.
Dr Julie
So if you're…
Dr Greenberger
Thinking of anxiety on a continuum, people can increase it towards the right side of the continuum, or they can decrease it towards the left side of the continuum. So the exposure that you described, I'm sure, was far towards the right side of the continuum.
Dr Julie
And he did trust you. And it was not our first group. But I remember just as an early therapist, I was like, Whoa. It's very powerful. It is very powerful.
Dr Greenberger
I do remember that person.
Dr Julie
Do you remember? Yeah, I do. That was a long time ago. Yeah. So for all the things you're sharing is why you believe, and we know, why CBT is so effective for people.
Dr Greenberger
Right. Cbt is effective because it has the ability to create sustainable changes in the way we think and the way we behave and the way we respond to situations in our life. The kinds of things that bring people into therapy maybe triggers that they have this habitual way of responding to habitual ways of thinking or habitual ways of behaving. Cbt has the ability to identify what those thinking and behavioral patterns or habits are and evaluating them and making changes to the way we respond. And it can make lifelong changes in people's lives.
Dr Julie
And it can happen quick compared to other therapies, right?
Dr Greenberger
Absolutely. It's generally thought of as a briefer therapy. Depends on the severity of the problem and the nature of the problem. Some people in some types of problems respond more rapidly, and others take a longer period of time to chip away at. But in general, it's much briefer than other kinds of therapy.
Dr Julie
I like it, too, because it's so interactive. I think most clients say to me, How long is going to take? I say, That's really up to you. The more you work at it, the quicker you're going to get better. And doing the homework and being accountable and all of that makes such a huge difference.
Dr Greenberger
And we were talking before the podcast started, for many people, really self help interventions are powerful enough. They can take it, they can read about it, they can learn it, and they can figure out what they need to be doing differently. Again, depending on the severity of the problem and the nature of the problem, other people need a little bit of guidance with it from a therapist, and other people may need more significant kinds of guidance. But yeah, people can benefit at any one of those different levels.
Dr Julie
Which is great. People want to start feeling better quicker, especially because they've been suffering so long.
Dr Greenberger
Right. And you're right. The rapidness with which people get better depends a lot on how much effort they put in in between sessions and how much time they're willing to put in. The more time they put in, the faster they generally wind up getting better. But most of the early studies that Aaron Beck had done with depression and anxiety, they were working in a 16 to 24 session model. And most of the change occurred in the first eight sessions or so. Interesting - 80 % of the change occurred in the early sessions.
Dr Julie
That's good to know. That is good to know. Do you think that there's any other potentials of CBT that we haven't addressed yet? I mean, it's always growing, but are there things that.
Dr Greenberger
You can share with us? I think recently for me, one of the things that's of interest is along the lines of what you said initially was that your initial impression was that it was pretty structured or pretty anal or pretty structured initially. One of the things that I'm interested in is this fidelity issue and also adaptation. So how do people maintain fidelity in treatment? How does a therapist maintain fidelity? And how does a therapist think through adapting the therapy to respond to a person's need? How do we customize the treatment for the person rather than having the person fit into the therapy? So it's interesting to me, number one, how that's done, and number two, how therapists think that through. Number one. The second thing that I think one of the ways that I've been thinking about CBT for a number of years is how do we incorporate newer findings into the CBT model? So I think that Dr. Beck has created a very durable model of understanding and conceptualizing people's difficulties. So whether that's what we call a cross sectional model, which is this, take any situation and we can pull it apart or we can dissect it into situation, moods and automatic thoughts and physiologic responses. So we can do a freeze frame a moment, and we can dissect that experiential moment into these four components. So situation, who, what, when and where, moods, one word, automatic thoughts, the words or images that go through your head right when you're feeling most emotional, and then any physiologic response. Or we can do a longer term conceptualization. What childhood experiences, relevant childhood experiences did you have? What beliefs developed out of that? How did you wind up coping with that? What secondary assumptions or conditional assumptions do you have that helped you cope with that better? And how does that manifest in any given situation? But what I think has happened in the last 20 years is that we've learned newer versions of CBT, like dialectical behavior therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy, or even back to pure behavior therapy. How do we incorporate all that we know that works and make it work for the individual person in front of us? There's a lot of very good strategies that we have that we know work that address the underlying cognitive or behavioral processes that are taking place at any given moment. How do we customize that from all these powerful strategies that we have into a cohesive treatment plan and a cohesive way of understanding the particular person that we're talking to?
Dr Julie
Yeah, that'd be powerful.
Dr Greenberger
Very powerful. It's interesting to me. I think a lot of very good CBT therapists do this, but we don't yet have a way of articulating the mental process that's taking place in therapists as they make these decisions.
Dr Julie
Because I know when you did the second edition, you guys added more, I guess, I think you call positive psychology with acceptance, gratitude, forgiveness, right? Very good. Yeah. Which I can tell people with Paige to turn to trust me. And I loved that addition to it because that's such a huge.
Dr Greenberger
Component, right? It is. I was mentioning DBT and ACT and different variants of CBT that have been shown to work. But you're right, there's been a lot of positive psychology interventions that have empirical validation now. So the question became, how do we incorporate that in the mind over mood? And we know that being able to focus on gratitude as an example has a very powerful impact on the way we feel. I know for myself, what I try to do is when I wake up in the morning to identify three things that I'm most looking forward to in the course of the day. And it's interesting because usually my first thought when I wake up, the automatic thought is not gratitude. Remember, the first thought is automatic, and I'll be thinking something else. But my second thought is a question, which is, what three things am I most looking forward today? Seeing Julie doing the podcast this morning was certainly on my list this morning. And seeing my grandson was the second one that was on the list and seeing my daughter and my wife. So I try to identify things that I'm most looking forward to, and then I book end my days. So I do that when my head hits the pillow at night. And at the end of the evening, I'll ask myself, what were the three best things that happened to me through the course of the day? And so these are findings from positive psychology that I'm incorporating into my life. And with gratitude, what I've done is to keep an ongoing gratitude list, which is in mind over mood now. But it's what things in my life am I most grateful for? And to remind myself of these things and to add to it on a regular basis. And I keep it on the cloud now, so it's available on my phone, it's available on my laptop at home, it's available on my desktop at the office, and I can look at it and add to it whenever I need to. And if I'm like most people, and I think I am, the gratitude list starts out with things that you're really grateful about, like being alive and having your health and people that are most important in your life. But it begins to filter down into hearing birds in chirping because spring is coming, or seeing the leaves beginning to change color, or the warmth of the sun on your skin. So it comes down of those kinds of experiences that happen on a daily basis. And what we know from the positive psychology literature is that as we're able to focus our mental attention on these kinds of experiences, it has a positive effect on our mood and really has the ability to counterbalance depression or anxiety or anger, guilt or shame, other kinds of negative moods that we may be having.
Dr Julie
When you talk about hearing the birds or the sun on your skin, I talk to my clients, that's being present. Exactly. With the gratitude list, I tell a lot of people, especially if you have a little bit of a commute to work, doing gratitude on your way home will change... Instead of like, at the end of the day, we're like, Oh, what didn't I get done or what do I have to do tomorrow? Or they say, That's what you think about in the shower. What do I have to get done or what's my day? And doing a gratitude list right there can just shift.
Dr Greenberger
Everything for you. Exactly. Doing a gratitude list or just feeling the warmth of the water in your hair or on your skin, the dripping of the water or the sound of the water. So you bring up another good point about being present and the mindfulness because it's an everyday mindfulness practice practice of focusing on right here and right now, whether it's your breathing or the sound of the birds or the blueness in the sky or the whiteness of the clouds. And as you're doing that, you're not focused on what you've got to do or what you're fearful about, or you're not focused on your self criticism. And so it becomes in some way like going to the gym and doing a bicep curl. Every time you bring your brain and your attention back to the thing that you're grateful for or back to the present moment, you're strengthening your brain, you're strengthening your mind, and you're strengthening your ability to free yourself from those distracting, more habitual, negative thoughts.
Dr Julie
That's wonderful. And everybody can practice that right now. Yes.
Dr Greenberger
Do that today. Right at this very moment.
Dr Julie
Right at this very moment, exactly. I haven't come up with anything regarding any controversial aspects with CBT, but are there any arguments against it out there that you hear about?
Dr Greenberger
So it's interesting because when I think about the history of CBT and when Dr. Beck was first starting, when I'd be in large lecture halls with him, people were hostile, therapists. Therapists were hostile, and there were all kinds of arguments and why it wasn't going to work and why it was superficial or it wasn't with a flash in the pan and wasn't going to last long. Those kinds of questions just gradually went by the wayside. I think that the current controversies, to the degree that there are some, are our intrafamily controversies, if you will. The family being the CBT family. So people will have one method or another that they may argue about. But if you think of CBT as a large umbrella of different kinds of interventions that have been empirically validated and shown to work and being effective, outside of that family, I'm not really aware of too many controversies and certainly much fewer than there were in the past. So these intrafamily debates or squabbles or whatever you want to call them, I think are really healthy in terms of moving the field forward. Yes.
Dr Julie
And let me ask you this question. When you were saying the fidelity about keeping the therapist on track. So I tell everyone, I practice what I preach. I use all these tools. I do, too. I think that allows me in therapy to help guide my client because I have an understanding of how it's benefited me or what works better for me. I tell everybody there's so many tools and not everyone's going to work for you, but we need to find out which ones will.
Dr Greenberger
Work for you. Because we practice what we preach, we know the difficulties and the challenges in implementing these. I'll tell you a funny story about Dr. Beck. He at that time would often come to California to give lectures. I was walking around a hotel with him not far from here the day before a lecture that he was giving. At that time, there weren't really digital devices. It was after lunch, we're walking around the grounds of the hotel, and he pulls one of those golf stroke counters out of his pocket. Do you know golf stroke counter? Yes. Little mechanical device, and he clicks it. I looked at him quizzically and I said, I don't get it. What are you doing? What's that? He said, Oh, that's my negative automatic thought counter. That's my seventh one of the day or my 17th one of the day or whatever it was. And it struck me for a number of reasons. But one of the reasons it struck me is that here's the person who's the father of cognitive therapy, of cognitive behavior therapy, and still having and being aware of the negative thoughts as they occur. And so it's always a practice, and that's something that we get to where it's ever all gone. But we all are at a different stage of evolution in this and ability with this, and we never get to the... There's never a point where we are pure in our thoughts or our responses or whatever because we're human.
Dr Julie
Yes. That's what makes Dr. Beck was so great. I mean, he stayed humble.
Dr Greenberger
All those years. Oh, my.
Dr Julie
Yes. Him being the father of all of it. He still knew he needed to grow and practice what he taught people.
Dr Greenberger
Right. Absolutely. Very humble person. Absolutely. But going back from just a moment to the mindfulness, how mindfulness is integrated into CPT, any of your listeners should Google a conversation between the Dalai Lama and Aaron Beck. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie. I have not seen that. Oh, it's fascinating. So they talk about the... It's about an hour long, maybe an hour and a half even, where just the two of them are sitting talking, and they talk about the similarities and differences between mindfulness and meditation and CBT. It's a fascinating conversation. I'm going to be listening.
Dr Julie
That is great. It really is. That is great. I'm humbled sitting here with you, so grateful. I know you don't give a lot of interviews, and I've always considered you a friend, and just grateful that I got to meet you back when I did. I had the training, and like I said, Mind Over Mood. Everybody knows that's my book. Is there anything, any last thoughts to share with the listeners about CBT or how you would recommend getting started? I wanted you to share just about your office here in Newport Beach. If anybody wants to reach out to you guys, he a lot of therapists that work here. So you might not see Dennis, but there's a lot of good therapists here in his office.
Dr Greenberger
As well. What do we do if the listeners are in California? They're certainly welcome to call here. I think that you can research CBT online, but if you're listening to Julie's podcast, you probably already are pretty well versed in CBT. I think if you're out of California and you're interested in getting involved in therapy, there's an organization that I am involved in. It's called the Academy of Cognitive and behavior Therapy. It's an organization whose mission is to certify people that have the ability to maintain fidelity to the CBT model. And so we use a lot of the fidelity instruments that Dr. Beck was using when he was doing his research studies. And there's people all over the world that are going to be listed on that organization's website. You can go to the Beck Institute's website. They have some certified cognitive therapists as well. And the third organization would be the Association for the advancement of behavior and cognitive therapy. So abct. Org, I think it is. And they've got a real extensive worldwide list of people that do cognitive and behavioral therapy. I think there's a lot of very good books in addition to Mind over Mood. One of them that I like for depression in particular is Feeling Good. David Burns has some other books on other mood kinds of difficulties as well. I think there's a lot of good resources out there now that people can find relatively easily.
Dr Julie
Okay. Can you share that when we were talking before the podcast? What was your second favorite book you said you were telling me about that.
Dr Greenberger
Would be good to share? Sure. So there was... Julie and I were talking prior to the podcast about my second favorite book in the world, my favorite one being Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. But the second one is called Learn to Optimism. And Learn to Optimism is a book that's written by Martin Seligman, who is the father of positive psychology. But he wrote this book prior to his work in positive psychology. And it was also a colleague of Aaron Beck at the University of Pennsylvania. But this book, Learn to Optimism, stems from Dr. Seligman's work understanding how people respond to failure and set back and defeat. And what he found is that people who are prone to depression tend to respond onto defeat in a very negative way. They tend to think of themselves as failures. They tend to think of themselves as always having been a failure, and they tend to think of that sense of failure as cutting across all kinds of situations. If I remember correctly, the failure is personalized, it's pervasive, and it's permanent. I always remember it from three years. Personalized, permanent, and pervasive. For example, if someone, a teenager fails a ninth grader fails a history test and they tend to be depressed, they'll think I'm stupid and I'm not only stupid in history, but I'm stupid in all subjects, and stupidity is not one of those characteristics that changes with time. This is with me forever. So it's personal, it's permanent, and it's pervasive across all subjects. As opposed to the person who fails the test, who is not depressed, they may say, I didn't fail it because I'm stupid. The teacher didn't test me on what they said they were going to test me on. It's her fault, not mine. And besides, I've got time to bring up the grade, and I'm doing well in all the other tests, so don't worry about it. Not necessarily that that's a better way of understanding it, but it's different than what you might be, what might serve as the cognitive basis of depression. Dr. Selderman called it how people explain events in their lives, or their attribution theory, or explanatory style. Now, what it led to his book, Learned Optimism, because what he realized is that some people respond to failure and defeat in a less than negative way. So Learned Optimism looks at how mental attitude affects us academically, sports, business, and even in medical care. Do you want me to share the medical one? Please, yes. So the one chapter, if I remember correctly, it was how people responded to a diagnosis of cancer. And what Dr. Seligman found is that if you hold constant stage of cancer, age of the person, type of cancer, and all the variables that you could possibly hold constant, that some people saw cancer as a death sentence, and some people saw the diagnosis of cancer as another life challenge that needed to be overcome and addressed, and to put it simply. And the people who saw the cancer diagnosis as a life challenge that needed to be addressed tended to live longer and have a higher quality of life, live significantly longer. And have a higher quality of life. It shows the power of the mentality, the power of the attitude. This chapter on the diagnosis of cancer, but you'll see in the rest of the book, in all different areas of life, how big of an impact it has. And this whole notion of explanatory style or attribution theory is another way of understanding cognitions and how we think through life challenges.
Dr Julie
Yes. That's powerful. You guys know that I had cancer a year and a half ago and laying in my hospital bed, I had that moment of like, I just need to use my tools because your brain can just go to the worst place. And based on what you're sharing with the book, I can see that that's where my head was, that it was another life challenge that I had to work through and give myself that space to sometimes just cry and be sad, but then get back and using my tools to be like, Okay, what am I going to do going forward? And even today, what do I need to do to stay healthy and be well. That book, all you guys, as always, will be on with the podcast today, too. So you can order that one as well. As with Mind Over Mood, it's always there for you guys to find, but we will post that book as well. So you can find that. I'm, like I said, eternally grateful then. It's the 100th episode. If I had some champagne here, I'd be popping the cork! It's very exciting. It's just a beautiful way to celebrate this. I'm grateful to all you guys that listen and please continue to share. The more people that learn CBT, I think the world will be a better place. And you know how to find me through my website at MyCognitiveBehavioralTherapy.com. Facebook - I'm under Dr. Julie Osborn. Instagram is under my CBT podcast. So keep sharing your feedback and questions. And I appreciate you being here. Remember to make decisions based on what's best for you, not how you feel.