Examples

MoodHelper offers stories and examples that illustrate how to use the two sets of skills to overcome depression.

Clear Instructions, Easy Steps

Each new skill is broken into clear, understandable, easy steps. Users are guided through each step one at a time with examples.

Doing More Fun Activities

Your Personal List of Fun Activities

One way to improve your mood is to make a plan to do more fun activities. While this may sound too simple to work, a lot of research shows that it can be very helpful. MoodHelper walks you through several simple steps to pick activities that are fun for you, then make a contract or agreement with yourself to do them more often.

First you’ll answer some questions about your preferences. Do you enjoy doing things by yourself or with other people? Outdoor or indoor activities? And so on.

Then you’ll see a list of many specific fun activities based on your general preferences, ranging from rock climbing to people watching, cooking to nature walks. Pick the ones you want, or choose your own, to create your personal list of 8 to 12 activities.

A Contract with Yourself

MoodHelper brings together your list of fun activities and your goal for how often to do them into a “contract” or agreement you make with yourself. The contract also includes suggestions on how to reward yourself for reaching your goals.

Keeping Track of Mood & Activities

Just as important as creating a plan is keeping track of whether or not the plan is working.

It’s a good idea to come back every few days to tell us how often you are doing your fun activities, and how you feel each day. Based on this information you’ll get advice about improving your contract or plan.

Feedback on Your Fun Activity Plan

Here is an example of the type of feedback you can get about your fun activities plan. This graph is created for you when you describe how you feel and how many fun activities you are doing.

The chart on the left shows mood and activity level going up and down together very closely over time. This is good evidence that the person feels better doing more fun things.

Sometimes mood and activity level do not go up and down together. This is a sign that the plan needs to be fixed. This person may be keeping track of the wrong activities: ones that are not particularly fun for them and do not have much effect on their mood. MoodHelper guides users in picking new activities that may be more important for their mood.

Changing Thinking: Step 1

The other approach that MoodHelper uses for managing depression is learning to change unrealistic or negative thinking. This screenshot shows the start of a “walk-through” example showing the link between stressful situations (called “triggers” here) and difficult feelings. This is the first step, with later steps adding the beliefs and thoughts that might happen in these situations.

Changing Thinking: Step 2

This is a screenshot of a later step in the same “walk-through” example. The website guides you through possible unrealistic thoughts that might occur.

Then, you are coached through creating realistic and more positive counter-thoughts, which you can use to argue against the negative unrealistic beliefs.

This is all to help prepare you to go through these same steps for your own trigger situations and unrealistic beliefs, with the goal of creating realistic counter-thoughts that should help you feel better.

Using these Skills with Your Own Life Situations

After the walk-through examples, you have a chance to identify your own trigger situations. MoodHelper helps you work through finding new ways to respond to these situations that may be more realistic and more helpful.

You can save and print each of your own trigger situations. You can come back whenever you want to improve your plan.

Hints and Suggestions

If you get stuck coming up with ideas, the MoodHelper program can offer you several suggestions for new ways of responding to your problems.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

This section offers quick answers to common questions about depression, its treatment and causes.

There also are questions and answers to other common health or lifestyles issues, such as sleep or stress problems.

Measure Your Mood - 1

By completing a brief survey you can see how you are doing over time.

Measure Your Mood – 2

Each time you complete the survey (as often as once a day), your results are saved. Over time, you can check your “mood history” and ideally, see the improvements you are making.