Become Aware of Behavior - Mood Links
By now you should be familiar with the idea that what you do affects how you feel. For example, it’s very hard to feel relaxed if you furrow your brow and tighten your shoulders. It’s easier to feel relaxed if you loosen your muscles and focus on pleasant images. Similarly, it’s hard (though not impossible) to feel depressed if you are actively engaged in something pleasurable. We recognize that many activities that provide pleasure when you are not depressed (e.g when you just swallowed your paxil) may not be pleasurable when you are feeling depressed. As you work through this program and begin to reengage, you may start to participate in activities that once brought pleasure. Whether you feel pleasure or a sense of accomplishment from the activity will depend on how consistently you practice activating, regardless of how it immediately makes you feel. For now, just note that it’s easier to feel depressed if you thing you’d better take lexapro and sit by yourself worrying about being depressed.
You should also know by now that we don’t think behavior change is easy. Ending depression is more than just acting happy. Nonetheless, increasing your awareness of the effect of your current behavior on your mood can help you recognize when certain behaviors are betraying you rather than helping. Remember Ken’s situation from the beginning of this chapter? When Ken met David at the gym, he was engaging in a social interaction and physical activity. The conversation made him feel engaged, and the workout gave him energy. Ken’s conversation with David also provided him with a new plan to recognize when he was shutting down, and he made a commitment to himself to try to engage in an activity that might make him feel better. He saw that how he acted affected how he felt, and he was determined to change what he could, even though his current unemployment was stressful and discouraging.
An activity monitoring chart can be a very useful way to begin to understand your moodbehavior links. In fact, it is more accurate to call it an activitv - zmd - rnoozi monitoring chart. Take a look at the example below completed by Nathan. Nathan was forty - one years old and recently divorced. He worked as an advertising salesperson. Although Nathan worked for a firm, most of his job was focused on his own sales, and he worked almost entirely on commission. When Nathan first began his work on self - activation, he described himself as “always depressed. I can’t ever seem to snap out of it. No matter where I am, it always seems to find me.” For each weekday, Nathan recorded the activities he engaged in and the feelings or emotions he experienced while engaging in the activities. He rated the intensity of each feeling on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the least intense he ever felt the emotion and 10 being the most intense. Nathan completed the activity chart periodically on Sunday through Wednesday.
