Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes walks through five questions to build motivation for change using cognitive-behavioral methods. You'll examine why change matters logically, weigh pros and cons, confront short-term reward bias, and identify thinking patterns that block progress. The 45-minute session uses real examples like sleep, eating, and substance use.
Hey there everybody, and welcome back to the addiction and Mental health disorders treatment manual. This is unit one, part 12, enhancing cognitive motivation. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. Now, if you've watched other videos on my YouTube channel, you know that I am cognitive behavioral by nature. So this is one of my favorite units. In this unit we're going to explore how does how to enhance cognitive motivation or the your thinking in order to get motivated to make your change. As with other parts, you're going to spend about 45 or 50 minutes exploring logical reasons for making this change. How is the new behavior logical and helpful to achieving your goals if you make this change? For example, if you decide to improve your sleep hygiene so you're getting better quality sleep and not sleeping as much, or improve your nutrition or stop using how is this new behavior logical and helpful to you achieving the other things that are important in your rich and meaningful life, like improved relationships or improved health or promotions at your job, whatever your other goals are? How is the old behavior unhelpful to achieving your goals? If you are sleeping all the time, it keeps you from engaging in positive interactions with the people that are important to you and nurturing relationships. It may keep you feeling groggy all the time so you're not able to concentrate as well and impair your ability to function at work. So think about how the old behavior, whatever it is, was unhelpful to achieving the things that are important in your rich and meaningful life. How did you rationalize that the old behavior was a good idea? Whether it was drinking to quote, help you relax or taking lots of naps, sleeping all the time because you figured if you could just get a few more hours sleep, you, you'd be energized or what. Whatever the behavior was that you were engaging in, how did you rationalize that that was going to help you? A lot of times people rationalize in the short term they, they're not thinking, how will it ultimately help me achieve my goals? They're thinking, how is it going to help me get through today? And yes, I want you to get through today and tomorrow and next year and the year after that. But it's important to recognize that one of the contributors to addiction and mental ill health is focusing on immediate rewards instead of focusing on long term goals. Explore your beliefs regarding how the new behavior might not work as well and and the validity of those beliefs. If you are thinking, okay, I'm going to improve my sleep, that way I have more energy and more time that I'm not actually in the bed that I can devote to the things that are important in my life. Well, how might that not work as well? And you may not find a whole lot of reasons, or you may, but it's important to address those. When we talk about motivation, we've got to look at the benefits as well as the draw drawbacks to change and the benefits as well as the drawbacks to staying the same. In what ways did your thinking or your attitude contribute to your addictive behaviors? Anxiety, anger, depression, guilt, grief or illness in the past? Stinking thinking is something that we talk about a lot in addiction, but I see it a lot in people with trauma, depression, anxiety as well. When you are in that state where you're hyper vigilant, where you're constantly scanning and anticipating bad things happening and looking for threats, it can put you in a negative mindset, which makes you pay more attention to the negative and ignore the positive one, which can increase your anxiety, anger, depression. And you also notice the negative things about yourself too. You may notice that when you're in that state, you're not being the type of person that you want to be, which may cause you to feel guilty, for example. And all that stress reduces your immune system and increases your illness and, and increases inflammation and increases pain. So think logically about all of the ways that your attitude, your stinking thinking, your attitude and your perceptions contributed to your situation. Now, it's also important to remember that when we experience something, our brain forms what we call a schema or, or a Cliff's Notes version so we can anticipate it in the future. You have schemas about stoplights. For example, you expect when you're coming up to a stoplight based on your past experience, if it's yellow, it's going to turn red. So you have schema about things, about people, about places that are designed to hopefully help you anticipate what's coming next to stay safe. Unfortunately, if you had bad experiences in the past, those schema may tell you to anticipate the worst in people in in the future, the worst in events in the future. So adjusting and addressing those schema for the present context is also going to be important. Looking at the present context and going, okay, I'm expecting this to be unpleasant, but that's based on past experiences in this context at this time, what do I know to be true? And we're going to talk a lot more about that in future units. But it's important to recognize how your thinking, how your expectations about the world may be contributing to your distress, and that may be one of those things that you might consider addressing.
