HOW DO YOU IDENTIFY ALTERNATIVE BEHAVIOURS?[MENTAL HEALTH]ARTICLE1

Article 1

When you are depressed it can be very difficult to see the wood for the trees. You simply cannot see any alternatives . Although the self-monitoring stages and functional analysis should help, it can still seem hard to decide what to do. Being depressed tends to slow your thinking down and make you feel helpless . However, there are a number of useful questions you can ask yourself to help with this.

*Think of all the possible alternative approaches to this- anything at all.

You can write all of the ideas down, no matter how unlikely they seem at first . Later you can choose which behaviours might work well and pick the most likely one.

• Have I had similar situations in the past when I was not depressed ?Did I deal with this in a more helpful way? What did I do ?

These are great questions…