The Daily Mood Log has five steps:
On this page, we’ll focus on identifying and rating your emotional reaction to the event.
We suggest you begin this step of the Log by spending a few minutes with your favorite breathing, relaxation, or imagery exercise(s) – without thinking about the event or focusing on your reaction.
Now comes the tricky part. You’re going to bring to mind the event,
notice your reaction to it, and do your best to maintain
the same calm, quiet, relaxed state you were feeling while you were
doing the breathing or relaxation exercises. Be very gentle with
yourself about this – it's very challenging.
If you find that
you aren’t able to look at the event without becoming upset and reliving your intense
reaction to it, its very important that you stop for a moment . . . breathe, relax, and then try
again, or come back to it some other time.
Please don’t judge yourself if you find this difficult. It is difficult, especially at first.
If you try to continue without getting calm, you'll just get caught up in the whirlwind of your emotional and instinctive brains. And that would only strengthen the neural pathways associated with the negative reaction. This makes it more likely you’ll continue to react that way in the future.
Once you get at least a taste of the calm at your core, you can return to describing the reaction.
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dejected alarmed worried despairing
Now it’s time to actually get down to writing in your Log.
From
the list of “emotion” words below, choose the word or words that most fit your
emotional reaction to the event. (Two or three words is usually
sufficient for capturing the emotion.)
Then rate the intensity of each emotion on a scale of 1 (completely neutral) to 100 (extremely intense).
David Burns provides his patients with a list of “emotion” words. This is a somewhat longer one,
but feel free to come up with your own list as well.
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When you’ve done that, you’re ready to go on to automatic thoughts.
The more practice you have with being neutral toward the event, the more quickly you’ll be able to release negative emotions when they come up. And the less you’ll need to use the Daily Mood Log. Meanwhile, the DML is an excellent tool for helping to cultivate a neutral stance. |
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