Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy

About The Book

Feeling Good is available on...

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (1980), written by Dr. David Burns, focuses on cognitive behavioral therapy. It is primarily geared towards those suffering from depression, but it is helpful for anyone who wants to get a handle on poor mental health and everyday life stressors. The book goes over multiple exercises and techniques that can help the reader deal with the root cause of depression: distorted thoughts.

The book is written in a direct manner with doses of humor, alongside some outdated phrases that make the reading interesting. Burns provides a lot of anecdotes from his years as a therapist for easier understanding and, in general, takes care to be kind to the reader.

In addition to depression, Feeling Good goes over:

  • Procrastination/"Do-Nothingism"
  • Uncovering which areas of life you may have self-defeating attitudes in
  • Antidepressants (do you need it?, precautions)
  • ...... & so much more!

My Experience

I've suffered from what might be a low-grade depression my whole life. I never thought it was serious enough to warrant getting medicated or seeking help, nor did I even believe I was actually depressed. Depressed or not, I was tired of feeling, well, tired, and wanted to change that.

There's a lot of advice online for handling depression/"feeling low" like exercise! sunlight! more water!, which is great and all but they never confront the core issue of distorted thoughts. If you're like me, maybe you never even realized that such thoughts were a problem, that they were just something you had to live with.

As for the results, a Sophocles quote summarizes my new mental state well. “I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect.” Reading this has me "sufering twice" no longer. If you want a timeframe, it only took a week of doing the main technique, the triple-column one, to notice an improvement.

If that was just a bunch of hubbabaloo to you, I think this comic by shencomix illustrates the process well.