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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy focuses on the interactions between our emotions, our thoughts, and our behaviors. These can seem like complex concepts when working with children and teens, but this strategy that I’ll be describing can help even those young minds begin to build their awareness of what is happening inside their brain and how they can help regulate it.

There have been wonderful movements recently to build mental health awareness in children and teens. The Inside Out franchise has helped children recognize that everyone experiences a multitude of emotions as they grow and that those emotions can impact what they are thinking and the choices that they make. Children can watch as the main character Riley shifts back and forth between choices as the ‘emotions characters’ inside her head fight over who will run the control panel in her brain. It’s a visually engaging way to portray how our feelings can influence what we focus on, how we feel inclined to respond, and how we overall interpret our interactions with our environment. As children watch that scene, they likely don't inherently understand all of those concepts, of course, but we as parents, teachers, therapists, etc., can help expand on these themes. Awareness of how our mind and emotions work helps us build compassion and patience for ourselves. It helps us understand why certain strategies work better in the long term (which is naturally difficult for children to understand), and it ultimately helps us build confidence and resiliency.

Everyone will experience a spectrum of stressors throughout their life and learning AT ANY AGE how that stress functions within our brain and body can help us in managing that stress and its impacts.

CBT Art Activity- MOODS

This following art activity can be modified for a variety of ages. If you are working with younger pre-K or early elementary students, the focus may be more on how feelings change the way we see things. You can introduce to older children how those changed views can then change our actions and verbal/nonverbal responses.

You begin the activity by asking the child to look around the room and describe some of the things they see in it. Next you’ll introduce a variety of colored cellophane sheets. These can be small enough to cut a shape out of that can cover at least one eye.

Let the child pick a color for each of their most common emotions or have a set list of emotions that you are wanting them to focus on. Make a little key or take note of which colors belong to which emotion. Now have the child take turns looking around the room or interacting with items in the room while they put the different emotions over their eyes. As they walk around have them describe how things have changed. You can have them layer different emotions and notice how that can change or ‘confuse’ things even further.

For example:

Adult: Ok, now lets put the blue SAD and the yellow HAPPY on top of each other and look around- what is different now?

Child: But wait, it’s green now, that’s AFRAID! SAD and HAPPY can’t mean AFRAID!

Adult: Actually, has there ever been a time you were excited or happy to do something new but then you felt afraid you might not like it, so you decided not to do it?

Child: Yes, one time I wanted to go on a big rollercoaster but I got scared and I didn’t do it.

Adult: Did you ever feel sad about that choice?

Child: Yea

Adult: That was 3 different feelings about the same thing! Sometimes those feelings can seem hidden where we don’t realize we are feeling all of them until we talk about it later.

This can happen a lot with ANGER. Let’s take the red ANGER square put it over some other colors. A lot of times it can make these colors too dark to see things very well. ANGER can feel really strong and it can make it harder for us to notice all the other feelings it is hiding underneath it sometimes, but those other feelings are really important to find. We have to be able to help those other feelings too.

So if I ask you how you are feeling, you can tell me the feelings that you know you are having right away- but then- take some time to calm your body down and think about what other feelings might have been there too and if we should make a plan to help with those feelings in the future.

You can help kids understand that when we put a color in front of our eyes, it can change the way we see EVERYTHING! People, objects, and even our own body seems different. Likewise, our feelings can also make us see things differently. If someone doesn’t feel the same way as you, they may see things differently than you too.

You can build on this activity to help each child notice how their thoughts and behaviors change for each feeling. You can create a checklist or a worksheet like this one below:

Or you can get a printable worksheet pack at the Therapy-Thoughts storefront here:

How we feel can change what we think about and what we want to do while we are feeling that way. That is the thoughts and behaviors sections. Pick a feeling for each column and have them write down ways it changes what they think about and how they act. This can include things we start to do (yell) or things we stop doing (talking).

When we feel sad, an activity that we normally love can suddenly seem boring and we choose not to do it. Feeling sad can change our thoughts to “that’s boring” and our behaviors to refusing to play.

Feelings can be hard to change quickly, but using our coping and emotional regulation skills can help us work on changing our thoughts and behaviors first which can then help our feelings change.

We can address our thoughts by focusing on neutral thoughts or tasks through mental grounding strategies or mindfulness and meditation exercises to shift our focus. We can use affirmations and positive thinking to try and elevate thoughts and then, in turn, our moods. We can even use humor to shift our thinking and bodily reactions when we begin to laugh.

We can address our behaviors by practicing body strategies like deep breathing, movement or somatic exercises, walking, stretch, exercising. We can intentionally do the opposite action that our “feeling brain” wants us to do in that moment, so instead of avoiding, we can slowly begin engaging in an activity.

The final step in the activity can be to develop a coping strategy plan for each specific feeling. It’s important to emphasize that there is nothing wrong with having any of those feelings and it is important that we don’t try to push those feelings away. Instead, our strategy plans are for any specific thoughts or behaviors that we don’t want to reinforce when we have those feelings such as behaviors that hurt others or negatively impact us or thoughts that negatively shape how we view ourselves and our abilities.

You can find specific strategies for many of these types of approaches in the Blog section under Mental Health Awareness or the Adult and Child sections.