Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) predominantly focuses on the present moment and aims to help you identify any current unhelpful thinking patterns and behaviours. CBT understands that our thoughts, behaviours and emotions are all connected and interlinked and aims to teach you ways of challenging unhelpful thinking patterns and introducing helpful coping behaviours to improve the way that you feel. CBT is a practical form of therapy and therefore requires you to practice tools and techniques between your therapy sessions.
Within each session of CBT, you and your therapist will agree on an agenda of what you would like to cover in the session. The general format of a session would involve a check-in with your mood over the past week, a look at your mood-monitoring questionnaires, a review of your in-between session tasks and setting a new task to practise over the following week. Your therapist will regularly review how you are finding the sessions so that they can adapt the sessions to your needs.