Create an Activity List

Since depression could make this approach difficult to carry out, we’ve come up with an easy-to-implement solution. Behavioral activation is all about increasing your activity level so that you can enjoy life again.

Step 1 – Choose a Set of Activities

When it comes to choosing the ideal activities for your improvement strategy, there’s no ‘right’ and ‘wrong”’.

You can literally add anything: house chores (washing the dishes, shopping for groceries, paying the bills), fun activities (exercising, spending time with your friends, reading a book), work-related tasks, etc.

Don’t forget to create a balance between pleasurable activities with necessarily responsibilities. It would be ideal to engage in at least 2 or 3 activities per day.

Once you start feeling more comfortable and motivated, you can increase the number of activities, as well as the overall duration of each activity.

Step 2 – Set a Weekly Schedule

To schedule your activities, you can use a simple weekly planner, like the one provided below.

If at first it seems too overwhelming and demanding to plan your entire week, start with a day or a couple of days.

Make sure you don’t discourage yourself, by cramming your time with all sorts of demanding activities. As you already know, it is crucial to start with small, simple and short tasks, which you can gradually increase in number and duration.

Step 3 – Rate Your Experience

After you’ve set your weekly activities, it’s time to rate each one based on your perceived level of depression and pleasure.

Use a 1 – 10 rating scale, in order to rate your perceived levels of depression and pleasure, both before and after each activity.

Remember, you have to use this worksheet, or a similar one, for every activity.

The point of this step, is to encourage yourself, by seeing the difference that activities make, as well as to find those activities that work best for you personally.