Exercise: Monitoring Your Activity and Mood during the Week
Over the next week, complete the activity - and - mood monitoring chart below at least three times a day (some people find it helpful to complete the chart at lunchtime, dinnertime, and just before going to bed). The more often you can enter information in the chart, the better, because trying to remember exactly what you did several hours ago and how you felt can be quite difficult when you’re depressed. Record each activity in a single box. If you engaged in an activity for more than one hour, leave the next hour blank or draw a line through it indicating that the previous behavior continued. You should still record your mood, however. If you do several different things in an hour, write down as many as you can (particularly if you felt differently during different activities).
For each activity, write down a word or two to describe how you felt, and rate the intensity of the feeling on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the least intense you’ve ever felt it and 10 being the most intense. To help with this, here is a list of common feeling words:
sadness glad anger
embarrassed pleased rageful
shamed happy furious
despairing joyful cross
melancholy elated vexed
blue excited incensed
In order to provide ample space for writing, the activity - and - mood monitoring chart allows for only one day. Please make multiple copies of this form before writing on the chart.
We recommend that you read no further in this website until you have completed at least a week of activity and mood monitoring. The strategies that follow depend on you having a greater awareness of your behavior - mood links. The next week might also be a good time to review the information we’ve covered up until this point. Copies of monitoring forms are provided in the appendix for photocopying
