Anxiety and Depressive Mood: Activity, Mood and Thought Diary

The second step in traditional CBT is to be aware of your thoughts and the feelings they contribute to as well as what situation that triggered them. A trigger is something that happened and/or something somebody said/did which make you react with thoughts and feelings that reinforce each other making you create a response. Common responses are: talk back, walk away, ruminate, withdraw, mourn, blame yourself, criticize yourself etc.

Go back to your diary over your activities and mental state for the last week (see exercises of last Thursday and Saturday) or/and create another one for the coming week.

Look at the diary where you rate your mental state high (above 7) and low (below 5) on the scale 1 to 10 and see if you can understand them better by using this formula:

Trigger: this happened…

Thoughts: the situation made me think…

Feelings: the situation and thoughts made me feel…

Response: this made me react by…

Next week we will continue by looking at how you can use this information to improve your wellbeing.

#anxiety #cognitivebehavioraltherapy #mood #selfhelpexercise