Daily Activity Log

Behavioural activation is the most evidence-supported intervention for depression that doesn’t run primarily through cognition. The activity log is the foundational worksheet that makes the rest of the BA protocol possible. Without it you’re guessing at which activities produce mastery or pleasure for this specific client, and prescribing more of them on instinct.

The clinical phenomenon the log addresses is the depressive distortion of perceived flatness. Most moderately depressed clients arrive in session reporting that the week was uniformly bad, nothing happened, they felt nothing. The actual data, captured at three or four points across the week, almost always tells a different story. There were spikes. There were activities that produced low-grade pleasure even when the global mood was low. The walk to the corner shop scored a 4 on pleasure. The phone call with their sister scored a 5 on mastery. The retrospective summary erases all of that.

Run it for a week before you start prescribing activities. The first round of data is the baseline. By the end of the second week, the patterns are clear enough to design BA assignments around. The activities that scored 6+ on either dimension are the candidates. The ones that scored low on both can be deprioritised or dropped. The decisions get made from the client’s own data instead of from a generic BA menu.

Two patterns worth catching. Clients whose mastery scores are universally higher than their pleasure scores tend to be over-functioning, doing things from duty rather than enjoyment, and the formulation usually involves perfectionism or burnout. Clients whose pleasure scores are uniformly low across all activities are showing you anhedonia at scale, which sometimes points toward a medication conversation alongside the therapy.

The log itself is small enough that compliance is achievable even at the floor of motivation. A client at 3/10 motivation can still log three activities a day with two slider taps each. The data accumulates and gives you something to point at in session, instead of running on the client’s verbal recap of the week.

In my-cbt, this is one of the bundled system worksheets. Assign it from the case file with a personal message that names the specific behavioural activation goal you’re working toward. Submissions save with timestamps in the case file, and you can read a week of data in two minutes before the next session.