How are you feeling now ?

A hot cross bun resting on a mug with a hot drink in

Identifying feelings using the Hot Cross Bun CBT Method

Do you like the smell of hot cross buns? The cinnamon and mixed spice? If not, look away now.

A hot cross bun resting on a mug with a hot drink in

My partner just had a hot cross bun for breakfast, and the smell was gorgeous. I wasn’t planning on posting a picture of an actual hot cross bun, but I wanted to try to represent that gorgeous hot bun smell. It’s hard to do that in pictures, though!

Hot cross buns are a tasty treat, but they also have another use in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT): as a useful shape to help us identify feelings and thoughts, and understand how we are feeling right now about something..

Unpacking How You Feel Using The Hot Cross Bun

In my CBT sessions, clients have often commented that this method of unpacking events is really helpful. You take an event that has upset you and break it down into these four areas. This isn’t the only method we use for this in CBT, but it can be a helpful place to start if you know you feel something but are unsure what.

I thought I would show you this method so you can use it to help unpack a situation for yourselves. We can also use this in our therapeutic journaling sessions because not only does it help to unpack the problem, it also gives us the words to start writing about these different areas.

Yellow circle with four quadrants, blue to yellow gradient background

Where To Start

Start with the first thing you know. It could be, “I know I feel furious,” or “All I know is that my heart is racing right now.”

Here are a few questions you can use to get started if you are not sure what to put into the quadrants. I’ve created this as a pdf so you can download it.

What’s the issue?

Answer these starting questions, and you should have some info to put into your hot cross bun.

Let’s plot an example to show how you would plot the different quadrants.

Example 1 – Annoyance

Boss asking me to do something just before I am about to leave work

In this example, you might feel tension in your body, but outwardly, to your boss, you seem very still as you are careful not to let your irritation show.

Of course, you will be writing this after the event, so it can be hard to recall exactly what was happening. However, as you bring up the memory and notice what is most present for you, write that down. If it is a sensation in your body, like tension, pain, or tingling, put that in the physical/sensation quadrant.

The ‘Behaviours’ quadrant is for what you DID in the situation. For example, did you avoid confrontation by agreeing to your manager’s request? Or did you confront your manager and argue? You could also put in the behaviour column that you didn’t say anything to your manager, but when you got home, you shouted at someone.

In the thoughts quadrant, write down all the things you recall going through your mind as you felt annoyed—the quick, seemingly innocent thoughts, even if they are not what you would say if you weren’t annoyed.

Note: This can be hard to do at first! If it feels overwhelming, take it one step at a time. Identifying the difference between a feeling and a thought, a sensation or a behaviour can be tricky at first.

Example 2 – Pride

In this example, let’s look at a different emotion, this time of a mixture of pride and relief. Often, the way we feel can be a mixture and not necessarily just one emotion.

Notice that how our body reacts depends on our perception of what is happening and how we feel about this perception. In annoyance, for example, we might turn our mouths downward, frown, or express a blank expression as we seethe silently inside.

If we feel something like Pride, we might have an upward-looking gaze, a smile, or a more open posture. The signs are not necessarily the same in everyone, of course. 

Debate is still ongoing about emotions and whether they follow the same pattern or are constructed in the moment. An excellent (IMHO) book about emotions is Lisa Feldman Barrett’s ‘How Emotions Are Made’. If you are interested in emotions, this book will be a real treat.

What To Do When You Have Unpacked The Situation

Now that you have a way of unpacking how you feel, you will have more information to start journaling about this situation. Start with either of the quadrants and keep writing. You can also examine the thoughts that were part of how you perceived the event and the behaviours that took you down a certain path to how you behaved in that event. If there are areas that you would like to change, this could be useful information to bring to therapy.

Hot Cross Bun PDF

I’ve included these images in a PDF and a blank hot cross bun template for you.


Guided therapeutic journaling

We used the hot cross bun in my weekly guided expressive writing journaling session on YouTube this week. Each week we take 15 mins to offload and process the week that has just gone, using expressive writing (therapeutic journaling). You can catch the replay where we used the Hot Cross Bun, here:

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