Navigating Your College Transition with CBT

Heading off to college away from home can feel exciting, scary, and more than anything, stressful! Having a couple of tools to get you through this transition can vastly help you to stay calm, collected, and more in control. Through a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) lens, some tools we can look at to help with this big change include thought records, successive approximation, and cognitive reframing. Let's dive deeper into these useful strategies and how you can use and apply them to your college transition.

Thought Records

Thought records are a way for you to document, record, and identify negative thought patterns. The more you practice keeping track of your thoughts, the easier it becomes to notice unhelpful ways of thinking and replace them with more balanced perspectives. Recording a thought is best shortly after you notice a change in how you are feeling.

You can ask yourself questions like,

• “Is there any evidence to support this idea?” or “ What outcome is most realistic?”

By regularly using thought records, you can reframe your worries and fears into more realistic understanding thoughts, which can help ease anxieties about the transition to college.

Successive Approximation

Successive approximation is the idea that we can break down obstacles or challenges we might be facing into smaller, more manageable steps. For example, going to social events in college may seem daunting and overwhelming, but by breaking it down, it can actually become much less intimidating. Let's try it out:

1. Decide you're going to attend

2. Get ready with some friends

3. Walk to the social event together

4. Stay for just 20 to 30 minutes at the event

Just like that, you've broken down the task into four manageable steps! By tackling each step one at a time, you turn a stressful goal into a series of simple actions, and suddenly that big challenge feels a lot more doable.

Cognitive Reframing

Cognitive reframing is a way to help us identify, challenge, and work to replace distorted and negative thought behaviors and patterns and work to replace them with more realistic perspectives that are constructive and beneficial. Let’s do an example:

Maybe you’re thinking,

• “I won’t make any friends in college!”

Step 1: Notice the distortion

• You’re predicting the future without proof!

Step 2: Check the facts!

• You’ve made friends before; college has tons of people, and most students want to make new friends too

Step 3: Balance your thoughts

• “I might not make friends immediately, but I will have many chances to meet new people!”

Step 4: Take action

• Join a club, attend a social event, talk to classmates, etc.

Time to do this!

Armed with these three CBT-based tools, you can now work to calm your mind, challenge your fears, and step into this brand new and exciting chapter of your life with confidence! College is a place full of opportunities and new experiences, and if you have what it takes to flourish, you’ve got this!