Most people experience anxiety as something that happens to them. A situation occurs, and they feel terrible. End of story. The connection between the two feels automatic and unavoidable, like weather.
The ABC model challenges that assumption at its root. It is one of the foundational tools of cognitive behavioural therapy and it has decades of research behind it. More importantly, it is practical enough to use on your own, without a therapist, starting today.
Here is what it is, how it works, and how to actually use it.
What the ABC Model Is
The ABC model was developed by psychologist Albert Ellis in the 1950s as part of what he called Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, which later became one of the primary influences on CBT. Ellis noticed something that seemed obvious once stated but was genuinely revolutionary at the time: it is not events that cause emotional disturbance, it is the beliefs we hold about those events.
The model has three components:
A is the Activating event. Something happens. Your manager gives you critical feedback. You make a mistake in a meeting. A friend does not reply to your message.
B is the Belief. The thought or interpretation you have about the event. Not the event itself, but what you tell yourself it means. "I am going to lose my job." "Everyone thinks I am incompetent." "She must be angry with me."
C is the Consequence. The emotional and behavioural response that follows. The anxiety. The avoidance. The hours of rumination. The sleepless night.
The critical insight Ellis identified is that A does not cause C. B causes C. Two different people can experience the exact same activating event and have completely different emotional consequences, because they hold different beliefs about what that event means.
This matters enormously because you cannot always control A. But with practice, you can change B. And changing B changes C.
Why Most People Skip B Without Knowing It
The reason anxiety feels automatic is that B happens very fast. The belief between the event and the feeling is often so habitual and so rapid that it seems invisible. The situation triggers the feeling directly, with no apparent thought in between.
Psychologists call these automatic thoughts. They are not automatic in the sense of being hardwired or unchangeable. They are automatic in the sense of being so well-practised that they run without conscious effort, the way driving a familiar route requires no deliberate navigation.
The job of the ABC model is to slow the sequence down enough to make B visible. Once you can see the belief, you can examine it. Once you can examine it, you can question it. And once you can question it, it loses some of its authority over how you feel.
How to Use the ABC Model in Practice
The simplest way to start is to write it down. The ABC model works best as a written exercise rather than a mental one, for the same reason that all CBT journaling works better on paper than in your head. Externalising the thought creates distance. Distance creates the ability to examine rather than just experience.
When you notice anxiety rising, find a moment to sit with a notebook or your phone and work through the following:
Write down A. Describe the situation as factually as possible. Not your interpretation of it, just what happened. "My manager sent me an email asking to discuss my recent project." Not "my manager is angry with me." Just what objectively occurred.
Write down C. How do you feel? Where do you feel it in your body? What are you doing or wanting to do as a result? Be specific. Anxiety at a seven out of ten. Wanting to cancel the meeting. Checking the email repeatedly for clues.
Now write down B. This is the harder step. Ask yourself: what am I telling myself about this situation? What does it mean to me? What am I predicting will happen? What does this say about me? Write the belief in its rawest form, not the polished version you would say to someone else. "I am going to be told I am not good enough and eventually fired."
Once all three are written, you have made the invisible visible.
The D Step: Disputing the Belief
Ellis later added a D to the model, which stands for Disputing. This is where the actual therapeutic work happens.
Disputing a belief does not mean replacing it with forced positivity. It means examining whether the belief is actually supported by evidence.
Ask yourself these questions about the belief you identified:
Is this thought actually true? Not do I feel like it is true, but is there concrete evidence for it?
What evidence exists against this belief? What are the facts that contradict it?
Am I catastrophising? Am I treating a possibility as a certainty?
What would I say to a close friend who was thinking exactly this?
What is the most realistic interpretation of this situation, as opposed to the most feared one?
The goal is not to arrive at a uniformly positive conclusion. The goal is to arrive at an accurate one. Sometimes the realistic interpretation is genuinely difficult. But it is almost always less catastrophic than the anxious mind's first draft.
An Example of the Full Process
Here is how the ABC model looks applied to a common anxiety trigger.
A: A colleague does not acknowledge you in the hallway at work and walks past without speaking.
B (automatic belief): "She is ignoring me. I must have done something wrong. People at work think I am difficult to work with."
C: Anxiety, rumination for the rest of the afternoon, replaying recent interactions for evidence of what went wrong, avoiding the colleague.
Disputing B: Is there evidence she was ignoring me specifically, or is it possible she was distracted, on the phone, thinking about something else, or simply did not see me? Has she behaved normally toward me in other recent interactions? Is there any direct evidence that she or others find me difficult? What is the most boring, mundane explanation for what happened?
Revised B: "She probably did not notice me. People are distracted all the time. There is no evidence this was personal."
Revised C: The anxiety does not necessarily disappear immediately, but its intensity reduces. The rumination has less material to feed on. The avoided interaction becomes possible again.
This is not magic. It is practice. The first several times you do this it will feel effortful and somewhat artificial. With repetition it becomes more natural, faster, and more automatic until the habit of questioning your beliefs begins to run at something closer to the speed that the beliefs themselves used to run.
Using the ABC Model With a CBT Journal App
The ABC model is one of the most effective tools for self-directed CBT practice, and journaling is the most accessible format for practising it consistently.
A dedicated CBT journal app like BrainHey can walk you through the ABC process with each entry, helping you identify the activating event, surface the underlying belief, and examine it systematically. The advantage over a paper journal is that patterns become visible over time. The beliefs that recur. The activating events that reliably trigger the same automatic thoughts. The cognitive distortions that show up again and again under different circumstances.
Seeing your own patterns across time is what transforms the ABC model from a single-use technique into a genuine shift in how you relate to your own thinking.
The model does not promise to eliminate anxiety. It promises something more achievable and more durable: the ability to examine what your anxiety is telling you before you automatically believe it.
That gap between the event and the feeling, the B that usually runs invisibly, is where the practice lives. And with enough repetition, that gap gets wider.
BrainHey is a free AI journaling app built on CBT techniques including the ABC model. Available on iOS, Android, and web at brainhey.com