Feeling Great: The Revolutionary New Treatment for Depression and Anxiety Paperback – September 17, 2024

Literally felt better after the first chapter.

I started to read this book out of curiosity, after a setback I had with anxiety, 2 months ago. I somehow knew how CBT works and the methods and tools used in this therapy; was initially reluctant to believe that these methods can “fix” quickly something like anxiety, which for me was a very big of a deal! I started slowly to read and most important, APPLY these techniques. Honestly, I found quite a few distortions in my thoughts, and was surprise how much garbage we have accumulated in our minds! No wonder that we feel the way we feel - very bad! I could not believe: anxiety almost vanished in few weeks. Right now, when I’m writing this, I feel so calm and peaceful!I’ve seen some people here writing kinda negative reviews (just a few); but these reviews are without support or evidence. As a sufferer, I can confirm that CBT works pretty well all the time. And I think that a sufferer has a louder voice to confirm this, than any scientist that never experienced anxiety! Period! many scientist talk BS about therapy and this because they don’t know how anxiety works! Really! They know only by what they’ve seen as symptoms at some sufferers and that is only 1%.We, the people who know how anxiety feels like and who learnt the hard way how to resolve it, we can confirm that this method works 100%.And more important: Dr. Burns experienced many forms of anxiety himself, so who anyone else knows better than him what is anxiety? :)What helped me also was: exercising, vitamins&minerals, better hydration, yoga (breathing exercises)Stop believing the BS that anxiety disorder is incurable and u have to live with it for the rest of your life!

Dr Burns' Feeling Good book literally saved my life when I found it back in 1986 as a college student. I can't imagine what my life would have been like if I had never found it.In the years since, I have carried my original dog-eared paperback copy everywhere, using it for tune-ups whenever I needed it, and bought just about everything else Dr Burns has ever written. However, although certain distorted thought patterns (mostly related to low self esteem) disappeared for me almost literally overnight when I first read the book and were easy to defeat whenever they threatened to sneak back, with some other patterns I felt eternally stuck. I'm still a perfectionist, I still procrastinate, I still feel the urge to make everyone else happy even when it makes me exhausted. I would do the original exercises, and they would help a bit, but never like the old breakthrough.The tools in this new book have given me hope for the first time in years that I can get unstuck in those few areas I've never been able to successfully address. Positive reframing offers a tool to analyze where you might be feeling resistance and how you can overcome that resistance. The dizzying array of techniques and the charts to help choose which techniques may be especially effective for which distortions have given me a lot more ammunition to tackle stubborn negative thoughts that don't respond to a first attempt.I have a lot of work to do on myself but during what is probably the worst year of our lives for many of us, this book is yet again a lifesaver. If you struggle with any form of depression or anxiety, you owe yourself a chance to feel much, much better.BTW I bought the Kindle version first but I'm going to order the hardback as well because it is that good. Nothing wrong with the Kindle version, sometimes you just want a physical book to hold.

Two days ago a new book Feeling Great by David Burns was released, by the author who popularized CBT with Feeling Good 40 years ago (and inadvertently introduced bibliotherapy by the way - many readers of the book reported that it helped them).TEAM stands for Testing (evaluation of the client's condition before and after the session [by completing a questionnaire]), E as empathy (safe environment), A as Assessment of Resistance and M as Methods. If the first two phases are quite self-explanatory, the fourth (methods) also, in the sense that there should be some new methods (only which ones work?), the most interesting and non-intuitive is the third phase, how to deal with resistance...It is interesting that he classifies patient's problems in four categories: depression, anxiety, relationship problems and addiction (food, drugs, phone), and how the approaches of solving them differ slightly.Many have noticed that CBT has similarities to Stoicism, and David Burns points out similarities with Buddhism. One is that the perception and interpretation of the event is more important than the event itself, and the other similarity is that the condition for solving problems (and generally for a full life) is the death of the ego ...I quoteThe Buddha believed that we could experience liberation from suffering when we escape from the trap of thinking that we have a “self.” Most religions, including Christianity, have also talked about the notion of death and rebirth, or being “born again.”Some claims will be controversial, such as. that a skilled psychotherapist with this method can solve many cases in one session (or a couple of sessions), that antidepressants generally do not work or, in most cases, they are difficult to separate from placebo (but there are exceptions).Also interesting is the guest chapter by a neuroscientist, which shows how TEAM-CBT is compatible with neuroscience.