Core beliefs

Joel Dean, Founder of Joyful
Last updated October 30, 2026

Where core beliefs sit in CBT

Aaron Beck's model of thinking has three levels. On top are automatic thoughts, the quick lines that pop into your mind in a moment, and under them are rules and assumptions, and under those are core beliefs: short, absolute statements that feel true in every situation.¹

The psychologist Christine Padesky described core beliefs as ideas that cognitive therapists hypothesize play a central part in long-term problems.² I like that she chose that word, because it makes a core belief a working guess about what's underneath, something a therapist works out with you.

Kinds of core beliefs, with examples

Judith Beck groups negative core beliefs about the self into three kinds: helpless, unlovable and worthless.¹ When a team in Brazil, the US and the UK later built a questionnaire to measure core beliefs, beliefs about the self clustered into helplessness, unlovability and worthlessness, close to her grouping, and beliefs about others formed a separate group.³

The examples below were written for this page. They aren't quotes from real people.

Helpless

Helpless beliefs are about being weak, trapped, out of control or not up to it.

Unlovable

The unlovable kind is about being unwanted, different or bound to be left.

Worthless

A worthless belief says you're bad, defective or not deserving.

About other people and the world

They sit beside the beliefs about the self, and often fit with them.

What 1,813 people wrote

Someone wrote every list of examples, the one above included, so I'd rather see what people wrote about themselves. Angela Millings and Katherine Carnelley read the core beliefs that 1,813 patients recorded in Beating the Blues, an online CBT program, using the downward arrow.⁴

• The three most common themes were global self-judgments (such as "I am useless"), attachment and competence.⁴
• Women were more likely than chance to write an attachment belief, and men more likely to write a competence belief.⁴
• People with anxiety wrote more beliefs about power and control, and fewer about attachment.⁴
• People who'd had thoughts of suicide in the past week wrote more global beliefs like "I am useless", and fewer about competence.⁴

The sample only included people who finished the program, so it isn't the whole picture.⁴

How a core belief shows up

A core belief rarely shows up in those exact words. It shows up as a theme. The same sting comes back after a missed call, and again over a short email or a cancelled plan, and each time the thought ends up in the same place.

Anything that doesn't fit can be hard to take in. A compliment may feel like a mistake, and one criticism may feel like proof. Padesky compared core beliefs to prejudice: both survive by distorting, not noticing or discounting what contradicts them, or by calling it an exception.²

How well the idea has been tested

If an app, a quiz or a person tells you what your core belief is, I'd treat it as a guess, because the idea itself has been tested less than its place in CBT suggests. The team that built that questionnaire noted in 2018 that, though core beliefs are central to Beck's theory, little research had tested them.³

Therapists disagree about them too. When 115 practitioners formulated the same case, they mostly agreed on the plain facts and agreed less on the parts that needed inference, and only 44% of formulations were rated good enough.⁵

And the link with childhood is a correlation. Core belief scores went along with reports of negative childhood experiences, attachment style, anxiety and depression, which doesn't show where any one person's belief came from.³

How long change takes

In Padesky's experience, people who start at 0% belief in a new, kinder idea about themselves often reach 5 to 10% after 4 to 8 weeks of daily practice.² Most, she says, need to keep practicing for at least six months before the new belief starts to settle.²

So in clinical accounts like hers the change is slow. If you're a few weeks in and only believe the new idea a little, you're close to what she often saw. Her numbers are clinical observations, though. No trial has measured them.

Ways to work on a core belief

1. Look for the theme across several thought records. Write the automatic thought from three or four hard moments and look for what they share, since a theme is easier to see across several. The thought record keeps them in one place.
2. Follow one thought down. Ask, "If that were true, what would it mean about me?" and ask it again of each answer. The downward arrow page shows how, and when to stop.
3. Name the belief you'd rather have, in your own words. Padesky observed in her clinical work that, for lifelong beliefs, evidence alone rarely shifts them until the person has a new belief to weigh it against.² "I'm lovable" may fit, or something smaller like "Some people like having me around."
4. Rate yourself on the new belief only. Draw a line from 0 to 100 for the new belief. In Padesky's clinical work, this often worked better than a line between two extremes, such as "unlovable" and "lovable", because it shows small amounts of the new belief.²
5. Keep a daily log of anything that fits the new belief. Small things count, like a text back, a thank you or a finished task. Padesky calls this a positive data log, and she says it's harder than it sounds at first.²
6. Test it in real life. If the belief is "people always let you down", pick one small ask and see what happens. Behavioral experiments shows how to set one up.

When to look for a therapist

Core beliefs tend to be old and sticky, and people often work on them with a therapist over months. If one shapes your relationships, work or mood most of the time, look for a CBT therapist, or one trained in schema therapy, an approach Jeffrey Young and colleagues built for long-standing patterns.⁶

If a belief like "I'm worthless" comes with thoughts of not wanting to be here, please reach out now.

Questions people ask

What are examples of core beliefs?

"I'm not good enough." "I'm unlovable." "I can't cope." "People can't be trusted." "The world is dangerous." Positive ones exist too, such as "I can handle most things."

What are the five core beliefs?

There's no official list of five, so any list of five online is someone's own sorting. Judith Beck groups beliefs about the self into three kinds,¹ and the 1,813-person study needed 10 categories to hold what people wrote.⁴

Are core beliefs the same as core values?

No, a core value is something you care about, like honesty or family, and a core belief is something you believe is true, like "I'm a burden". Values guide what you do, and negative core beliefs can get in the way of that.

Where do core beliefs come from?

The questionnaire research found core belief scores going along with reports of negative childhood experiences and attachment style, but those were correlations, measured at one time,³ so they can't show where any one person's beliefs came from. Whatever the origin, CBT treats them as ideas that can be examined and slowly revised.

Related

• Automatic thoughts: the quick thoughts that sit on top of core beliefs.
• The downward arrow: how to follow a thought down to the belief under it.
• Cognitive restructuring: the wider set of CBT methods for changing thoughts.