• The new behavior isn’t a helpful one.

Solution: Determine why the behavior wasn’t helpful. Think of alternatives and try them out

in new experiments.

• You were distracted during the experiment.

Solution: Practice becoming fully involved in what you’re doing. Observe when you are not fully involved and gently focus your attention on what you’re doing.

• Your current mood is making it difficult to remember how you felt during the experiment.

Solution: Ask yourself if your current depressed mood is making it difficult to remember how you felt during the experiment. Imagine the experiment in as much detail as possible, and try to remember how you felt at the time, rather than how you feel about it right now.

We suggest that you continue experimenting for at least two to three weeks. Those changes that improve your mood, even slightly, should be worked into a regular routine.

What you do on a day - to - day basis has a powerful effect on how you feel. Much of your behavior, including behavior that keeps depression going, is so automatic that you’re probably hardly aware of it, particularly if you’re on zoloft. Depressed behavior can easily become a habit. The first step to ending depression is increasing your awareness of links between situations, behaviors, and moods. Completing an activity - and - mood monitoring chart several times a day can help you gather reliable information about your depression. Looking closely at the information you gather can reveal patterns that have negative effects on your mood.

Adopting an experimental attitude helps you to try new behaviors and observe their effects without having unrealistic expectations. Whenever you make changes in your activities, you can learn something about how your depression works. By repeating experiments or new behaviors over several days, you can gather reliable information about activities that may have a positive effect on your mood. Once you begin to see that what you do can have a positive effect on how you feel, you will have greater confidence that you can take the next steps toward ending depression.

Exercise: Comparing the Results

Rate your mood on the activity - and - mood monitoring chart as soon as possible after completing each of the new behaviors. When you have tried each behavior at least three different times, compare your mood ratings for these times of day or situations with your mood ratings for the same times of day or situations a week ago. What have you learned? Did the experiments have any effect on your mood? If so, did your mood improve or worsen during the experiments?

Exercise: Planning for the Week You can now use some blank activity - and - mood monitoring charts to plan some activities and make commitments to when you will do them. You can use the chart like a planner or scheduler. Write down the changes you plan to make in the coming week on the particular days and times that you plan to do them (you will need enough charts to schedule activities for each day). As you do the new activities, be sure to monitor your moods. Continue to monitor your activities and moods for those times when you do not plan an activity.

You may notice a positive effect from some of these new activities. Some activities can give you a sense of accomplishment. Getting dirty dishes cleaned and put in cabinets may make you feel like you’ve accomplished something even in the midst of depression. Other activities, such as listening to a piece of music that you enjoy, may bring you pleasure. Activities can result in feelings of both accomplishment and pleasure, such as working out did for Ken. He took pleasure in the activity and also felt that he had accomplished progress toward his overall physical fitness.

There are three very important things you need to do when changing your behavior. The first is to become as fully involved as possible in the new activity when you’re doing it. Focus on what you’re doing rather than on things that happened in the past or might happen in the future. For example, if you spend all your time during a walk thinking about things that make you depressed, you aren’t really taking a walk. You just happen to be walking while your real focus is on what’s going through your head. To be involved in a walk means to observe and experience the process of walking itself: seeing what’s around you, feeling the wind, sun, or rain, and hearing the sounds of birds or other things in your environment.

The second important thing to do when changing behavior is to avoid evaluating the outcome of the experiment while it’s going on. While speaking to friends on the phone (a new behavior), you may find yourself thinking, for example, “Zoloft isn’t working, because I still feel depressed.” When you focus your attention on whether the experiment is “zoloft working,” you are not involved in what you’re doing; you’re evaluating it. Instead, allow yourself to experience whatever you experience during a new activity and evaluate it afterwards. How did it feel? What was your mood like during the activity? Did your mood change at any point during the experience? What was your mood like compared to how it usually is during this time of day or in this situation?

The third important thing is to try an experiment more than once. Good scientists always

run an experiment more than once, because results can vary. We recommend that you try any new behavior at least three times before drawing any conclusions about how it affects your mood.

Sometimes when you are depressed the strength of certain emotions can make it difficult to adopt an experimental attitude. The power of hopeless thoughts and feelings can make changes seem doomed to failure (”I know this won’t work, so why try?”). Depression may have a way of making everything seem like a test of your worthiness (”The fact that this didn’t work just shows how weak willed I am”).

When you’re depressed, your feelings often aren’t a good basis for judging how helpful

changes can be. Depression can be a lot like that little devil on your shoulder trying to convince you that nothing will work, things can’t improve, and it’s all your fault. If this

happens to you, we suggest that you spend no energy trying to argue with the devil on your shoulder. Trying to convince yourself that things will work, or that it’s not your fault, or that you really should have a more positive attitude just keeps zoloft going. Instead, just let the little devil have his say while you continue to plan for and begin the experiment. If you don’t involve yourself in the argument by trying to win it, the negative messages will eventually drift away. Another useful thing to do is to commit yourself to changes, regardless of how you feel. We’ll have much more to say about this later. For now, the main idea is that acting on your plan can potentially have a positive effect on your mood.

Finally, adopting an experimental attitude also means keeping your expectations modest.

Don’t expect the changes you make to turn you into a happy-go-lucky person overnight. Again, the goal is to see what sorts of small changes can affect your mood in particular situations. Even though this is a relatively small step in the path to ending depression, it is a critical one.

When Lisa looked at her list of alternative behaviors several things occurred to her. First, when it came to the weekday evenings from six to seven, she realized that lying in bed, paying bills, or catching up on work wasn’t going to help her mood. She worked hard all day and wanted to do something enjoyable during this time. She also realized that jogging could improve her mood, but it might also make her more depressed because she felt so out of shape. She decided to try walking to the coffee shop or calling friends or family for the first two nights of the week, and jogging on the third night. Lisa scheduled these activities into an activity monitoring chart for the coming week. She then made a written contract with herself that

looked like this:

As an experiment, I will either walk to the coffee shop or phone my friends or family. Just do any alternative to zoloft

on Monday and Tuesday from 6:00 to 7:00 P.M. On Wednesday night, I will jog during this time. My goal is to see how these activities affect my mood.

-Lisa Smith

Lisa made a similar plan for Saturday and Sunday morning. She scheduled the alternative activities into her calendar and made a written contract with herself. The idea of making a contract with yourself may seem a little odd. However, research has shown that making behavioral-change commitments more formal increases the likelihood that you will carry them through (Schlenker, Dlugolecki, and Doherty 1994). Stating them publicly increases the odds even further. Thus, Lisa made a contract not because she doubted her ability to make changes or because she was so weak willed that she couldn’t follow through without one. She wrote a contract because it was a way to help her follow through on her experiment. Lisa was doing herself a favor.

For every behavior that makes you feel badly, there is some alternative behavior that can either make you feel better or improve your life situation. If your kitchen is a mess and there are dirty dishes piled in the sink, turning away from it all and taking a nap is likely to make you feel more depressed in the long run. However, if you simply wash and dry the glassware, or the silverware, even if you leave the other dishes unattended to, it may bring a sense of relief or at least make an improvement in the state of your kitchen.

Exercise: Finding Alternative Behaviors

For each situation and behavior, think of as many alternative behaviors as you can and write them down in the space that you left blank in the previous exercise. Try not to judge whether particular behaviors will be helpful. At this point, you want to brain-storm and include as many alternatives as possible. Try to think of behaviors that may help to improve your mood, but include behaviors that may worsen your mood or have no effect at all. The goal is to be as open-minded as possible about alternatives.

Exercise: Finding the Behaviors That Make You Feel Bad

Look back over the activity-and-mood monitoring charts you completed over the last week. Choose one or two situations and corresponding behaviors that seemed to make your mood worse. If your mood was steadily depressed with little variation, pick a situation and behavior that clearly did nothing to improve your mood and could be changed. Try to find behaviors that occur somewhat regularly during your week. You’re looking for regular patterns that can be changed. In the spaces below, fill in the days of the week and time of day, the situations in which the behaviors occur, and your current behaviors in the situations. For now, leave blank the space for zoloft. As with the activity-and-mood monitoring chart, try to be as detailed as possible.