Using it between sessions

Clients can write what matters to them in the five life areas of the revised brief treatment by Lejuez and colleagues, choose activities that fit, and plan them on specific days. Values are optional, so a client can plan without writing any. Difficulty uses three levels, Easier, In between, and Harder, in place of the brief manual’s ranking from 1 to 15, and the list puts the easier ones first. Any activity can have a smallest version, and the planner offers it again when a plan doesn’t happen.

A plan can be timed to an exact time, a part of the day, something the client already does, or anytime that day. Afterward the client answers with Yes, the smaller version, partly, or not this time. Enjoyment and accomplishment are rated separately, after the activity only, from 0 to 100, or 0 to 10 in the app if the client prefers. Nothing asks for a prediction ahead of time, since checking predictions belongs to behavioral experiments.

When a plan doesn’t happen, the client can pick what got in the way from twelve choices, and the next steps that fit those barriers come first. After a barrier that can be avoidance, letting the plan go is never among the first three. Every move of a plan is kept. From the second move of the same plan, a quiet line offers to make it smaller or to look at what’s getting in the way, without blocking the move or calling it avoidance.

The app’s avoidance page follows Martell and colleagues’ TRAP and TRAC in four plain questions: what happened, how you felt, what you did and what it did for you, and what you could try instead. The last answer can become a plan. It isn’t exposure work, so it has no fear ratings, no hierarchy, and no belief testing, and it tells clients to work on avoidance tied to strong fear, panic, or trauma with a therapist.

An end-of-day mood rating is optional and off by default. It’s shown beside the activities done that day, never as a cause. There are no questionnaires, scores, streaks, or praise. The app’s Learn tells clients to go with your forms and words when they differ from the app’s.

The report for a therapist

Before a session, a client can make a PDF of the last 7 or 14 days. It holds these sections, each only when it has something in it.

1. At a glance
2. What the activities were for
3. What got in the way
4. Moved more than once
5. Day by day
6. End-of-day mood
7. Notes about activities
8. About the week
9. What matters to me
10. When I notice I’m avoiding something
11. Keeping it going
12. Questions for my therapist

The client chooses whether their notes, their values, their avoidance entries, and their Keeping it going plan go in, and decides who sees it. Ratings show as the client entered them, with blanks where nothing was rated. The online activity planner prints the same report from the same layout code, minus the parts that live only in the app.

Printables

A weekly plan, what matters to me, my activities, and when I notice I’m avoiding something, each as a print PDF and a fillable PDF, plus a one-page behavioral activation handout for clients or groups, all in English and Spanish. See the printables.

Groups

Everyday Insight is adapting each of its tools for group therapy, and a group version of Behavioral Activation is planned. There’s no date for it yet. In the meantime, Activity Record’s site has facilitator guides and handouts for 50-minute, 90-minute, and four-session activity and mood groups built on behavioral activation, and the four-session skills group on the Everyday Insight site has a session on it.

What it doesn’t do

It doesn’t diagnose, screen for, or treat depression or any other condition, and it never tells anyone they’ve improved. It isn’t a crisis service. Every free-text field is checked on the device for words about suicide or self-harm, and a match offers crisis lines and nothing else. Its Learn article on getting more help names when to see a doctor or a mental health professional, and asks people with bipolar disorder to plan big changes in activity and sleep with their clinician.

Not a HIPAA-covered service. There are no accounts and no server of ours. What a client writes stays in their browser or on their device, or in their own iCloud or Google Drive if they turn on sync in the app. Anything they share with you becomes part of your records and your obligations.

The research

The research page names the sources behind each part, including both treatment manuals. The Learn articles are written for clients and are the same ones in the app.