Making sense of your record

5 minute read

After a week or two, an activity record starts to show things you could not quite see while you were living the days. This is a guide to reading it, and to not reading too much into it.

Give it enough days

One day tells you about that day. Patterns need repeats: several Mondays, several evenings, several hours of the same activity. The app and the worksheet hold back their written observations until enough hours are rated, and they only mention a difference once it is large enough to notice. A week or two is a reasonable first look.

What to look for

Times of day

Some hours may run higher or lower again and again. The feeling you follow often has a shape to the day that has little to do with what you were doing: a hard first hour, a dip after lunch, a rise at bedtime.

Days of the week

Sunday evening, Monday morning, the day with the standing meeting. The intensity map shows this at a glance. It is a grid of hours by days, and the color deepens as the rating rises.

Activities

Look for the activities that keep turning up next to your higher ratings, and the ones next to your lower ones. Group them loosely. "Called Mom," "phone with Mom" and "Mom called" are the same thing. The app and worksheet do some of this grouping for you from the words you used.

Pleasure against mastery

A week with plenty of achievement and almost no enjoyment, or the reverse, is worth noticing. So is an activity you expect to enjoy that keeps scoring low.

What is missing

Hours that are always blank, or things you meant to do and never logged, can say as much as the entries do.

Avoidance

A record often shows avoidance, the things people do to get away from a bad feeling in the moment that cost them something later. It usually shows up without a name. Scrolling after a hard call. Staying in bed after a bad night. The afternoon that went to tidying instead of the email you were dreading. Notice these without judging them. They made sense at the time. Seeing them written down is useful in itself, and it gives a therapist something concrete to work with.

What not to conclude

The record shows what went together, not what caused what. If anxiety runs higher in the hours you wrote "meetings," the meetings might be raising it. You might also book meetings on days that are already hard, or both might follow a poor night's sleep. Treat each pattern as a possibility, not a verdict. The observations in the app and the worksheet are worded this way on purpose. They describe what you recorded and stop there.

Small numbers mislead. Three hours of an activity is not a pattern, and neither is one bad week after a hard event.

Where it can lead

What you notice can also inform other techniques, such as planning activities into the week or testing a prediction by trying something out. Kanter and colleagues describe activity monitoring as the information that later activity planning builds on. These are separate work with their own methods, usually worked out with a therapist, and if you keep recording while trying them, the record shows how those weeks went. The activity record in CBT and behavioral activation explains how they fit together.

Bringing it to a session

If you see a therapist, bring the record. A PDF from the app or the worksheet includes each day's hours and can include the intensity map and the written observations, which is usually quicker to go through together than trying to remember the week. You decide what to share. The page for therapists explains what they will see.

References

Kanter, J. W., Manos, R. C., Bowe, W. M., Baruch, D. E., Busch, A. M., & Rusch, L. C. (2010). What is behavioral activation? A review of the empirical literature. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(6), 608–620. doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2010.04.001

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.