Breaking The Cycle Of Depression: Understanding Behavioral Activation For Mental Health Improvement

    Then because of these negative thoughts and feelings, you withdraw from social situations, avoid responsibilities, and neglect hobbies and interests. This leads to less involvement in activities that once brought joy or a sense of accomplishment. As things progress, you become more and more inactive mentally and physically. You may sleep more or stay in bed more even if you're not asleep. You can feel sluggish all the time and even feel mentally foggy and slowed. Feeling like this makes you continue to not do very much because you don't feel well, and then the loop keeps circling on itself and you feel increasingly lonely and hopeless. You may even blame yourself for being inadequate.

    Research shows that participating in constructive activities, even in minor amounts, can have a positive reinforcement effect. And we're not talking about exercise here, although exercise also improves depression because it increases brain-derived neurotropic factor, called BDNF. BDNF is a brain chemical that promotes nerve growth. The activities of behavioral activation can be anything that you normally do that you're now not doing much of. You're reengaging with these activities, even if you don't feel like it, and over time, repeated exposure to these activities produces a sense of accomplishment and productivity that is positively reinforcing and offsets the negative thoughts you have about yourself and the world when you're depressed.

This is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy it is purely behavioral. You're looking into modifying what you're doing instead of what you're thinking, but what you do affects how you think about yourself and your environment, so we're indirectly addressing your negative thoughts by changing your behavior.

How do you do it? The first thing you want to do is monitor your activity. It's easy when you're depressed to slip into this low-activity state and not be aware of just how much you're no longer doing. You may know you're not doing a lot, but you've lost perspective and can't appreciate the change as much. Keep track of your activities for a week. Break down each day into morning, afternoon, and evening. For each segment of the day, write down what you did and how you felt about it on a scale from 1 to 10with 10 being awesome and 1 being awful. You don't have to write down every single thing, like "I brushed my teeth and used the bathroom."In fact, you can probably eliminate going to the bathroom from the list because that's not really an activity. That's a body function that's going to happen whether you're lying in bed or not. The activities on this tracker are intentional things that you do that you don't have to do to live. To help you identify these things, you can answer the W questions. What were you doing? Who were you with? Where were you? You want to make sure you write down things soon after you do them. It's much harder to remember things hours later.  You can keep track of your phone. But you want to keep the tracker or your phone nearby so you can immediately write down what you did. You're only tracking for a week, and you want to record activities even if they seem trivial like doing laundry. After you've monitored your activities for the week, the next thing you want to do is review your activities and how you felt about each of these activities. What were you doing when you felt your best? What were you doing when your mood was the lowest? Also, think about these questions. What activities made you feel the most connected to people? What activities made you feel the most accomplished? Can you see a relationship between your mood and activity level?

    In general, we get more satisfaction out of life when we are doing things that align with our core values, or doing things that are important to us. When we get depressed, we tend to lose sight of our values and things that are meaningful, so step three would be to reflect on your core values.

You can find articles online about common values that people have. circle the values that most resonate with you. The next step is to plan your activities. You're going to create a list of activities from a few sources: your activity monitoring sheet, and your values assessment, and you'll need to include essential activities of daily living like preparing meals, laundry, and paying bills. I mentioned earlieryou don't have to list every single thinglike brushing your teeth. You could group all of your grooming just grooming activity because you don't want the list to be too long you can't fit it in the space.

    Then you can also use the activity menu that's included in the workbook to help brainstorm some other activities. The last step is to schedule and plan the activities. You can use the same activity tracker that you used from the activity monitoring in the first step. You are going to need to be patient with this process. Getting active won't make you feel better immediately. It takes time. But the more you do it, the easier it gets. You become more motivated and more energized and feel better about yourself. If you really struggle to do this, you can ask a friend or a family member to help you brainstorm some activity ideas, help you realize your values, or hold you accountable for sticking to the things that you scheduled.

    Connecting with people you care about in and of itself is extremely valuable and can be one of your activities. If you don't have much support, a therapist can also help you create a behavioral activation plan.