Behavioural Activation (BA) is a treatment for depression or low mood that has been found to be very effective, even for clients who have not had success with other approaches. Behavioural activation stems from a behavioural model of depression that works from the assumption that negative life events such as grief, trauma, daily stressors, or a genetic predisposition to low mood can lead to a person having too little positive reinforcement. Additionally, a person might turn to unhealthy behaviours (e.g. drug use, sleeping late into the afternoon, social withdrawal) in an attempt to avoid negative feelings. Although such behaviours provide temporary relief, they ultimately result in more negative outcomes, and worsening mood.

Chris Martell, the founder of BA emphasis that we think people do things because they are motivated, and it is difficult to be motivated when a person is depressed, so doing things is difficult. However, research tells us that it is the other way round, namely, motivation follows action. Thus, the treatment is geared toward helping people identify activities that may prove to be antidepressant for them and systematically help them to increase activity in order to improve their mood and motivation will follow. BA targets inertia. When depression zaps motivation, the BA approach is to work from the “outside-in”, scheduling activities and using graded task assignments to allow the client to slowly begin to increase their chance of having activity positively reinforced.

In summary, behavioural Activation (BA) is a highly personalised, structured brief psychotherapeutic intervention that targets one’s depression by targeting the behaviours that feed into that depression. It focuses on: (1) increasing engagement in adaptive activities (which often are those associated with the experience of pleasure or mastery), (2) decreasing engagement in activities that maintain depression or increase risk for depression, and (3) solving problems that limit access to reward or that maintain or increase aversive control.