Recording yourself?

[dkkm]

Hey, I find this part of the forum extremely helpful as it's nice to hear positive attitudes from SAers.

Anyway, my life is really going by and I'm not getting anywhere. I always say I need to do something about it but SA and depression just destroys these positive thoughts and so it repeats day in and day out. So I thought I'd write down everyday what I eat, sleeping patterns, anxiety/depression/ocd levels, what I did on the day etc. and see how that goes. (If anyone else has other ideas would be great). Thanks for reading.

[tiberius]

A book called Overcoming Low Self-Esteem by Melanie Fennell suggests keeping a daily activity diary (DAD). It can help you identify the positive aspects of your daily life. It's not specifically for SA but I think it can help in what you're doing.

The idea is to keep an hour-by-hour diary of your daily activities. Each activity you rate for pleasure (P) and mastery (M) on a scale 1-10. Pleasure means how much you enjoyed the activity and mastery means how much of an achievement the activity was.

At the end of the day you review. What does the record tell you about how you are spending your time, and how much pleasure and satisfaction you get from what you do? What worked for you? What did not work? What would you like to change? What where the high spots, both in terms of pleasure and mastery? What were the low spots? What would you like more of? Less of?

The DAD could look something like this:
6-7 Sleep M0 P6
7-8 Wake up; breakfast M3 P5
8-9 Drive to work M2 P1
9-10 Work M5 P3
10-11 Work; difficult client M8 P0
11-12 Lunch with a friend M1 P9
and so on...

I did this for a week or so. It encouraged me to do some of the unpleasurable things more just for the feeling of achievement afterwards.

Originally Posted by dkkm

So I thought I'd write down everyday what I eat, sleeping patterns, anxiety/depression/ocd levels, what I did on the day etc.

After you've got all this information written down what are you going to do with it? It is just a bit unclear to me how it's gonna help. Is it to find a link between nutrition and depression levels or what?