"The Stanford psychiatrist who turned Aaron Beck's cognitive therapy into pen-and-paper tools anyone could use."
David D. Burns, M.D. is adjunct professor emeritus of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he remains involved in research and training. After earning his B.A. from Amherst College and his M.D. from Stanford, he trained under Aaron T. Beck at the University of Pennsylvania — the psychiatrist who developed cognitive therapy and later wrote the preface to Burns's own breakthrough book. Burns's contribution was to translate Beck's clinical framework into plain-language, self-administered tools, most notably the list of ten cognitive distortions at the heart of Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (1980), which has sold more than four million copies and remains, by the research Burns cites, the self-help book mental health professionals recommend most often. He gained wider recognition after a 1988 appearance on The Phil Donahue Show, and later developed TEAM-CBT, an expanded therapy model detailed in his 2020 book Feeling Great. Burns was named Stanford's Clinical Faculty Teacher of the Year three times.
Our in-depth summaries and reviews of his work
Dr. David Burns's Feeling Good distills cognitive therapy into pen-and-paper tools that identify distorted thinking and lift depression and anxiety without medication.
Read Summary →Burns argues your emotional reaction is generated by the automatic thought running through your mind in the moment, not directly by the situation itself.
Burns catalogs ten specific, recognizable thinking errors — like all-or-nothing thinking and emotional reasoning — that account for nearly all self-defeating automatic thoughts.
Burns's core tool has readers write the automatic thought, name its distortion, and draft a more accurate response — on paper, not just in their head.
"Depression has been called the world's number one public health problem."— Feeling Good
"You feel the way you do right now because of the thoughts you are thinking at this moment."— Feeling Good
Dr. David Burns's Feeling Good distills cognitive therapy into pen-and-paper tools that identify distorted thinking and lift depression and anxiety without medication.
