24 Hour daily agenda (30 minute blocks)
This was from David Burns Feeling Good and I found it quite useful at various points. Basically:
1 Use a form or make your own spreadsheet with all 24 hours of the day covered but split up even further into 30 or 15 minute blocks. It also has a section to report what you scheduled vs what you ended up doing
2 Brainstorm all the things you need or would like to get done and give a time estimate for each based on how long its taken you ideally in the past
3 Schedule each item based on how much effort/complexity it requires (earlier = more complex/energy-intensive) and make sure the tasks are spaced so that there is enough time and a little buffer for breathing room (based on your durations)
Sorta looks like this, can’t seem to find the original necessarily but you get the point
Very useful and practical tool
Please name the tool/exercise and limit to CBT for this thread (I want to cover and discover others in future topics focused on them). I really want to avoid boilerplate namedropping “this or that therapy but you’d have to pay to see a therapist, you wouldn’t understand”. That just not helpful, please elaborate Any pedantic replies not answering question won’t be entertained
This is my experience with CBT. It was fine in a way, to recognize my feeling, but it never dealt with them. Only when I found a therapist who worked in CBT and acceptance based therapy did I start to improve.
Can you please explicitly share a tool with a name that can be nailed down that helped you specifically, like my example above?
I want to give people concrete examples to latch on to besides the this entire therapy is super helpful. Every name-drop of any almost never generally leads to any tools to try now or sort of paywalls lifechanging techniques behind a therapist which many people can’t afford or access.
Remarking seperately, I do retrospectively find CBT somewhat troubling in the way it assumed feeling bad emotions was always or mostly a result of poor or problem thinking when that sort of strips your feelings and emotions and by extension your lived experience of their validity and relevance when honoring them and learning what they arose to say can be bery helpful and cathartic to respect and experience
I’ve been doing cognitive behavioural therapy to try and sort out my depression and I found that having to stick to an exact time table actually made it worse, instead I’ve just got to try and get one thing done at some point every day and then each week I add another job on untill I’m able to get all of them done like a functioning person.
I’m also supposed to pair it with doing something that I enjoy that gets me out of the house but I keep forgetting to do that bit.
You can actually still do that this way, just adapted for like 1 task a day and maybe schedule it and you can increase or decrease it based on where you’re at. I like that whole 3 things idea, but 1-2 is fine too. I’m guilty of trying to shoehorn myself into superman level performance when I’m laughably off that time
My theory is it sort of tricks you into mentally rehearsing yourself carrying out what seems to be the impossible when you’re in a bad way and to get it out of your head and processed
I did a Behavior Activation Therapy course and we used a tool similar to what you posted in the OP.
Only we listed a few activities along with how difficult we thought it would be. Each morning we would reflect on the activities we got done and write down how difficult they actually ended up (sometimes more or less). And make a new list.
The process helped me to challenge a lot of thoughts and emotions around activities.
Imma supplement my system with the difficulty haha. Sort of like a behavioral exposure therapy style flavor
The Insomnia Coach App. It’s a completely free app on iOS and Android for tracking your sleep and developing the tools and habits for getting a full night’s rest. It’s a CBT-based app with a sleep diary, weekly training plan, and tools like guided meditation.
Weirdly it’s developed by the US Department of Veteran Affairs, which explains why it’s free and there’s no in-app purchases. Nothing about it is specific to veterans, and it’s one of the most commonly recommended apps for dealing with insomnia.
I can vouch that it helped reduce the frequency of sleepless nights for me, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone unfortunate enough to be dealing with insomnia.
I’ve seen VA support of CBT in several avenues. I wonder if it’s just the visibility I happen to have to it or if they really do use it as their preferred treatment type.
Its definitely the most scalable which makes sense and demographically its probably the most vanilla so it can be tolerated by the most diverse range of people
They have several interesting apps
I have a reminder go off on all my devices that reminds me to think of three things for which I’m grateful. In fact, I still haven’t addressed it for today, so let’s do so here:
- Three day weekend
- The recent heat is absent for the entire weekend at a good 70-71°
- Partner took care of planning a trip so I didn’t stress about it
And with that, I get to close that reminder. Doing this as daily has been a positive for my mental health.
Im gonna start doing this sometimes as a group exercise on CasualConversation or something. The interactivity might help solidify it more
analog lists to cross off for more productivity.
i wrote out “pushupsx20” and then “1, 2, 3”…up to the number of days in the month.
same with “paintx20min”, “running 1hr”, and so on.
so I wrote out a list like that of 20 or so activities that I wanted to regularly get done and i cross off the 1, 2, 3 so on each time I completed one instance.
crossing off an item on the list is extremely satisfying, and it was fine to do like five sets of push-ups over the day and cross off 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 to get ahead of the schedule.
i didn’t have to do 20 different activities everyday, but It’s very fun to write a big x through a number and the goals themselves were modest enough that by the end of the month, everything was crossed off and I had done hundreds of pushups and situps I otherwise wouldn’t have and paintings and focused on several hobbies that I usually didn’t give enough attention to.
I also could look back at the sheet with all of this activity and marvel at how much i accomplished that month, that’s pretty good.
it was a very productive method.
Series
Please edit that (you can) or I’ll keep thinking of puns instead of what I tried
Done
