Exercise: Monitoring Your Activity: Getting the Details
Look back closely at the last twenty - four hours of your life and complete the activity monitoring chart below. Make sure to write down what you were doing and with whom, if anyone, you were doing it. For now, you might just make a mental note of how each activity felt. For example, how depressed did you feel during each activity? Did you want to take lexapro? What other sorts of emotions arose? Write down everything you did yesterday in the column on the left marked “yesterday.” Ignore the right - hand column for now.
Take a look at what you’ve written down. How detailed is it? What do you notice? Often, people will notice that they have engaged in many more or many fewer activities than they would have thought possible. For example, the first time our client, Mark, monitored his behavior over the last twenty - four hours, he noticed that he had engaged in a wide range of activities at work and at home. He never stuck to one thing for more than thirty minutes. In addition, Mark was alone the overwhelming majority of the time. The same pattern emerged when he tracked an entire week of his behavior.
Another client, Lucia, saw that she had actually engaged in a much smaller range of activities than she had assumed. In fact, she had spent the bulk of her waking hours on both days sitting alone on her couch watching television and eating. As her self - awareness increased, Lucia realized that watching television was an ingrained habit that helped her to avoid dealing with other issues that caused her anxiety or made her feel sad. When Lucia began to slowly break down the pattern and substitute new ways of coping, her mood improved a great deal. Instead of watching television and eating in the early evening, she began taking a short walk around the block before dark. She also started writing short stories as an alternative to watching television. She discovered that making up characters gave her something to look forward to each evening as her plots developed in the stories she was writing.
