Harnessing the Power of Behavior to Feel Better

This post is by David Preece, Ph.D., and Xavier Sol Banson, edited by James Gross, Ph.D.

Feelings, thoughts, and behaviors are all connected. When we are feeling stressed or down, our thoughts and behaviors can become less helpful to us. Similarly, when we begin to have negative thoughts or unhelpful behaviors, these can drag down our mood. How can we break negative spirals that span our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors? Today, we will focus on a strategy to improve how we feel by changing our behavior—behavioral activation.

Before we do that, let’s reflect on where your life is and the meaningful directions you want it to go. This will give us the foundation for planning our behaviors later, setting our ife compass in the right direction.

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The Life Compass

Feelings of stress, sadness, or burnout often come from there being a difference between how things are in your life and how you want them to be. Let’s reflect on where things are for you in four broad areas of life:

1. Fun, hobbies, and free time.
2. Work and education.
3. Relationships.
4. Health and personal development.

First, for each of these areas, think about what is important to you in each area. For example, how do you ideally want to spend your time in this area? What do you want it to be like?

Second, let’s rate how well each area is going right now, from 0 (terrible) to 10 (amazing).

Harnessing Your Behavior

Often, people will have one or more areas in their lives that are not going as well as they’d like. This gives us the targets to aim for—let’s try to get closer to that 10, one small step at a time. Behavioral activation is a strategy to help get us there.

Behavioral activation refers to regularly scheduling pleasant and meaningful activities throughout our week. Meaningful activities are ones that fit with what you want in life, and they can target any of the four domains we discussed above. This might sound simple, but the science is clear: it’s very effective. Behavioral activation is a major part of evidence-based mental health treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy, and by doing behavioral activation regularly, you can significantly reduce depression, anxiety, stress, and burnout, and improve your well-being and life satisfaction.

Here are three tips to start doing behavioral activation in your life:

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1. Get Specific

The key is to schedule specific activities on specific days/times. This helps us stick to our goal. Make sure these are pleasant or meaningful activities, and try to schedule activities that you can do regularly on that day every week. This builds healthy habits over time.

When setting a goal, focus on the process (the specific activity) rather than the outcome. For example, we might have a broad goal in the health area to “get fitter,” which is ok, but it’s a bit vague. A more specific goal that breaks this down to a clear behavior could be, “Every Monday at 6 p.m., I’m going to go for a 30-minute walk around the lake.” Having some of your activities be about physical exercise can be helpful, as getting our body unstuck helps us get our mind unstuck, too.

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2. Build Momentum

There are many activities we might schedule—for example, having a cup of tea, doing some yoga, watching the sunset, reading a book, completing an online course, hanging out with your pet, or having lunch with a friend. To start with, you might not always feel like doing the activities you schedule, but by still doing them, you build behavioral momentum where you feel better and get more energy over time. It can sometimes take a while to feel the effects. There will be days when you don’t end up doing your set activities, or you do a smaller version of it—that’s ok, that’s normal—the key is to reset and try again the next day.

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3. Finding the Right Balance

Sometimes, when you start to schedule pleasant and meaningful activities, you might have thoughts like, “But I’m too busy to do fun things for myself,” or “That’s selfish.” When we have thoughts like these, it can be helpful to remember that if we don’t take some time out for ourselves, we are going to burn out, and then we aren’t going to be properly productive on all those things we are busy with. It’s about finding the right balance. Imagine you are in charge of the weekly schedule of someone else you care about—would you make sure to include some enjoyable things in their week? Probably! We need to treat ourselves with that same care.

Let’s Do It!

Ok, so take some time now to schedule pleasant and meaningful activities you can start this week. Begin with one or two activities and build from there as the momentum grows. Remember, it will be a journey with ups and downs. There will be weeks where you don’t do your activities—the key is to keep bouncing back, trying again the next day. Good luck!

Dr. David Preece is a Clinical Psychologist and the Director of the Perth Emotion and Psychopathology Lab at Curtin University in Australia. He is also affiliated with the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory at Stanford University.

Xavier Sol Banson is the lab manager for the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory under Dr. James Gross. He graduated with highest distinction in Psychology from UC Berkeley.