In this article, I discuss how predicting the pleasure you will get from activities can help you address your depression.
One of the most effective steps in addressing depression is to become involved in activities which bring pleasure. Participating in activities you previously enjoyed or pleasurable activities you haven’t yet tried can have a positive effect on your mood, motivation and energy. Engaging in pleasurable activities can by itself be a step forward in addressing depression. In addition, feeling better as a result of these activities can make it easier to use additional strategies to address your depression such as cognitive restructuring skills.
Lack of motivation as a barrier to engaging in pleasurable activities
Despite the beneficial effects of engaging in pleasurable activities, when you are depressed it can sometimes be hard to summon the motivation to take such action. One of the main factors playing into this lack of motivation is the negative thinking which ‘comes along for the ride’ when you are depressed. In this context, being depressed fuels the negative belief that there is no point in participating in pleasurable activities because the activities will not bring you pleasure.
How to conduct a pleasure-predicting experiment
One way of overcoming this obstacle to engaging in pleasurable activities is to conduct a pleasure-predicting experiment. This is a way to test the depression-fuelled belief that engaging in activities will not bring you pleasure. You may find it helpful to conduct such an experiment with the assistance of a psychologist as part of your depression counselling.
The first step in the experiment is to choose an activity which has a good chance of bringing you pleasure. This might be an activity which you used to enjoy before you became depressed, an activity other people have found pleasurable or perhaps one that you have always wanted to try. Secondly, predict how much pleasure you expect to get from engaging in the activity using a 0-10 scale with a higher number indicating more pleasure. Third, engage in the activity. Fourth, use the 0-10 scale to rate how much pleasure you actually got from engaging in the activity.
Debriefing the experiment: What to do next if you obtain more pleasure than you predicted
Next, ‘debrief’ the experiment to examine results you obtained and learn from them. To do so, compare your rating of actual pleasure for the activity you engaged in to the rating you made in your prediction. This comparison will yield information which will be valuable to you in your goal of addressing your depression.
One possible result is that your rating of the pleasure you obtained from the activity is higher than your predicted rating. This would inform you that being depressed leads you to underestimate how much pleasure you would derive from an activity. You can use this going forward to make it easier for you to engage in pleasurable activities. That is, if you don’t feel motivated to do such an activity because you don’t think it will bring you pleasure you can remind yourself that your predictions have been wrong in the past. In addition, you can tell yourself that the activity is likely to be more enjoyable than what you are predicting and therefore it may be worth doing the activity. In other words, the results of your pleasure-predicting experiment can enlighten you to the notion that you should not use the thinking stemming from your depressed state to guide your decisions about whether it is worth it for you to engage in an activity as a way to improve your mood.
What to do next if your low-pleasure prediction is confirmed
You may be wondering how to respond to the results of your pleasure-predicting experiment in the event that your prediction that you would not obtain much pleasure from the activity is confirmed by a low rating of actual obtained pleasure. Even though this type of result tends to occur less frequently than the one in which obtained pleasure is higher than predicted pleasure, it can occur in some instances and so it’s important to know how to effectively respond to such a result.
Your not having obtained pleasure from an activity calls for problem-solving to make it more likely that you will obtain pleasure from activities going forward. Several strategies to achieve this goal are featured in my blog article entitled, ‘Capture pleasure to improve your mood‘. In my work as a Calgary psychologist and a Cochrane psychologist, I have found these strategies to be beneficial to my clients. Using these strategies in combination with pleasure-predicting experiments should improve your motivation to engage in activities which should lead to an improvement in your mood. When you have such activities as part of your routine, you will have taken a significant step forward in addressing your depression.
May your pleasure-predicting experiments yield data which benefits you,
-Dr. Pat
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