Hi, everyone. So before we embark on these series of audios around Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for ADHD, it's really, really important to sort of introduce you to the fundamental principles of CBT. Some of you might be fully aware of that already, some of you might have already had CBT. So apologies if this is very familiar to you, but obviously, I'm sure you can understand, we need to get everybody up to speed. So it might be a good refresher for you. And for others, this might be the first time you're hearing this. So I hope it's helpful.

So the term CBT stands for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. The term cognitive is basically cognitions, or thoughts, we have between 20 and 70,000 thoughts in a day, if you've got ADHD, you're might be more on the higher end of that a might a really busy brain like me. Some of that is obviously really, really helpful, practical problem solving orientated. Some of it might be complete, mundane tosh. Some of it might be it was very likely to be really unhelpful. And I guess that's part of what we're trying to do here in this programme is learn how to identify unhelpful thinking and unhelpful thinking patterns, and try to change the way we think, in order to enable us to feel better.

So I'm just going to introduce you to a key model. And that is what we call the five areas model. Other people might refer to it as the hot cross bun model. Never used that term myself but you could see why. Now, we have our environment and within that different situations evoke, or trigger different thoughts, don't they? Now, as mentioned, we have an awful lot of thoughts, many of which we might not even be aware of.

But what I'm going to say next is absolutely key really, to what we're going to be doing and the key to the principles of CBT. And that is, we don't tend to have a feeling or an emotion, whichever term you prefer, without a thought. Just want that to sink in for a moment. You might just think, yeah, yeah, but actually really think about that for a moment, we don't tend to have a feeling without a thought. So I'm never just sad. I'm sad, because I had a sad thought.

What if that thought is inaccurate? Because thoughts are not facts. We can't always think accurately or logically or rationally. And I remember when I first learned about this back when I was a social worker working in a psychiatric hospital, and I sat in on a CBT group. And that absolutely blew my mind. The idea that we don't have a feeling without thought immediately gave me a sense of control a sense that, well, if that's the case, then I can change the way I think or I can manipulate or alter my thoughts to alter my feelings.

So I like to think of it like this like the if you look at that emotions box, I like to think of it like you've got different cups in there different cups of emotion, you've got an anger cup and an anxiety cup. Guilt cup of shame cup. If you have lots and lots of individual anxious thoughts, for example, that cup is going to fill up and spill over pretty quickly. Or it might be a really triggering situation, and you have one really strong, powerful, anxious thought the cups can spill over, isn't it?

And CBT understands that once that happens once the emotions are triggered, we then experience the physiological sensations associated with that emotion. So for anxiety is an obvious one, isn't it? You might feel your sweaty heart racing, trouble breathing. I'll talk more about that in another audio fight flight symptoms, but but with anger a might be tenseness or you know, the so it's the thought influences the feeling or emotion whichever term you prefer. And the level of feeling influences the level of bodily sensations or physiological sensations, which all in turn influence our behaviours.

So a really obvious scenario might be say, let's say I had a job interview - and that's the situation that evokes lots of anxious what if thoughts. What if I mess it up? What if they think I'm an idiot? What if I'm late, etc, etc, I got to feel very anxious. And now I'm going to get the physiological sensations connected to them sweaty and shallow breathing. And then my behaviour is to avoid the interview and not go, what am I going to think about my behaviour? I'm going to have negative thoughts aren’t I? I should have, why didn’t I, I really needed this.

And that's going to affect my emotion. So then you're going to get secondary emotions, from thoughts stemming from the behaviour. Does that makes sense? And then I'm going to get physiological sensations to that. And then maybe my behaviours are more unhelpful, which are going to influence more negative thinking. So it's very cyclical.

So that's a brief introduction to the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy five areas model. My advice, if you've never heard any of that before, is to listen to that. Listen to this a couple of times just to let it sink in. Okay, and maybe start applying that a little bit to certain scenarios where you notice strong emotion and try and link it back to the types of thoughts that you might have had. Okay, good luck.