Recently, the International Association of Cognitive Therapy added the word “behavioral” to its official name. This change reflects how cognitive therapy techniques are being integrated with behavioral methods that are essential for treating a wide range of conditions.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is one of the most common and best‑studied forms of psychotherapy. It combines two therapeutic approaches: cognitive therapy and behavioral therapy.

This combination therapy originated in the 1950s and 1960s and arose from the fields of cognitive and behavioral psychology. It blends techniques that focus on modifying negative‑thought patterns (cognitive) with techniques that address problematic behaviors (behavioral).

Although the exact therapeutic approach depends on the condition or problem being treated, the basic idea remains the same: what we think, how we behave, and how others make us feel are closely related and affect our well‑being.

Behavioral therapy arose from behaviorism, a theory that suggests that human behavior is learned and therefore can be changed or relearned in a different way. Behavioral therapy tries to determine whether certain behavioral patterns make life more difficult or problems worse. Once these behavioral patterns have been identified, the next step is to work to change them.

On the other hand, cognitive therapy helps people learn to replace these thought patterns with thoughts that are more realistic and less damaging. It also helps them think more clearly and better control their own thoughts.

This form of mixed therapy is agile and focuses on present‑day problems and crises. Although it does not completely ignore the weight of the past on current actions, it differs from psychoanalysis in that it does not anchor its strategy in addressing past experiences; it does so only to resolve and improve the present.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is used to treat mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, obsessive‑compulsive disorder, and addictions.

But it can also be used to treat physical conditions like chronic pain from, for example, chronic low back pain or rheumatoid arthritis. In these cases, CBT has been proven to help people better cope with symptoms and modify behaviors to better address these conditions.

Scientific studies have demonstrated that together, cognitive and behavioral strategies improve mental health conditions—and therefore patient well‑being. Worldwide, there are 3970 completed or ongoing studies on this combination therapy applied to disorders from alcoholism to post‑traumatic stress disorder.

The following table, taken from a document on CBT from the Spanish Society of Psychiatry and Mental Health, shows how therapists can help patients learn to modify their behavior by analyzing opposite reactions to a given situation:

Some of the strategies that therapists use to change thought patterns are:

In CBT, the therapist and patient agree on the work to be done. Each session will likely begin by defining what will be discussed that day. Another way that CBT differs from traditional psychoanalysis is that CBT doesn’t last years. It often doesn’t exceed 20 sessions.

In increasingly multidisciplinary healthcare systems, where patients are understood as a whole with physical and mental aspects forming a single unit, the ideal scenario is for primary care providers to use protocols to detect when a patient could benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy. The key, experts say, is to work together so that, with the support of the clinician, the therapist can conduct sessions to address and solve a specific problem.