Lesson 4 of 6 · Doing before feeling
What this is not
Worth saying clearly so you are not sold something else under this name.
This is activity scheduling. It is not exposure. Nothing here asks you to walk towards a situation that frightens you, or to stay in one until the fear comes down. That is a real technique, it has a place, and its place is with a therapist who is in the room with you.
The line is simple. Schedule one thing that used to matter to you, yes. Schedule the thing you are most avoiding, no.
The honest qualification, because you will meet it elsewhere. Activation does often move a person towards things they have been avoiding, and the people who developed it say so. What it does not do is build a ladder of feared situations and work you up it. That is the difference, and it is why this one is safe to run from a page and the other is not.
What the research says
The people who developed this approach describe it as increasing contact with steady sources of reward and reducing avoidance, guided by noticing what you actually do and scheduling more of what matters. That is the whole of it, and its plainness is a feature.
The statement of what behavioural activation is by the people who developed it: increasing contact with stable sources of reward and reducing avoidance, guided by monitoring what you do and scheduling more of what matters. It is not exposure therapy, which works from a hierarchy of feared situations, though the authors are clear that reducing avoidance is part of what activation does.
Jacobson NS, Martell CR, Dimidjian S (2001). Behavioral activation treatment for depression: returning to contextual roots. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 8(3), 255 to 270 doi