Therapy Time: Activity Diary and Goal Setting

My therapist sent me some homework, particularly (1) a rated activity diary, and (2) module on how to set goals. These are tools for CBT (cognitive behaviour therapy), which I have been undergoing for a while now.

In the activity diary, I plot my done activities into a calendar layout, and I have to rate each activity in a scale of 0 (none) to 10 (most) in terms of pleasure (how much the activity makes me feel good) and achievement (how much the activity objectively achieves something). It is interesting because I normally plot my activities into my personal and work calendars anyway – my work calendar being my bible and blurring the line between work and personal life, and my personal calendar only having these logs when I have to adhere to certain schedules like travel, date, events, etc. The differences with this activity diary are: (1) the rating – I have to rate in the moment how the activity makes me feel, and (2) the activities are for monitoring what I did, not what I plan to do.

The goal of this diary is to see on a bird's eye view how I spend my day and how it makes me feel. Apparently, this is a tool for helping on clinical depression – to identify the triggers of depression, patterns of joy and fulfillment, even sleeping and eating patterns probably.

Now, I am looking at my calendar logs for the past few days, and the patterns I see are:

• I sleep very irregularly. A part loans from the fact that I am still jetlagged after more than a week, and the New Year party and impending return to office are not really aiding.

  
  

• I eat very irregularly, too. I make it a point to eat soon after I get up, because objectively my body has been food-deprived for at least the number of hours I have been sleeping, but the problem is I don't really get up as soon as I wake up. Some days, I only eat twice a day, which is very deficient for me.

• I have spent too much time crocheting since I returned to London. This is a new hobby I started, which is merely because my boyfriend gifted me an amigurumi set for me to work on, but I ended up buying actual yarns and hooks and started new stuff rather than building the doll I was supposed to do. Hahahaha. Going back to the point, I notice that the pleasure/achievement from this activity is not really consistent either, because I just like buying yarn and starting things but not really finishing any projects.

• The highest pleasure activities are the ones related to meeting specific purposes – New Year party, reuniting with my boyfriend after the holidays, learning a new technique in crochet, doing my therapy homework, reconciling my financial books, clearing my Gmail.

  
  

• And that brings to my next point that, for me, pleasure is very tied to achievement. As a person who derives my self-worth from being useful and accomplishing things, it is very inherent for me to only feel happiness when I tick things off a box. Therefore, staring at a wall and crying at my pitiful life is both sad and unproductive, and is just a vicious cycle.

For setting goals, at the beginning of the program I was asked to write what I want to achieve, in as detailed as I can. The problem is, I have a high self-awareness but I have no empathy for myself, and therefore I know I am not doing okay and I have cognitive book knowledge on how to be okay, but I do not know how to apply those and I can't be bothered to tend to myself which runs on the inherent belief that I am not worth an effort to be saved. I am good at goal setting for everything in the world except for anything that involves my feelings. So ,the goals I wrote were a bit off – they sound good goals but they are actually empty, i.e. "I just have to say something that fits the requirement".

This time, I was asked to revisit my goals so we can recalibrate. This time, to think of problem statements first, before goals. Each problem statement consists of three things: triggers, reactions/sensations/thoughts, and impact. From these problem statements, the SMART goals would arise. The point is to verbalise the problem as clear as possible, so that it can be broken down and addressed by clear goals (and therefore solutions).

When I look at the problem statements I wrote, I cry at them. I cry at how much my life is dominated by thought processes and I cannot identify my physical and emotional feelings most of the time. I cry at how much I rationalise everything (which is also something all of my therapistS have pointed out). I cry at how pitiful I think, and at the things I literally cry for help because I do not know how to attend. I cry at how I am aware of the problems but I have no motivation to fix them.

At one of these boxes, I even wrote that my daily budget of energy and motivation is not enough to sustain my daily activities (mainly my job), and so I have to borrow from the future's budget, which is why the payback slaps me in the middle of a sunny day, because these are "loans I cannot pay off".

Anyway, the goals I set from this activity were pretty meh but actually have meaning to me. For example, my favourite goal for this episode goes like: "Always keep my room door open.  I like to be alone but I figured out that being confined to my room during downtime is creating a visual that I am in a suffocated place." It is not even a goal for CBT, but I am sure my therapist will understand why I wrote it here. Some goals are not really responsive of the problem statements, but I just have to write them.

Overall, I had fun doing this homework.

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I guess the reason I wrote this blog is to get things off my mind, in the moment. After doing the homework, there are just things that flowed to my brain, and they are not responsive of the homework nor do I have time to talk about them with anyone, so might as well write them out.