Step I: Track Your Activities on a Day - to - Day, Hour - by - Hour Basis
It helps to track the behaviors you engage in each day. To do this, you can use an activity monitoring chart (Beck et al. 1979). Later in this chapter, you will find a blank chart to copy and use to record your activities. For now, take a look at the activity monitoring chart below. This chart was completed by a client named Lisa as part of her self - activation work. We have included her notes for Sunday. Notice that she has completed a word or two about each hour of the day. She wrote down what she was doing, where she was, and who she was with. The chart is detailed but not overly so. There is enough information to track her day, and for her to begin to see what she has done and how it may effect her mood.
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.
