Customer Reviews

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy

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I have been dealing with anxiety and depression for many years and have read just about every type of book imaginable. The only reason I'm writing this review is that I found this book to be the best overall work I have ever read in the realm of self-help psychology.

One of the greatest parts about the book is that Dr. Burns' model of cognitive behavioral therapy is very thorough, yet it is easy to understand and incorporate into one's daily living. He recommends cognitive behavioral therapy as the first line defense in dealing with mood disorders. However, the beauty of the book lies in the fact that Dr. Burns does not simply dismiss psychotropic medications. He clearly states that medications in addition to his therapeutic techniques are wholly appropriate for many people. In fact, it this updated edition he goes into detail about the different classes and types of drug options available on the market today. This approach is refreshing for someone who is benefitting from the use of medication and wanting to incorporate cognitive behavioral therapy into their recovery without having to read a book which outright dismisses the role of medication in treatment.

Also of special significance is his list of 10 'Cognitive Distortions'. Here, he lays out a plan for recognizing faulty thinking, how these thoughts affect our moods, and how to correct these distortions.

In summation, Dr. Burns' book is a practical encapsulation of the ideas and theories of some of the great pioneers in the field of mental health such as Drs. Abraham Low, Albert Ellis, and Aaron Beck.

If you made it this far to decide whether or not to buy this book, read some of the other reviews then put it in your cart.

This book explains CBT in a very simple an easy to read fashion. It was the first Burns book (he has several), and so doesn't contain all the exercises that he developed later. I own all the books and use them in my own therapy and also when dealing with clients. These techniques work. When incorporated correctly and dilligently followed, I believe anyone can benefit from these concepts. CBT is quite simple really. Your moods are created by your thoughts and how you view your world. Change the thoughts and your are on your way to managing your moods.

One important note: Burns makes it time and time again in this book and the other books he has written. YOU MUST DO THE WRITTEN EXERCISES!! Otherwise you probably won't get it. Intellectual internalization by reading is not enough. You may learn a little but probably not enough to change your behavior or your moods. CBT is the leading technique in treating depression today.

As a counsellor, I am quite familiar with the use of Cognitive Therapy, not only in treating depression, but as a means of bringing balance and harmony to one's life, depressed or not. Cognitive Therapy is based on mood modification - a principle one can use on their own to eliminate symptoms and achieve personal growth. "Feeling Good" is aimed at ridding ourselves of negative thinking, that which holds us stagnant and inhibits personal growth. Even if you are on medication for depression, you can still use the principles outlined in this book as a form of self-help. Through these pages, the author will help the reader to understand why you feel as you do, the power of positive thinking, how to develop self-control and how you can change through mood modification. The book is quite lengthy and certainly not a book one should speed read. To maximum its use, one should read, digest and absorb the material slowly and attentively. It is an excellent self-help book written in a style that is easily understood by the layperson; you do not need a course in psychology to understand its meaning.

It's now been a little over a year since I read this book. That seems like a good time to review it; better than in the first couple of weeks, when I had a tremendous boost of happiness and feeling at peace with myself and the world. (I felt as if I had just been at a 10 year Buddhist retreat!). And better than in the months after, when I was disappointed and discouraged that the initial empowerment had worn off and I was still indeed depressed, anxious and insecure much of the time.

To be clear: I absolutely don't believe there will ever be a book in this world that can "cure" long standing depression or anxiety. No matter what any studies show (though incidentally, the ones on this book are pretty encouraging.) Those wonderful newly gained insights and skills don't have the power to obliterate what the brain has had decades to learn and get good at. That's continuous work.
(To those who find the CBT attitude towards "dwelling" on childhood trauma too dismissive for their situation, I recommend the book "Reinventing Your Life", which is based on Schema Therapy.)

So where did Feeling Good fit in for me?

One thing I'm deeply grateful for is the tools it's given me to cope with each thing that drags me down - specifically, the 3 column writing exercise. More often than not, I just don't do it when I'm upset. I'll feel too discouraged to have faith in the process, or I'd rather distract myself with tv and self soothing than "deal". But when I do it, it's never once failed to make me feel a lot more balanced, a lot more in control, a lot less overwhelmed. It's as if as soon as I start working on my counter-points, I begin to step outside of the ring of fire of my own ruminations. Slowly but surely, my sense of humor and my perspective - the first traits depression banishes - return to me.

But the other, even more important side of this book is the core values and attitudes it presents as alternatives to the outlook we have on life when we're chronically unhappy: judgemental, or fearful, or self loathing, or self righteous, or all of the above.
Dr. Burns' writing style can sometimes feel (like every other successful self-help author, I suspect) too simplistic, or flippant, or self assured, or plain cheerful for the reader to recognize the pretty deep ideas it taps in to. I don't think anyone who was raised with other values will easily accept them - and the point isn't to uncritically swallow what the good doctor says, anyway. (At least my book is full of belligerent notes in the margins - "great, you just defined the meaning of life once and for all" and " exactly why is every example of paranoia a needy irrational girlfriend?!"). But it's been tremendously valuable to me to reflect and elaborate on ideas such as:

- The idea of a person's "worth" or "value" is a false mental construct, and thus your worth cannot fluctuate with how you perform or what others think of you.
- Self-obliterating notions of guilt and shame often stand in the way of taking true responsibility for your mistakes.
- Perfection is an abstraction as well. It quite literally does not exist anywhere in the real world - so the judgement of something as "flawed" will always be somewhat arbitrary.
- Furthermore, how close we perceive something to be to perfection has little to do with how much we enjoy or take from it. (Example: I can find at least thirty passages in this book I disagree with or dislike. Does that make it a bad book? Should Dr. Burns feel bad about his work, based on my opinion of it?)
And not least:
- It's not all about me.

I hope you'll take as much as I did from this book. Feel better!

Please keep this in mind when reading my review: 1) I am the jaded reader of many self-help books and 2) Whatever I say about you, the reader, applies equally to me, if not more, and 3) I respect the author very much for his sincerity and for all the hard work he put into this book, even if I do think it is a bit self-deluding, and 4) My main purpose in writing the review is to be a devil's advocate.

It is difficult to encapsulate everything the author says in just a few words, but basically his premise is that bad feelings are caused by distorted thoughts, and by correcting these distorted thoughts we can change the way we feel.

In the intro, Dr. Burns gives us an example from his own life, when his own son was being born: "He was bluer than a healthy baby should be and he was wheezing and gasping for air... I thought, 'God, he needs oxygen for his brain cells. What if he ends up with brain damage or is mentally retarded?'" As Dr. Burns applied his own techniques to the situation, he realized that he was 1) Predicting the future and 2) Thinking in other distorted ways that were causing him to feel anxious unnecessarily. After this realization, he calmed down. His prediction did not come true.

In this case, his methods worked very well, and there will be many cases in the real world in which they will work equally well. There are many normal people who have these kinds of problems. But, by using this example, Dr. Burns made himself seem a bit like a naive "golden boy" who had only experienced the ordinary problems of life, if not less, at the time of the book writing.

Although Dr. Burns may not have experienced social ostracism, disfigurement, poverty or any form of serious deprivation, I think he would say that his techniques can still be useful. I'll agree, but I am not sure how much. Still, it does indeed seem glib to claim that one can simply choose one's own happiness.

In one way of thinking, I do like the book, and I actually do think it will help the majority, who have only average insecurities. But that isn't my focus. Part of what I don't like is that, for those of us in the shadows, it appears be suggesting that we think in ways that are unnatural. Nobody who is ever bright and successful is ever told "you might be happier if you stopped being so competetive", yet the rest of us are constantly scolded by professionals for being "down on ourselves".

I am someone who is more that just a little different, and so I have trouble fitting in. On various occasions, people have pointed out to me that I am different. I often imagine others to be thinking I am strange. Dr. Burns might, in this case, might suggest that I am mind-reading, but I say I don't think so, doc. I believe that my fears are pretty well founded.

Dr. Burns also seems to discount the value of negative feelings, as well as the validity of intuition. In some cases,our feelings can be an impetus for much needed change, as when we are behaving poorly and other people react in a way that tells us so. In this case, our intuition tells us that other people don't like us, but our intuition is correct and challenging it might be doing a disservice to ourselves.

In some cases, maybe there is some other kind of change needed. When I was a child, I had a large and noticeable mole on my face that I didn't like. Rather than taking me to the doctor to have it removed, my parents simply told me, without understanding the unintended effect it had, that all parts of me were beautiful. IF THEY HAD READ DR. BURNS' BOOK, they might have told me that I was using magnification, or that I was guilty of emotional reasoning. Later, I got the courage to just go and have it removed myself, and I never felt better! What I am saying is, sometimes the "self-help" techniques really don't get to the root of the problem. I think it is always better to try and make changes where you can, rather than having to continuously do mental exercises just so that you can accept yourself.

I liked this book, but at the same time I hated it.

First of all, it is obvious that the author spent a lot of time thinking about it, organizing it, and making it readable. I would even say he is probably sincere in what he says. It also contains a good deal of information about how drugs can be used to treat depression.

Now here's the bad part: I am skeptical about how useful these ideas could be. The author says these ideas are revolutionary, but I don't think they are going to change the world or human nature. They originated with Albert Ellis, who in my humble opinion was a bit grandiose.
What Dr. Burns seems to be telling us is that we feel the way we do because of what we tell ourselves. If instead we learn to intellectualize everything or look at it in a positive way, we will feel a lot happier. For example, if I tell myself "Oh, I am always screwing things up" we are more likely to feel bad than if we simply say "I Don't ALWAYS screw things up, and even though I did it wrong this time I can learn from it". Talking to ourselves in terms of "always" or "never" is known as overgeneralization and will get us into trouble, the author claims.

The problem I have with this idea is that some of us naturally are less adept, less talented, less beautiful than others. We ARE IN FACT judged by or IQ, social skills and beauty. In this vein, it could be argued that we should learn to accept ourselves regardless of what disablities we have, what people think of us, and so on. Indeed, there ARE some people who seem to be happy a great deal of the time, regardless (down's syndrome children being a very good example). But how many of the rest of us can honestly say that the opinion of others does not matter to us? I would suspect the answer is "few".

In wrapping things up, I want to say that the ideas in the book may be useful to someone who has mild self-esteem problems and a fair amount of insight as to how he/she interacts with others. On the other hand, if the book is used by someone who has poor social skills or limited awareness of his/her self, the problem is not to DENY the existence of these problems, as the book suggests, but rather to RECOGNIZE THAT THERE IS A PROBLEM and work to improve it with the help of a trained practioner. Doing anything else is guaranteed to cause even further damage to self-esteem in the future.

The title of my review is actually a summary of how this book plans to make you feel better.

The book is authored by a someone who has had a lot of experience using cognitive therapy techniques to try and improve people's depression. Cognitive therapy's premise is that your thinking (messages that you are giving yourself all day long) directly inflences your moods and how you feel. Therefore, if you are thinking negatively, you're going to feel that way. Likewise, if you think positive and optimistically, well, you're going to feel good!

And that's what the book is about- getting you to get rid of negative thoughts and replacing them with good ones. Does it work? Well, the book has been around since 1980, and there's actually been some good solid research that has actually taken the book, given it to depressed patients.....and they've improved!

With its easy writing style and research-backed techniques, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy +Revised and Updated is definitely worth the read- just know you've got over 500+ pages ahead of you. If this seems too daunting, or this approach doesn't appeal to you, try something like Exercise Beats Depression- which has been shown to be just as effective as cognitive therapy or drugs in controlled trials. Good luck!

Dr. Burns' book "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy" offers instant yet insightful ways to start pulling out of depression or anxiety and to create life-long changes in thought patterns that can keep one living a happier and more productive life into the future. His systematic identification of the thought-errors that lead to and reinforce depressive feelings is quite brilliant: Most of us aren't aware when we are doing them and, if aware, believe that there is truth to these mistaken patterns. Simply becoming aware of negative self-talk and its mistaken premises may almost immediately help a person (particularly someone with milder depression).

BUT: Dr. Burns, I feel, fails to take seriously the effect that major traumatic events can have on a person's psyche. While he acknowledges that death, disability, or major illness can lead to feelings of sadness (although, he says, they do not "cause" depression), I feel that he systematically underestimates the importance of the conditions of one's life in relation to how one feels in and about their life. Certainly, one shouldn't need external "props" to feel basically good or worthy. However, there are some basic, necessary conditions of human flourishing that everyone needs - to be free of serious pain, to have the minimum financial wherewithal for basic security, ordinary human social contact and not isolation; maybe a handful of others. Dr. Burns seems to minimize the importance of any "real world" factor in his assertion that anyone - including, in examples he uses, prisoners of war - can be happy if only they have the right mindset. This takes a good principle too far, and makes it potentially damaging: A person is not weak or even suffering from errors of thought if he or she feels somewhat depressed under truly extreme circumstances that are outside the bounds of what people should be called upon to live with; rather, they're experiencing a possibly realistic reaction to a very bad situation. It's important to distinguish when you need to change your *thoughts* from when you need to change your *reality,* though often both are important.

The caveat above really is a small one, as most people suffer from depression in the midst of totally ordinary circumstances - circumstances that only may appear hopeless or insurmountable because of the depression itself. That's where treatment - and Dr. Burns' book - are so valuable. But for people experiencing depression in truly extraordinary circumstances that deprive one of the basic conditions of human flourishing, I think it's helpful, and humane, to acknowledge that it is not merely mistaken thought patterns that create a barrier to contentedness or happiness.

In summary: A hugely helpful book - but a bit panglossian on the power of right thinking under any and every circumstance.

Dr. David Burns, in his Feeling Good series of books, gives us the most easy to follow guide for cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy is an effective method of treatment, one that is so structured that it can be studied because therapists who provide it correctly all do it the same way. Basically its premise is that depression occurs from our distortions in thinking and by changing these distortions, we can cure our depression. So if changing your thinking patterns relieves your depression, cognitive therapy is right for you.

Dr. Richard O'Connor, in Active Treatment of Depression and in Undoing Depression, explains this and goes on to recommend Feeling Good as a good resource . Undoing Depression also explains the other ways depression can occur and gives many ways to attack this vicious disease.

There have been times that a quick recap of cognitive principles have put me back on track. At those times, Dr. Burns's books have been just the ticket. There have been other times that telling me to work on "changing my thoughts" would have been like telling me that I wasn't experiencing what I knew I was.

This is a BIG book full of uneccesary material that someone who is severely depressed is going to have a HARD time even holding up. Seriously, I went through a deep depression many years ago and during that time "Feeling Good" was required reading in one of my college courses. The professor, who admittedly had never experienced a depressive episode swore that this was the best book for anyone suffering from depression. While I will admit there is some helpful information in this book you have to be out of the deep depression to begin appreciating any of it.

In the academic field of counseling/psychology this book is touted as the best book for patients with depression. However, in my real world experience the only therapists/counselors recommending this book are ones who have either not gone through a severe depression or who never really read the book themselves.

Cognitive theory ideas can be extremely helpful to people with depression. But I wouldn't waste your money on this one.

There are several books out there - written by other sufferers who made it back to freedom - that will be more valuable. If you need a therapist to help you then get a live one and not one from a book whose theory is based on his personal style.

I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

When Going Through Hell... Don't Stop! A Survivor's Guide to Overcoming Anxiety and Clinical Depression

Down Came the Rain : My Journey Through Postpartum Depression

A Pathway to Healing: One Woman's Journey through Depression

etc...