Behavioural experiment

When you suffer from anxiety- or mood-related problems, you often encounter negative thoughts about an event, or you have negative expectations about an event up front. To test these expectations, you can start a behavioural experiment for yourself. You will evaluate whether your expectation becomes reality. An example of such an expectation is this: “When I want to say something in a meeting, nobody listens to me” or “My boss gets angry when I ask for a day off”. 

A behavioural experiment often follows a completed Thought record, in which you’ve examined your thoughts about a situation and formulated an alternative helpful thought. A logical next step is to collect ‘evidence’ for the alternative thought in daily life by conducting a behavioural experiment.

Negative scenario

First you will do research on what is the worst thing that can happen, this is called the negative scenario or the disaster scenario. Example: “When I try to say something in a meeting, I will be interrupted and there will be no interest in the topic I am introducing. I feel very stupid then.” The behavioural experiment helps you to research and evaluate this thought.

The experiment

Together with your therapist you will think of an experiment and you are going to write this down in detail.
You can answer the following questions:

1. What is the unhelpful thought or expectation? How credible is this expectation in percentages?
2. What is the helpful thought or expectation? How credible is this expectation in percentages?
3. Describe the experiment that you are going to perform. What are you going to do? In Which situation? How are you going to behave yourself in this situation?
4. Pretend that the unhelpful expectation becomes reality, how is the experiment going to perform? What happens, how do you react, what is the outcome?
5. Pretend that the helpful expectation becomes reality, how is the experiment going to perform? What happens, how do you react, what is the outcome?

After you have performed the experiment, answer the following questions: 

1. How did the experiment play out? Which expectation did become reality?
2. What is, now that the experiment is performed, the credibility of your unhelpful expectation on a scale from 0-100%?
3. What is, now that the experiment is performed, the credibility of your helpful expectation on a scale from 0-100%?
4. What did you learn from the experiment?

You have completed your behavioural experiment! It helps to practise experiments more often.
Usually it takes repetition and practice before the credibility of the unhelpful and helpful thoughts changes.

In the NiceDay app the Behaviour experiment exercise is available.

Source

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

https://pratenendoen.nl/behandeling/cognitieve-therapie/484-2/gedragsexperimenten/