The vicious circle of behaviour

The negative circle

Your feelings have an effect on your behaviour. When you are feeling down, you have less motivation to do things. In turn, you often also do less (and the things you still do are often chores, tasks or less fun activities). If you do less it can make you feel guilty or you can experience less satisfaction with what you have done, increasing the negative feelings. This is how you can get stuck in a vicious cycle. The negative circle looks like this: 

To improve your mood, we want to break this negative circle together.

The positive circle

You can break this negative circle by gradually increasing the amount of fun or relaxing activities you do. So that you can experience more satisfaction throughout the day and increase your mood. Because your mood is more positive, you feel more motivated to do activities which, in turn, will make you do more. You’ll enter a positive circle which will make you feel better. The positive circle of behaviour looks like this: 

Source

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