What is Behavioral Activation? Does is Help With Depression

 

Tips for Using Behavioral Activation to Treat Depression

Behavioral activation is a basic coping strategy, as well as a short-term treatment, that can have a tremendous effect on your mood. If you're already getting treatment for depression and/or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), studies show that behavioral action can be an effective part of that treatment.1

When you feel depressed or anxious, you may be less likely to do the things you enjoy or avoid other potentially pleasurable activities. The consequences of this are often a worsening of mood, feeling more detached from others, and an increase in anxiety. As you feel more and more isolated, you may begin to be at risk for depression.

How Behavioral Activation Works

In behavioral activation, you identify specific goals for the week and work toward meeting those goals. These goals take the form of pleasurable activities that are consistent with the life you want to live. For example, if you want to live the life of a compassionate person, you might choose goals focused on volunteering, helping a friend out, or donating to charity.

Behavioral activation is designed to increase your contact with positively rewarding activities.2 Particularly when you notice yourself feeling anxious or depressed, you should work on an activity. This teaches you that your behavior can affect your mood.

How to Enhance Behavioral Activation

Although behavioral activation is a pretty simple coping skill, it can be difficult to do, especially when you're not feeling motivated. However, there are some ways you can make behavioral activation more effective.

Identify Activities That Are Uniquely Important to You

When implementing behavioral activation, sometimes people identify activities that are important to other people. Basically, people identify activities based on what they think they should be doing as opposed to what they want to do. If you come up with activities that aren't important to you, it's going to be difficult to be motivated and to really feel connected to the activities you're engaging in.

When you're choosing activities for behavioral activation, try to think of what's uniquely important to you. What matters to you? What kind of life do you want to build for yourself? Come up with specific activities that really matter to you and that are about your values and desires. This will help give you that extra boost of motivation when your mood is down or you're experiencing high levels of anxiety.

Make Sure Activities Are Specific and Progress Is Measurable

Come up with specific activities where you can measure your progress. That is, can you quickly determine whether or not you have accomplished a task? If the answer is "no," then the activity you identified is likely too vague.

For example, let's say that you came up with the activity, "Get organized." What does this mean? What do you want to organize? If you organize your bills, does this mean that you have accomplished this task, or is there more to organize?

Instead, you may want to choose the activity, "Organize my kitchen." This is an activity that is specific and its completion can easily be measured. When activities are specific and measurable, it can give you more direction in behavioral activation.

List Activities From Easiest to Hardest

Behavioral activation can be hard to do when you're feeling down or very anxious. Therefore, you want to make sure you can see progress quickly. If you're experiencing very low motivation, the most important thing is to get moving to make sure that avoidance behaviors associated with anxiety and depression don't set in.3

You can do this by ranking your list of activities from easiest to hardest. Once you have this list set up, start with a couple of activities that are going to be very easy for you to accomplish. In doing so, you can make sure that you get active but also don't stress yourself out too much.