Activity Sceduling

February 24, 2025 • 6 min

This is my personal favourite of all the CBT techniques that I love to use myself and with patients. It’s always the first thing that I turn to if I’m feeling blue. 

In CBT we spend time mapping out what’s happening when we feel low, what’s happening in our thoughts, bodies, emotions and behaviours. These are all interconnected. How we think has a big impact on our emotions, how we feel in our bodies shapes what we feel like doing, and what we do has a big impact our mood. By targeting our behaviours and activities we can make a big impact to our mood, how we feel in our bodies and to our beliefs and thoughts. 

In CBT we call this behavioural activation. It‘s the process of deliberately scheduling activities that can give us a boost- whether this is through pleasure, a feeling of achievement or closeness to others. 

Judith Beck is a famous CBT therapist who I think is great. She has proven that most depressed patients have withdrawn from activities that previously gave them a sense of achievement or pleasure (or both) and lifted their mood. Depression has a nasty tendency to make us increase behaviours which maintain or increase dysphoria – the sense of unease or dissatisfaction. This might be watching TV which doesn’t interest us, not eating well, smoking or drinking more, spending more time in bed during the day, scrolling on our phones, etc. 

Activity scheduling needs to be done kindly. If we’re comparing what we’re able to do now with what we used to be able to do when we weren’t feeling low we call this discrepancy monitoring. This lends itself to rumination, critical thinking patterns and is likely to compound difficult feelings and make it not seem worth trying.

It's really hard to imagine feeling different from how we do at any given moment. This is exaggerated when we feel low, in a process known as over generalised memory. This is unfortunate because it makes us believe that we cannot change how we feel emotionally. I promise you that you will feel differently. I probably felt differently this morning to how I do right now, but that’s not easy for me to remember, even with all my training, and I’m not currently feeling low. It’s just how our minds work. By becoming more active in a targeted and scheduled way, and giving ourselves credit for our efforts, this not only improves mood but strengthens all important feelings of self efficacy – i.e. how much we believe in our ability to complete a task or achieve a goal. 

If you want to be really thorough about this, you can do what I ask my patients to do. Complete a week long baseline diary of activities – listing how you are spending your time and rating how much achievement (A), pleasure (P) or connectedness (C) each one brings you, out of 10. For example this morning I showered (A 3, pleasure 4, connectedness 0) I had breakfast P6, achievement 2, connectedness 0) and have been researching and writing (a 8, P8 connectedness 8). You may gather a whole week of data, or perhaps a day or two. Don’t over think it. You can then reflect on this. Prepare to be surprised. Often quite mundane activities might bring pleasure, and perhaps former habits are no longer serving us. Do I have enough pleasure in my day? Am I connecting with others (I’ve just been reflecting that I could probably use some company this evening) Often when we become depressed, we can become quite out of kilter. Perhaps we’re just doing what we need to do, and missing out on opportunities for pleasure? Or are we just looking for pleasure and letting what we need to do pile up around us, metaphorically and practically? If you have a sense there’s an imbalance in your week, spend a few moments thinking about how you might able to rebalance, what do you need more of? The trick here is to aim low, break things down into small chunks and keep it realistic. Set yourself up to win, you can always be more ambitious in week two. Then look at your week in the round. Sometimes I find it helps to imagine that we’re doing this really compassionately for someone that we love rather than for ourselves. Whether you use a paper or electronic diary, or a piece of paper doesn’t matter. Sketch out your commitments for the coming week and then think about what needs to be peppered in to improve the balance of pleasure, mastery and connectedness. If Monday and Tuesday look tiring, would a pleasurable activity be a bubble bath? A call with a friend? If Wednesday is quiet and you have loads of chores that are piling up would scheduling in 45 minutes to complete chores bring a sense of achievement? If you haven’t enjoyed the company of another human by Friday would a cup of tea with a friend, a phone call with someone you love or an exercise class so you can be among other humans feel nice? We are all delightfully different in our preferences so developing your own list of pleasurable activities that you can engage in is a good idea. Ideas from other patients include eating a favourite chocolate bar and watching birds out the window, having a bubble bath, sitting in the sunshine, reading a poem, singing along to music. One human’s chore is another’s pleasure so obviously your list will need to be personalised. There might be things you like more than chocolate and music, for example – although I find that hard to imagine myself.  

Once you’ve planned a week for yourself the trick is to try to follow your plan and not your mood. There’s a helpful metaphor in CBT - activity scheduling is like push starting a car. Really really hard to start with but once you get it moving it’s quite easy to keep it going. Reward yourself for sticking to your schedule. This might with something you were going to do anyway – like have lunch – but see if you can cultivate a feeling that you really deserve this lunch as you did SO well sticking to your plan. This can reinforce our routines, give us a nice dopamine boost and makes us more likely to stick to the next plan. If something gets in the way and an activity doesn’t happen, that’s so understandable, try not to be hard on yourself, dust yourself down and rejoin your schedule as soon as you can. 

Exercise has been proven to be as effective as anti -depressants and so having some movement in your week is a good idea. You don’t have to be lifting weights, it could be a walk, swim or gentle stretch. 

A general principal of one pleasurable thing a day is a good idea. It might be that you are able to take 10 minutes for yourself to sit on a sunny doorstep – the washing can wait – and that this feels good. Or that you choose to watch a series of an evening. Look out for activities that give you joy – it’s the ultimate medicine – and then you can have a personalised list which you pull out and use to schedule some nice time for yourself. If you are feeling quite low it might take a little while before your activities lift your mood. Try not to be disheartened if you’re not enjoying things as much as you usually do and don’t give up on your schedule. Trust that doing these things can make you feel more like yourself again, and give you a real boost over time. It’s often a good idea to involve your partner in the schedule, if you have one, or to stick it on the fridge. We need to be kind but firm to overcome feelings of hopelessness and low motivation if they are there. A spirit of experimentation is helpful. Noticing feelings of doubt or reluctance, following the plan and then noticing how it made us feel. 

I hope that there’s something inhere you might like to try. If you’re a parent it’s really helpful for us to model good self care to our children as they grow, even if it feels like you don’t have time.  We can’t wait until we’ve completed our to do list to do these things, or it might be 15years! There’s a huge amount of evidence to suggest this should be the first line of treatment for low mood or depression and I’ve seen it be transformational, and always have a better week when I’ve scheduled in the things I want and need to do for myself. Good luck and go kindly and firmly with your scheduling, if you do decide to try this.