Re-engaging in what you used to enjoy can ease depression

Depression comes with the side effect of making people less interested in activities that used to make them happy, such as hanging out with friends, going for walks, and reading. Sometimes, the best way to fight back against depression is to do exactly what you don’t want to do.

Behavioral activation is a form of therapy that asks people to engage in life by doing the things that they need to do and enjoy doing in order to find diverse and stable sources of reinforcement.

How does behavioral activation work?

Depressed people typically lose interest in activities, isolate themselves more, and stop taking care of themselves. Another way to look at this is that they’re engaging in avoidance. However, if one avoids studying or putting effort into school because of a bad test score, they’re unlikely to see a more positive result. This eventually becomes a cycle of avoidance that needs to be broken.

Behavioral activation shows a lot of promise when treating children and adolescents as it makes sense to them which is helpful in reducing the fear and anxiety about what they’re going to be asked to do in therapy.

How long does it take behavioral activation to work?

Depression doesn’t typically happen overnight. Instead, the change takes time and occurs in reaction to a negative life even or series of negative life events. As nice as it would be to instantly reverse the damage that depression causes, the healing process takes time.

At Rogers, the 45 to 60 day length of stay allows time to make some headway, but there is still follow-up and additional treatment needed to change these patterns of avoidance.

Incremental steps toward the desired behavior is what works best and is something parents need to keep in mind. If a child is avoiding going to school, the ultimate goal is to get them in school every day and engaged in extracurricular activities. In cases like this, going into school for an hour and building up from there is a good place to start.

Find multiple positive activities for behavioral activation

Taking the time to shower and go to school is important for development and for mental health. If a child or teen is spending all day doing something like playing video games instead of these essential activities, the risk for depression increases.

If a child is playing a lot of video games and falling into a pattern of avoidance, then they are not taking the time to attend to activities of daily living like showering, eating regularly, leaving the house, and seeing friends, In the short term, they might be distracted by the games, but this leads to increased feelings of depression in the long term because They've sat around all day without doing anything productive.

Whether it’s gaming, reading, or any other hobby, it’s important to find the right balance rather than spending too much time only doing one thing. Having multiple hobbies or activities that you can invest your time in is best.

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