Activities that lift your mood

Depressed clients have stopped doing things they used to enjoy because anhedonia distorts both anticipation and recall. They predict the activity won’t be enjoyable, so they don’t do it. They remember past activities as having been less enjoyable than they were, so they have no evidence to push against the prediction. The forecast becomes the reality, the activity stays unattempted, and behavioural activation can’t get traction.

This worksheet is the targeted behavioural activation tool for that pattern. The client picks five specific activities they used to enjoy and tries each one across the week, with a mood-before and mood-after rating per attempt. The before-after data is the lever. Across five attempts, the actual mood lift is almost always larger than the client predicted, and the data sits in their own file as evidence that the prediction system has been miscalibrated.

Use it with depressed clients in the activation phase, with clients in post-treatment maintenance who’ve started withdrawing again, and with anxious clients whose avoidance has narrowed their pleasure activities. Don’t use it as a first intervention with severe depression where the client can’t yet imagine doing anything. Start there with a smaller activity log first, get one or two completions on the board, then move to this worksheet.

The clinical patterns to read. Clients whose mood-after consistently matches mood-before despite genuine engagement with the activity are reporting either severe anhedonia (pointing toward a possible medication conversation) or that the activities they picked aren’t actually pleasurable for them anymore. Help them generate a different list. Clients who pick five ambitious activities and complete none are reporting the bar was set wrong. Help them shrink to two or three smaller, more accessible activities and try again.

A more subtle pattern: clients whose mood-after is meaningfully higher than mood-before but who still report verbally that the activity “didn’t help.” That’s the recall bias of depression in action. The data contradicts the verbal summary. Read the entries with the client and let them see the slider scores. Most clients are surprised by their own data once they look at it directly.

In my-cbt, the worksheet is one of the bundled system templates. Assign it from the case file with a personal message asking the client to write the rating immediately after the activity rather than later in the day. Submissions save with timestamps so you can see whether the ratings are real-time or reconstructed.