12 Best CBT Courses for 2026: For Learners and Practitioners

When I studied psychology, my study group spent weeks practising CBT techniques on each other and ourselves. The beauty of CBT is that it is structured, which makes it easy to apply it to yourself (which I don’t recommend if you have high anxiety).

But I get that therapy isn’t always accessible or affordable. The impulse to self-apply CBT is there, especially when you’ve googled what it is. It seems instantly doable. But since it requires you to check your thinking objectively, there’s always a risk of bias.

That’s why this list has courses for both learners and therapy practitioners (six for each). From over 100 CBT courses on Class Central, I picked 12 for this Best Courses Guide.

Please note: if you have a diagnosed condition, or you often feel overwhelmed by your emotions, a course cannot replace real support. Please reach out to a mental health professional who can offer proper care.

Which CBT Course Is Right for You?

Know whether you want to understand CBT or practice it

Before you pick, know what you want from CBT. If you’re curious about using it on yourself, remember that it looks easy but there’s a lot of nuance underneath, and self-application is harder than it looks.

If you’re studying psychology or planning a career shift,  understand that these courses won’t make you a therapist. No online course can. But they will show you how CBT works. So choose where you want to apply CBT, on yourself or with others. That’s how I’ve sorted the picks.

How We Chose These Courses

I looked for courses that are honest about what they’re for, because a course that promises to make you a practitioner and a course that helps you understand your own thinking are different. The courses are

• Taught by a university department or a working clinician with named credentials
• Cover the mechanics: thought records, cognitive restructuring, or behavioral experiments
• Fit two purposes (understanding CBT or practicing it)

The ranking is based on Class Central, course platform, and Reddit reviews.

The first six courses are for learners and the next six for practitioners. If you’re the former, start with the Understanding Anxiety, Depression and CBT from the University of Reading; audit it free on FutureLearn and work through the first two weeks before deciding which track fits what you actually need.

Best Beginners CBT Course (University of Reading)

Understanding Anxiety, Depression and CBT is a five-week University of Reading course that explains what anxiety and depression are, how clinicians identify them, and how CBT works as a treatment. It is taught by Shirley Reynolds, a clinical psychologist and Director of the Charlie Waller Institute, and Dr Michelle Lee, who leads educational outreach on evidence-based therapies.

Learn the CBT model across both conditions: how certain thoughts and behaviours keep anxiety and depression going, and the techniques used to address them, including behavioural activation, graded exposure, and cognitive restructuring. You’ll also learn from real accounts from two former patients, Ailsa and Chris.

The course states that it shouldn’t be used for self-help treatment and cannot be used to diagnose yourself or anyone else. That makes it appropriate for curious learners, family members, and frontline healthcare workers who want to understand CBT without misapplying it. Nearly 168,000 people have enrolled, and it holds a 4.8 out of 5.0 from over 1,100!

Learners who want to move from understanding the model to practising emotional skills may find How to Process Your Emotions a useful next step.

Best Comprehensive CBT Course (The Great Courses Plus)

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Techniques for Retraining Your Brain’s instructor is Jason Satterfield, a professor of medicine at UCSF. He teaches 24 lectures that move from the foundations through self-assessment, goal-setting, and third-wave approaches.

Dr. Satterfield focuses on stress, anxiety, fear, depression, anger, trauma, addiction, sleep, chronic pain, relationships, and work, then closes with guidance on finding professional help. Each lecture covers one topic, so you can take the whole course or just bits that are relevant to you, since the full course is 12 hours long.

You’ll also learn through patient case studies and learn how to identify root causes of behaviors. If you’re looking for a more practical approach to CBT, take this course.

Best CBT Course for Everyday Life (The Great Courses Plus)

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Daily Life starts from a simple observation: we talk to ourselves all day, and some of that inner talk shapes how we feel. Dr. Jason Satterfield uses 24 half-hour lectures to offer you tools to work on your thoughts.

dr. Satterfield has assessments and goal-setting, then builds the core skills: behavioural activation, cognitive restructuring, thought records, and work on the rules and core beliefs beneath our reactions. From there, each lecture takes on a real situation. Worry and rumination, assertiveness, difficult emotions, problem-solving, grief, panic, procrastination, rejection, chronic disease, chronic pain, and insomnia.

The course is practical, anchored to problems you might face rather than theory.

Best CBT Skills Course (Therapy in a Nutshell)

How to Process Your Emotions is a 30-part series on YouTube from Emma McAdam, a licensed marriage and family therapist behind the channel Therapy in a Nutshell. It teaches emotion-regulation skills in a clear, sequenced order.

McAdam works through naming and processing emotions, the fight-or-flight response, grounding techniques, neuroplasticity, reframing negative thoughts, cognitive distortions, cognitive defusion, mindfulness, values, and self-compassion. The series runs about nine hours.

For hands-on CBT, this one’s really solid.

Best CBT Course for Choosing Therapy (UC Santa Cruz)

Evidence-Based Psychotherapy from the University of California, Santa Cruz takes a different angle from most CBT courses. Rather than teaching you to use CBT on yourself, it explains how to understand and evaluate therapy as a whole, so you can make informed decisions about care.

The course teaches how clinicians define and diagnose mental illness, what makes a therapy evidence-based, how to spot weak claims, and how CBT and DBT each work in practice. Case videos and therapy-style worksheets clarify concepts better.

This one is holistic because it discusses interventions such as exercise, nature, yoga, social connections, etc. This module will be helpful to learners who are contemplating therapy but want to deal with the issues by themselves first.

Best CBT Course for Supporting Teens (University of Reading)

Understanding Depression and Low Mood in Young People is built for the adults around a struggling teenager rather than the teenager. Shirley Reynolds, a clinical psychologist and Director of the Charlie Waller Institute at the University of Reading, leads five weeks of material aimed at parents, teachers, and frontline professionals.

The course teaches how to recognise low mood and depression in young people, the role of lifestyle and daily habits, behavioural activation, activity monitoring, and working with unhelpful thinking patterns. It also looks at family communication and finding further help. With over 61,000 enrolments and a rating of 4.78, it has a strong track record. If your goal is to support someone else rather than work on yourself, this is the course to choose.

Best Practitioner Starter CBT Course (Udemy)

The Ultimate Guide to CBT teaches the cognitive model from the ground up, then walks through how CBT is structured, who uses it, and how the therapist-client relationship works. It explains categories of negative thinking and cognitive distortions, then moves through the interventions designed to address them. A closing section looks at CBT’s limitations and related therapies.

At just over five hours, this is a compact, structured first look at how CBT interventions work in practice, useful before committing to longer practitioner training. Worksheets, slides, and section quizzes reinforce each stage. Finishing this course teaches concepts and techniques; it does not qualify you to practise therapy with clients.

Best CBT Role-Play Course (Dr. Todd Grande)

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, a 40-plus-video playlist on YouTube by licensed professional counsellor and counsellor educator Dr. Todd Grande, opens with the cognitive model and cognitive distortions, then shifts into filmed role-plays. Techniques demonstrated include behavioural activation, exposure and response prevention, the downward arrow, decatastrophizing, and cognitive reframing. Multi-part sessions for social anxiety show how a full course of CBT unfolds.

You don’t generally see techniques unfolding in online courses, making this a strong complement to any course that teaches CBT in theory. Thirteen hours of role-play footage gives you a feel for pacing, language, and clinical judgment that written material rarely conveys.

Best CBT Course for Coaches (Udemy)

CBT Practitioner Course, taught by Kain Ramsay with Achology, is the most substantial course in this guide by length and enrolment, with 32 hours of content and over 171,000 students. It teaches the central ideas and psychology behind CBT, cognitive behavioural models for understanding people, core beliefs and cognition, values as a basis for decision-making, and a CBT goal-setting process. The orientation throughout is coaching and personal development rather than clinical treatment.

For coaches and helping professionals who want a CBT-informed framework, this is a thorough, well-rated option. Its 4.5 rating from over 37,000 reviews confirms its quality. Still, it does not qualify you to practise as a clinical therapist.

Best Expert-Led CBT Course (Psychwire)

CBT Foundational on Psychwire is taught by a faculty of clinicians and researchers who helped develop and refine modern CBT, including Leslie Sokol, a former education director at the Beck Institute, and Keith Dobson. That lineage is the draw. Learning the method from people who shaped it, with filmed in-session demonstrations, puts this among the strongest clinical foundations available online.

The course follows a step-by-step foundational track and opens into further specialised tracks. It is self-paced with 12 months of access. Aimed at practising clinicians and serious learners, it teaches structured CBT practice through real technique shown in session rather than described.

Best CBT Course for CE Credits (University of Pennsylvania)

The Beck Community Initiative Course in CBT from the University of Pennsylvania is taught by Torrey Creed, who directs Penn’s Beck Community Initiative. At 22 hours and carrying 22 APA continuing-education credits, it gives licensed clinicians a full grounding in CBT while satisfying professional CE requirements at the same time.

A university-issued course carrying APA CE credit counts toward the credits a practising clinician needs to keep their licensure current, which sets it apart from courses offering only a completion certificate. Built for licensed clinicians and supervisors, it is a practical choice for professionals who need their training to count toward something.

Best CBT Course for Certification (Beck Institute)

Basics of CBT: Essentials I from the Beck Institute is taught by Judith Beck and walks through CBT’s history, theory, and step-by-step application, including case conceptualisation, session structure, and action plans. Teaching tools include role-play demonstrations, annotated transcripts, and clinical roundtables. This is the entry point to the field’s recognised certification pathway, and for anyone serious about practising CBT to a professional standard, it is where the credentialed route begins.

Completing Essentials I opens the path to Essentials II and the Institute’s CBT certification. The course carries continuing-education credit and is self-paced. While accessible to non-therapists, it is built for the clinical pathway and carries the weight of the institution behind much of the field’s training standard.

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