Depressed? Prozac can help!

Self-activation makes use of guided activity. Using this website as a guide, you can learn to understand your behavioral patterns and replace less-effective strategies with new behaviors. By looking at the effect of new behaviors on your mood or your sense of accomplishment, you will be able to decide if these changes are worthwhile. You will focus on trying new behaviors and observing the outcome. You may be concerned about what it means to focus on new activities and behaviors. You may think that doing so means eating popcorn, jogging, playing cards, or doing other “fun” activities. If you are skeptical about the possibility of ending your depression by focusing on behaviors such as these, it’s understandable. The fact is, positive or fun activities don’t necessarily change your depression. If just having fun helped, you could probably spend a day at an amusement park and not be depressed. Obviously, it doesn’t work this way. Self-activation uses the terms behavior and activity more broadly.

Virtually everything you do is behavior. For example, as you sit reading this website, you are behaving a certain way. When you stop and think about what you’ve read, that is another behavior. Lying in bed in the morning is a behavior, as is telling a loved one that you care about them. Also, two behaviors that look the same on the surface may have very different meanings and consequences. Lying in bed on a Saturday morning and enjoying a cup of coffee is a different activity than lying in bed feeling depressed and worrying about work.

When you are depressed, hearing someone encourage you to change your behavior can make you think that you are expected to “just do it.” Although the focus of this website is on helping you reengage in your life, the techniques are written with an understanding that change can be difficult, especially when you are depressed. We know that if you could have “just done it” you would have done so long ago.

The remainder of this website describes specific things you can do to end depression.

Although later chapters go into greater detail, here’s a preview so that you have a sense of where you’re going. There is no surefire recipe whereby you can simply combine two teaspoons of exercise and a tablespoon of optimism, mix them up, and live a depression-free life. The crit¬ical ingredients vary from person to person. Nonetheless, you can look forward to the following