Cognitive-behavioural therapy: An information guide - CAMH ...

CBT approaches to behavioural change
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Scheduling activities
The same schedule used in Table 3 to monitor activities and make
pleasure and mastery ratings may also be used to help you schedule.
One use is to schedule activities that you may have been avoiding.
This can help to remove indecisiveness around whether or not
you should do an activity. For instance, if you decide in advance
that you will go to the gym between 5:00 p.m. and 6:00 pm on
Tuesday, you are more likely to go than if you wait to decide based
on how you feel that day.
The therapist may also ask you to schedule both pleasurable activities
(e.g., lunch with a friend) and mastery tasks (e.g., organizing and
paying bills) for the upcoming week. You will likely also be asked to
keep track of your automatic thoughts during your weekly activities
to help you identify distortions or other appraisals that minimize
or undermine your pleasure or sense of mastery in the activity.
A further use of the activity schedule is to help you recognize the
barriers to completing tasks and to break down these tasks into
smaller units to make the tasks less distressing and more likely
to be accomplished. “Graded tasks” can then be constructed where
you schedule the easier steps of the task before getting to more
complicated and challenging parts of the task. Simply changing the
structure and the approach to tasks in this way can create remarkable
changes in the likelihood that you will accomplish tasks.
Exposure therapy
A standard component of cbt treatment for anxiety is exposure
therapy. Exposure therapy works to reduce your fear of certain
things (e.g., insects, snakes) or situations (e.g., closed spaces,
heights) by gradually increasing your exposure to the feared thing