we all have times when we lack confidence and we do not feel good about ourselves but when low self-esteem becomes a long-term problem it can have a harmful effect on our mental health and our day-to-day lives when our self-esteem is low we tend to see ourselves and our life in a more negative and critical light you may feel defeated defective deserted and deprived having a low self-image or self-worth can actually transform something seemingly trivial into something overwhelming and sadly you may be so relentless and persuasive in your belief that you are defective that you may
even start to convince your friends and family that this is actually true low self-esteem often begins in childhood our parents siblings friends and social media send us positive and negative messages about ourselves negative emotions can often seem to stick more than the positive ones and you may begin to find it difficult living up to the expectations that you perceive others have of you so how do you deal with this you challenge it you talk back to that internal critic this sense of worthlessness is created by your self-critical dialogue i'm useless nobody likes me i can't
do anything right this feeds into that sense of despair and hopelessness david burns a professor of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at stanford university wrote about the triple column method in his book feeling good the new mood therapy this is a surprisingly simple yet surprisingly effective tool to change the way that you feel about yourself the fundamental belief of cognitive behavioral therapy is that your taught determine your actions because of this is important that you align your values and beliefs that will best serve you in life your beliefs become your thoughts your thoughts
become your words your words become your actions your actions become your habits your habits become your values and your values become your destiny mahatma gandhi there are three main steps to the triple column method step 1 train yourself to recognize and write down the self-critical thoughts as they go through your mind step two learning why these thoughts are distorted and step three is to practice talking back to them so you can develop a more resilient self-image to create a table for a triple column technique you simply draw two lines down the center of a piece
of paper and divide it into turrets you label the left-hand column automatic thoughts or self-criticism you label the middle column cognitive distortion and then you label the right hand column rational response or self-defense in the left-hand column or the automatic thoughts column you write down all the hurtful self-criticisms you make when you are feeling worthless and down on yourself in the middle column you try to identify and write down the cognitive distortions of your self-criticisms cognitive distortions are simple ways that our mind tries to convince us that something that isn't really true is these are
inaccurate thoughts and are usually used to reinforce negative thinking or emotions there are 10 main cognitive distortions in cognitive behavioral therapy and i go into these in much more detail in my video cognitive distortions which i will link here and also in the video description but here's a quick overview mental filtering is when we focus exclusively on the most negative and upsetting features of a situation filtering out all the more positive aspects of it all or nothing thinking is when we see things purely in black or white these types of thoughts are characterized by terms
such as always every or never everything is seen as either good or bad or success or failure over generalization is when we see a single unpleasant incident or event as evidence of everything being awful and negative and a sign that now everything will go wrong individuals thinking in shoulds odds or must have an iron-clad view of how they and others should and ought to be these rigid views or rules can generate feelings of anger frustration resentment disappointment and guilt if not followed reasoning is when we assume feelings reflect fact regardless of the evidence the idea
here is i feel therefore it must be true such thinking can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies whereby thoughts can end up eliciting the very behavior we predicted a person engaging in personalization will automatically assume the responsibility and blame for negative events that are not under their control this is also called the mother of guilt because of the feelings of guilt shame and inadequacy that it leads to thinking in a magnifying or minimizing manner is when we exaggerate the importance of the negative events and minimize or downplay the importance of the positive events disqualifying the positive is
when we continually discount and dismiss the positive experiences we encounter by deciding they are unimportant or don't count labeling is an extreme form of all-nothing thinking and over-generalization rather than describing a specific behavior an individual instead assigns a negative and highly emotive label to themselves or others that can leave no room for change an individual who jumps to conclusions will often make a negative interpretation or prediction even though there is no evidence to support their conclusion it can show up as either mind reading or fortune telling once you've identified the cognitive distortion or distortions we
move into the right hand column which is the rational response or self-defense column this is where you talk back and defend yourself against the criticisms what you're essentially saying here is why this isn't true or why it doesn't matter with cognitive behavioral therapy you are learning to use rational intentional talk between an emotional and an impulsive self-defeating reaction in learning to do this you will develop the habit of testing the validity of your own thoughts and challenging the significance of the negative outcomes of your fears let's take an example say you're late for something important
you feel your heart beating faster and you start to panic ask yourself what thoughts are going through your mind right now what are you saying to yourself why is this upsetting you write these down in the left hand column using the list of cognitive distortions that i outline try to identify what the negative thought pattern is so i'm always late is over generalization for example then in the final column you might respond with something rational like i'm not always lit i'm mostly on time if i'd like to be late less often i'll work on developing
methods to be more punctual maybe i'll leave a bit earlier if you feel you can't take of a rational response that's fine just forget about it for a while and when you come back to it you'll be able to think more rationally an important thing here though is not just to put in words that describe your mood or emotional reaction only put in the toss that created that emotional reaction in the automatic thoughts column for example if we take the running late example again don't just write i feel like crap because that's essentially true you
do feel like crap this is what we're trying to solve instead write down the thought that led to you feeling like crap let's say it was i will look foolish when i arrive write that down identify the cognitive distortion which is labeling or fortunate telling then respond with the rational thought it may be something like yeah it would have been better to leave earlier but i'm not stupid life is unpredictable and things happen i'm not a fool for being late everyone is late sometimes burns suggests that working through this simple triple column technique every day
for 15 minutes each day that it will become easier and easier to do and that this self-defensive rational thought will become more and more intuitive for you it's okay if you're having trouble at first thinking of a rational response you can always step back from it or even ask someone else what their answer would be to this particular negative thought so to summarize how then do you develop a sense of self-esteem well the answer is you don't have to you don't have to do anything especially wordy to create or deserve self-esteem all you have to
do is to turn off that critical arguing inner voice because it is that arguing inner voice that is wrong you can use the triple column technique to really zero in on those automatic thoughts then write them down writing things down can make things tangible which helps to deal with them learning the different cognitive distortions will allow you to go through each of these criticisms and identify the negative thinking once identified you can substitute this distorted thought with a more objective rational thought you will then be boosting your self-esteem and you'll start to feel better and
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