Mind Over Mood – by Dr. Dennis Greenberger & Dr. Christine Padesky

Sometimes we’ve reviewed books about mental health, and said something to the effect of “however, no, it’s not just a book about CBT”. Well, this one is!

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a very useful tool—or rather, set of tools—for managing one’s own mental health. It’s not a cure-all and it has its limitations, but it’s also the industry gold standard for a reason (the reason is: it has a huge evidence-base for actually working).

Its strengths are: managing mood disturbances that are related to automatic negative thoughts/beliefs, by applying the tools to see through the illusions presented by depression, anxiety, anger, shame, etc.

This book is an introduction to CBT, guide to applying CBT in your life, and a workbook for then actually doing so. To this end, you’ll get the most out of the book if you do actually do the exercises.

The style is comprehensive, with a lot of lengthy examples that were a little lengthy for this reviewer’s personal preferences, but the result is arguably a deeper dive into the potential applications for CBT than we might have got if the examples had been a few lines each for simplicity.

Bottom line: if you’re comfortable that you already know how to use CBT to manage your moods, then you can skip this book. But if you’d like an “everything in one” explainer/guide/workbook, then this one is certainly worthy of consideration.

Click here to check out Mind Over Mood, and manage yours!