Pleasure and mastery

4 minute read

Pleasure and mastery are two ratings that go back to the activity chart in Aaron Beck's cognitive therapy for depression, one of the founding forms of CBT. Pleasure is how much enjoyment an hour held. Mastery is how much sense of achievement it gave. Rated next to the feeling you follow, they show things a single mood number hides.

Where they come from

Beck, Rush, Shaw and Emery's 1979 manual on cognitive therapy for depression asked people to rate their activities for mastery and pleasure. The aim was to help them recognize partial successes and small amounts of pleasure, which depression tends to overlook when it sees things in all-or-nothing terms. A written record pushes back against "I did nothing all day."

Behavioral research of the time also linked enjoyable activity and mood. Peter Lewinsohn and Michael Graf reported in 1973 that mood was related to the number of pleasant activities people took part in, and that depressed participants took part in fewer.

Pleasure

How much fun, joy, or satisfaction you got from the hour. Rate the enjoyment you actually felt, not how enjoyable the activity ought to be. A walk you usually love can score a 2 on a bad day, and that 2 is useful to know.

Low pleasure hours are not problems to fix one at a time. What matters is the pattern across a week: whether there is any enjoyment in it at all, and where it tends to turn up.

Mastery

Your sense of achievement in the hour. Feeling capable, having made progress, or being in control. Mastery is measured against how things are for you at the time, not against a fixed standard. Judith Beck's 2020 textbook makes the same point when it encourages people who are depressed to give themselves credit for what they do. Getting up and showering can deserve a high mastery rating on a morning when it took real effort.

Why the two disagree

Plenty of hours score high on one and low on the other. Paying bills is low pleasure and reasonable mastery. A long bath is high pleasure and no mastery at all. A day heavy in one and empty of the other feels quite different from a day with some of each, and neither difference shows up if you only rate your mood.

In the record itself, your only job is to rate honestly and let the week show where enjoyment and achievement turn up and where they are missing. Later, in behavioral activation, a therapist and client may draw on these ratings when planning activities. That is a separate step, activity scheduling, which Martell, Dimidjian and Herman-Dunn describe in their 2022 clinician's guide.

How to rate them

Rate soon after the hour, on its own, against your own range and nobody else's. Zero means none at all. The top of the scale means as much as it gets. Use the whole range. If every hour gets the same number, you are probably rating the day.

Judith Beck's CBT worksheets include a pleasure and mastery rating scale that you fill in for yourself. Writing down what a 0, a middle rating, and a top rating look like for you makes the numbers easier to give and easier to compare later.

You do not have to rate the feeling, pleasure, and mastery every hour. In the app and on the worksheet you can switch pleasure and mastery on or off, and ratings you have already saved stay as they were.

What the ratings are not

They are not a score of how well you are doing. A week of low numbers recorded honestly is a better record than a week of high numbers rounded up. They are also not a standardized measure. They are personal ratings, meant to be compared with your own other hours.

For what to do with them once you have a week or two, see making sense of your record.

References

Beck, A. T., Rush, A. J., Shaw, B. F., & Emery, G. (1979). Cognitive therapy of depression. Guilford Press.
Beck, J. S. (2020). Cognitive behavior therapy: Basics and beyond (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.
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
Martell, C. R., Dimidjian, S., & Herman-Dunn, R. (2022). Behavioral activation for depression: A clinician’s guide (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Helpful links

Educational content, not medical advice or a substitute for professional care. Ready to try it? Open the free worksheet, print a sheet, or get the app for iPhone and iPad or Android.