Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy has been the go-to book on cognitive behaviorial therapy for depression for decades. In Feeling Good: the New Mood Therapy (which,because the book was published so long ago, isn't really “new”) Dr David Burns makes the case that cognitive methods of treating depression are as good or better than antidepressant medication. He spends the first few chapters making the case for this claim with extensive quotes from the research and accounts of multiple studies. The rest of the book is a series of exercises in changing thinking to change mood.

He includes tips and techniques to help recognize what causes mood swings, immediately address negative feelings as soon as they begin, handle other people's hostility, move beyond emotional needs for love and/or approval and build self esteem.

The majority of work in cognitive behavioral therapy is recognizing and correcting distorted thinking that causes us to act in ways that are not appropriate for the actual situation at hand, and to feel in ways that are negative, either in the form of sadness or anger or possibly anxiety. In Feeling Good, Burns describes these distortions and then leads readers through exercises that confront automatic thoughts created by cognitive distortions. Readers are then coached to replace those same thoughts with what he calls more “rational responses.”

Although this book has a long track record and is considered a classic by some, I found it an interesting read but not ultimately helpful. The problem with cognitive distortions is that they're hard to recognize because well, they involve distorting thinking. I believe if most people could figure out where their thinking was making them unhappy, they'd have already done it. However, because it explains the research and the concepts behind cognitive behavioral therapy so well, it's a useful primer even if it's not a valuable stand alone self help resource.