Different Feelings Can Occur with Different Activities
People experience emotions with varying intensity based upon the situations in which they occur. For example, you might be out on a sunny summer day and eat a piece of your favorite, juicy, summer fruit. The feelings associated with it may be satisfaction and pleasure. On such a day, you might rate both feelings as 10 on the 1 to 10 scale. However, if you are rushing through a busy workday, feeling pressured to get things accomplished, and you pick up a piece of the same kind of fruit at your local deli, you may still experience satisfaction and pleasure but might rate both only a 2 or 3 in intensity. So, when you try to rate the intensity of your emotions on your activity-and-mood monitoring charts, remember to consider the entire context of the situation and then rate the intensity of what you are feeling.
Increasing awareness of behavior-mood links for the first time can be a real eye-opener.
Some of the most common things people notice are listed below:
• variations in mood
• lack of variations in mood
• difficult times of day
• easier times of day
• difficult situations or activities
• enjoyable situations or activities
• depression loops
You may have noticed much more variation in your mood than you would have predicted.
Depression has a way of coloring memory as you look back in time, even over a few hours. Like Nathan, you may have the sense that you are “always depressed.” However, when you record your experiences close to the time that they happen, you may find your mood is much more variable. Even if your mood is generally depressed (as opposed to happy, relaxed, angry, or otherwise), the level of depression will probably vary, even if it’s only slightly. These variations are important because they provide clues about situations, activities, or times of day that can increase or decrease your depression. Your condition may also vary depending on your paxil dosage. Those situations, activities, or times that increase depression can be modified, and those that decrease it can be capitalized on in ways we will discuss shortly.
Sometimes people notice that there is a real lack of variation in the way they feel. For example, one man with whom we worked recorded feeling only depressed or bored all the time. Although the level of boredom or depression varied somewhat, the range of emotional experi¬ences did not. Part of his self-activation strategy, therefore, involved finding activities and situations that produced other sorts of emotional experiences. For example, as an experiment, he purposely went to a comedy club with friends to see if humor had an effect on the range of his moods.
You probably noticed difficult times of day on your activity-and-mood monitoring chart.
You may find that you associate morning with feelings of depression. Or you may associate depression with returning home at the end of the day or eating dinner. Other times of day may be somewhat better. One of our clients, Dana, found that her mood was significantly less depressed for a brief period of time each day when she was at the gym. After examining her experiences at the gym a little more closely, Dana became aware that while she was working out she wasn’t thinking about the things that tended to depress her. She was then able to introduce other sorts of enjoyable activities that occupied her mind at other points in her week.
