Choosing activities: enjoyment, accomplishment, and routine
Behavioral activation isn’t only about doing more fun things.
A useful week usually has a mix. Some activities bring enjoyment. Some bring a sense of accomplishment, like paying a bill or finishing a chore, even if they aren’t fun. Some keep you connected to people. Some are routine, like regular meals, a shower, and a set bedtime, which keep the day from coming apart.
When you rate an activity afterward, you rate enjoyment and accomplishment separately. A hard phone call might be low for enjoyment and high for accomplishment. Both are worth knowing.
Accomplishment is rated given how hard it was at the time. On a rough day, getting dressed can count for a lot.
Where the two ratings come from
Rating activities for pleasure and for mastery goes back to Aaron Beck’s cognitive therapy for depression in the 1970s. Mastery meant a sense of having done something, judged against how hard it was at the time. Martell’s behavioral activation manual keeps both ratings. The brief treatment by Lejuez and colleagues asks how enjoyable and how important each activity is.
This app uses the plainer words enjoyment and accomplishment, and asks for them after the activity, not before. The point is to learn from what actually happened.
Why two ratings instead of one
A single “how was it” number blurs things together. An evening of TV can be pleasant and leave nothing done. Cleaning out the car can be no fun at all and still leave you feeling a bit more in charge of your life. With separate ratings, you can see which activities do which, and plan a mix on purpose instead of by accident.
Low mood tends to discount both. Fun gets written off as a waste of time, and small accomplishments get written off as too small to matter. Rating them on their own scales gives each a fair hearing.
Connection
Time with people is its own kind of activity, and often the first to go when mood drops. Many of the everyday pleasant events in Lewinsohn’s checklists involve other people, from talking with a friend to sharing a meal.
Connection doesn’t have to mean a party. It can be a text to someone you’ve lost touch with, ten minutes on the phone, or walking the dog with a neighbor. Sitting in a café near other people is a start. If seeing people has gotten hard, these smaller versions still count.
Finding ideas
When everything feels flat, it can be hard to think of anything at all. A few places to look:
- What you did before this stretch started, even if it doesn’t sound appealing now.
- What you’ve been meaning to do for a while.
- What people you know do on a good weekend.
- Things close to free and close to home, like a walk, the library, or cooking something new.
- Activity ideas, in My activities, has 40 ideas grouped by area of life.
The aim at this stage isn’t to find the perfect activity. A rough list you can try things from is enough.
A mixed week
For someone just starting, a week might look like this. A shower and breakfast at the table on Monday and Thursday, for routine. Paying the phone bill on Tuesday. Lunch with a coworker on Wednesday instead of eating at the desk. Fifteen minutes of guitar on Friday, for no reason except that it used to be fun. Cleaning the bathroom on Saturday morning, and a movie with a friend that night.
Not every day needs one of each. Over the week, there’s some of everything.
Reading your ratings
After a few weeks, patterns tend to show up. Time outside might rate higher on enjoyment than you would have guessed. Chores might rate low on enjoyment and surprisingly high on accomplishment. Things with other people might be hard to start and good afterward. Patterns, in the app, shows some of this, and Looking back at the week gathers each week in one place.
The ratings aren’t a test. An activity that rates low still tells you something about what to plan next.
When nothing feels enjoyable
This is one of the most common sticking points. When mood is low, enjoyment can be hard to feel at all, and every rating lands near zero.
Therapists usually suggest a few things. Keep rating anyway, because small differences near the bottom of the scale still tell you something. Pay attention to accomplishment and connection, which sometimes come back before enjoyment does. Use the scale for your own range, not for anyone else’s.
If nothing has felt enjoyable for more than a couple of weeks, that’s worth talking about with a doctor or a therapist. “When to get more help” has more.
When only chores feel allowed
Some people fill their plans with things they should do and feel guilty putting anything on the list just for fun. Behavioral activation counts enjoyment as part of the work, the same as the chores. Try one small enjoyable thing a week, and treat it as seriously as the bill.
References
- Beck, A. T., Rush, A. J., Shaw, B. F., & Emery, G. (1979). Cognitive therapy of depression. Guilford Press.
- Martell, C. R., Dimidjian, S., & Herman-Dunn, R. (2021). Behavioral activation for depression: A clinician’s guide (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
- Lejuez, C. W., Hopko, D. R., Acierno, R., Daughters, S. B., & Pagoto, S. L. (2011). Ten year revision of the brief behavioral activation treatment for depression: Revised treatment manual. Behavior Modification, 35(2), 111–161. doi.org/10.1177/0145445510390929
- MacPhillamy, D. J., & Lewinsohn, P. M. (1982). The Pleasant Events Schedule: Studies on reliability, validity, and scale intercorrelation. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 50(3), 363–380. doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.50.3.363
- Lewinsohn, P. M., & Graf, M. (1973). Pleasant activities and depression. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 41(2), 261–268. doi.org/10.1037/h0035142
Helpful links
- Centre for Clinical Interventions: Back from the Bluez, a self-help workbook for depression
- Psychology Tools: Behavioral activation
Everyday Insight’s tools are for education and personal reflection. They are not therapy or medical care, and they are not for emergencies. In an emergency, call 911. If you are in crisis in the United States, call or text 988. Mental health resources