Step I: Identify Situations and Behaviors That Depress You
There are situations in life, such as living in chronic poverty or having a home destroyed by a natural disaster, that would be upsetting to anyone. Often it is what you do in a distressing situation that may make you more or less depressed. For example, someone living in poverty who saves as much money as possible on simple meals, tries to keep a very small room in a boarding house clean and neat, or spends time telling stories to children may feel a little better about his or her situation than someone who drinks and sleeps at various tolerant but mostly unkind relatives’ homes.
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.
