Registering social situations

When social situations cause you to feel stress, it is important to practice with them in the right way.
By writing down and describing these social situations, you can investigate what went well and what went wrong. By reflecting on them, you can learn whether you can manage the situations in a different way next time. You can describe the social situations and your reaction to them.

You can do this as follows:

• Event: Describe the situation. What happened exactly?
• Feeling: How do you feel and how strong is this feeling? Choose one or more feelings: happy, angry, scared, sad, ashamed, etc.
• Thoughts: Describe your automatic thoughts. For example, what were you afraid of? What were you thinking of?
• Behaviour: What did you do? How did you react? Did you rely on safety behaviour or open behaviour?
• Consequence: What did the situation result in? What was your attention focused on? Which physical sensations did you experience?

Source:

Keijsers, G. P. J., Van Minnen, A., Verbraak, M., Hoogduin, C. A. L. & Emmelkamp, P., (2017). Protocollaire behandelingen voor volwassenen met psychische klachten.