Your Brain on GLP-1 s (with Dr. Sasha High)

And that's where perhaps your brilliant toolbox, CBT and ACT, cognitive behavioral therapy.

And am I getting it right? Acceptance and commitment therapy?

Correct.

Yeah.

So cool.

I want to get into this.

I just love this.

What can CBT teach someone on a GLP-1 about changing their behaviors and thought patterns that have kept her stuck? How does it work? Can you just tell us for people that don't know what this is, what are these wonderful tools?

Yeah, I think in broad terms, CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy is just understanding how our thoughts influence our emotions or feelings and then how that can influence the actions or the behaviors that we engage in.

And then that feeds back to our thinking.

And so many times people are trying to change behavior without realizing that their internal monologue, that story that they kind of have rehearsed in their brain over and over is is influencing their ability to show up.

So I'll give an example.

If we go with the example of a setback, how people respond to a setback.

So a setback could be you were trying to stay on your plan and then your coworker brought in donuts and you told yourself you weren't going to have any and then you ended up eating three and now you're telling yourself, I knew I couldn't do it.

I knew I was going to fail.

I can never stick this diet.

It's so difficult, right? That storyline causes you to feel defeated or discouraged, whatever that kind of saboteur emotion is that then causes a downward spiral in your actions.

And that's the part that people don't realize the value of kind of reframing that is if we can change how we're responding with our thinking, then we don't discourage ourselves so much.

And it's much easier to continue in the trajectory of positive health behaviors.

So being able to kind of notice and then name the unhelpful thinking patterns and then work on reframing them to something that's more neutral or even positive is will then allow us to have more positive health behaviors.

I like to call them, this is from acceptance and commitment therapy, but there's away moves and towards moves.

And towards moves are actions or behaviors that take us towards our ultimate values and what's most fulfilling in life.

And then away moves are things that we engage in that are actually drawing us away from the person that we want to be in the life that we have and the values that we hold.

And you know, it's often those negative or unhelpful thinking patterns and challenging emotions that start to pull us in the direction of the away moves.

So being able to disentangle ourselves from unhelpful thinking patterns and those emotions can help us to engage in more towards moves.