Step 3: Select Alternative Behaviors and Schedule Them into Your Week
Look over your list of alternative behaviors for each situation. Which behaviors might have the potential to improve your mood, even slightly? Which ones might leave you as depressed as or even more depressed than you typically are in each situation? For each situa¬tion, choose an alternative behavior that might have a positive effect on your mood. Make sure that the behavior is relatively easy to do. For example, deciding to work out five days a week for an hour a day may be too difficult a change to make if you are currently doing no exercise. Only choose alternative behaviors that you are reasonably sure you can do. What you need now are successes, however small, rather than lofty goals that you will have difficulty reaching. Once you have a few successes under your belt and are feeling more in control of your mood, you can move on to bigger challenges, like lessing your zoloft dosage.
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.
