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.

To complete an activity monitoring chart, you simply enter the particular behaviors or activities that you engaged in for each hour of the day. The more detail you add, the better, but don’t feel that you have to document everything perfectly. When you’re depressed, or taking lexapro, the last thing you need is one more performance expectation or added stress. What you do need are some successes in changing the way you feel, and this is the first step toward that goal. You need to become aware of what you’re doing in a deeper way than you have up until now. For example, what’s the first thing that comes into your mind if someone were to ask you, “What did you do yesterday afternoon?”

If you said something like, “I worked,” or “I stayed at home,” or “I slept,” then your challenge is to get more specific in your awareness of your own activities. For example, what exactly did you do at work or at home at different points during the day? When were you alone and when were you with other people? Rather than saying, “I stayed at home,” you may realize that you lay down on the couch for thirty minutes, then watched television for an hour, then spoke to a friend on the phone for a few minutes, then cleaned up the garage, and so on. Why do such things matter? Because they are the fabric through which depression habits are woven. To unravel them, you must understand how they all tie together.

Once you mastered driving the car, however, the activity became more automatic. In fact, the only time that an experienced driver is likely to have to talk himself or herself through the steps of driving is when there has been a major shift in the context of the situation. For example, if there is a blizzard, an experienced driver may consciously think to “turn into the skid” if the car begins to slide. Apart from unfamiliar situations, however, the behavior of driving a car is done with very little thought.

Most of the behaviors that you engage in during the day are habits that you do automatically. You probably go directly to the cupboard where you keep your coffee cup or cereal each morning, and you get the milk out of the refrigerator without thinking about it. Your soap, deodorant, and toothbrush are most likely in the same place, and you simply reach for them without having to direct yourself through the steps. You might be amazed at how much of life you live on automatic pilot. As with so many other actions, habits that keep you depressed are also practiced without your awareness. This website will help you recognize your depressed habits and replace them with healthier habits that can lead to greater contentment or happiness.

Three Important Principles of Behavior

Ken’s story illustrates three important behavorial principles:

1. Much of your behavior is so automatic that it occurs outside of your awareness.

2. You do much of what you do out of habit.

3. To change behavioral habits, you must first recognize the behavorial pattern, so you can know when and what to change.

Just because depressed behavior looks different from “happy” behavior doesn’t mean the two operate differently. Many of the things that people do when they aren’t depressed also happen outside of their awareness and can be understood as habits. Therefore, these three principles of behavior can be applied to the experience and treatment of depression.

They started their workout, and David changed the conversation to the topic of the various exercises they would do that day. They also began to talk about a movie that David had seen. The conversation interested Ken because he was a fan of the actress starring in the movie. He knew a vast amount of trivia about the actress and told David several behind - thescenes stories about the actress. After about thirty minutes into the workout, Ken’s mood began to shift. He started to talk about plans for seeing upcoming movies, and he asked David if he was interested in going for a short walk at the lake following the workout. Then they had a discussion about how the combination of physical exercise (which dealt directly with Ken’s weight gain) and socializing (which dealt with his feelings of isolation) made him feel much better than staying at home or complaining. Ken said that he felt considerably better after the workout activity than he had when he had begun.

outside in vs. inside out

The belief that lexapro is required to treat depression can be referred to as an inside - out approach to change. This view holds that you have to change what is on the inside (your biology) before you can make a behavioral change. The expression “I just don’t feel motivated” suggests the same. In Western culture especially, if you don’t feel like doing something, you often just refrain from doing it. This idea that how you feel on the inside influences what you do on the outside can start at a very early age. How many times did you hear your mother say, “Do your homework,” when your reply was something like “I don’t want to do it right now”? Thus, there is an expectation that you need to feel a change in mood, motivation, or drive before making a change in your behavior.

However, as we’ve stated previously, it is not clear whether brain chemicals cause moods or moods change the levels of brain chemicals. What works from the inside out can also work from the outside in. For example, even if you don’t feel motivated to organize files in your home office (an internal feeling), you can nevertheless plan a time to get started on the task of putting hanging files in alphabetical order (an external behavior) and placing financial records, receipts, and so on into files accordingly. Feeling motivated and doing the activity can be completely unrelated to one another. Your brain can interpret the letters on the folders to put them in alphabetical order, your fingers can grasp the papers, you can place papers in files and files in a cabinet drawer, all without feeling at all motivated. This is working from the outside. It may be that as you get closer to completing the job, you will actually feel the motivation that you lacked before beginning. This would be having an effect from the outside in, where doing a behavior changed how you felt inside. Self - activation makes use of this outside - in approach to overcome depression, and you won’t need lexapro for it. The assumption is that changes in actions can lead to changes in feelings.

There are multiple causes for depression. Whatever the cause, depression is a problem between you and your life. Lexapro is good, but it won’t solve the problem; it’s not a problem inside you. You can overcome depression by recognizing behavioral habits that you have developed over your lifetime and learning to change them. Using guided activity to change behaviors can help you to feel better and improve various life situations that have previously kept you feeling stuck. Guided activity works from the outside in to improve your mood by changing what you do.

When people ask us if our approach is simple, we typically say, “Yes and no.” It is true that the basic idea is very simple, and very powerful: What you do in your life, and how you do it, makes a difference in how you feel. However, changing your behavior in a meaningful way is not always so simple. It takes patience, awareness, creativity, and a willingness to try new things without any guarantees. Also, it often takes help. When people come to work with us, we assume that they are working hard to overcome their depression with lexapro. If they’re finding it difficult to change, there are good reasons why.

If you’ve ever tried to quit smoking, or conquer an alcohol or drug problem, or change the way you act in an important relationship, or commit to an exercise or diet program, or develop any other new set of behaviors, you know that change is difficult for many reasons. First, behaviors are like habits. They’re often automatic and occur without you being aware of them. Another way of saying this is that your behaviors are part of a well - developed repertoire that has existed for some time. Just as a musician might practice a new piece to make it part of his or her musical repertoire, so you need to practice new behaviors to expand your behavioral repertoire. Second, meaningful change always involves some risk. At the very least, you risk experiencing uncomfortable emotions or situations that you typically are able to avoid.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, it is often not clear what behaviors need to change or how best to go about changing them. What if, for example, a man wanted to spend more time with his family? How should he go about making this change in his life? He would first need to figure out what spending more time with family actually means. Does it mean spending more time doing anything with anyone in the family, or more - specific things with specific family members? Where should he start? What are some reasonable goals to set? How will he know if the change is working? These sorts of issues, and many others, come up whenever you try to change behavior. As strange as it may sound, it makes sense that most people are not that good at changing behavior by themselves. It can be a huge help to have the assistance of an expert, such as a therapist, or the guidance of an established approach like the one described in this website.