Sing First. Mean It Later.

• The traditionPraise was always built to run ahead of the feeling
• The mechanismDoing it before you feel it has a name
• The limitsWhere the two part company
• The practiceWhat to try this week

In 1996, a psychologist named Neil Jacobson took cognitive therapy apart.

What he found is thirty years old now and it has held up since. It also lines up, near enough word for word, with an instruction the Psalms have been giving for three thousand years: praise first, and let the feeling catch up later. Of all the spiritual practices for mental health you could reach for, this one arrives with a dismantling trial behind it.

Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.

Psalm 42:5, NIV

He is not praising there. He is instructing a self that will not praise, about a praise that has not arrived. Which is roughly what you may have been told at a point in your life when it sounded like the least useful advice going: do it anyway. That is what this piece is really about.

Cognitive therapy for depression had three moving parts. Get the person doing things again. Catch the thoughts that arrive before you have noticed them arriving. Dig at the beliefs sitting underneath those.

So which of those three would you bet on?

The field had already picked, and it picked the thinking. The whole therapy rested on one idea: that depression is held in place by the thoughts a person keeps having about themselves, so the way out has to run through changing those thoughts. Everything else was preparation for that. On that account a scheduled walk isn’t treatment at all. It is how you go and gather evidence to argue with those thoughts later. The name says as much: it was called cognitive therapy, not behavioural therapy.

Jacobson’s team decided to find out which of the three was doing the work. They split a hundred and fifty people into three groups. One got the whole treatment. One got two of the three parts. One got only the first part, getting moving again, with the thought work deliberately left out. Experienced cognitive therapists ran all of it, and they weren’t shy about expecting the full version to win.

It didn’t win. The people who got only the first part, the getting-moving-again part with all the thought work stripped out, did just as well as the people who got the whole package. At the end of treatment, and again six months later [1].

If you bet on one of the thinking parts, you were in the same company as the people running the trial.

And “getting moving again” hides more than it explains, so here is the actual shape of the work [2][3]. You keep a record of what you did each day and how you felt while you were doing it, which is duller than it sounds and more revealing than you expect. After a week or two the pattern is visible on the page: the things that reliably lift the day a little, the things that reliably flatten it. Then you schedule more of the first kind, in pieces small enough to survive a bad morning:

• Twenty minutes outside.
• One phone call.
• The washing-up, standing at the sink.

And you do them at the time you scheduled them, whether or not you feel like it when the time arrives.

That is the whole of it. No thought records, no digging at the beliefs underneath, no talking yourself into a better mood first. A diary, a timetable, and an agreement to keep the appointment with yourself. It looks less like therapy than like admin, which is part of why it was treated as the warm-up rather than the treatment.

One more thing before we leave the research, because it is the part that actually matters. Matching the full package is interesting, but on its own it only shows the thinking add-on wasn’t carrying the load. It doesn’t show that moving first does anything by itself. For that you have to set the activation work against people who got no real treatment, and the same review does exactly that. There the result isn’t level at all: the people doing the activation came out better roughly forty percent more often [2]. So the piece being treated as the warm-up was carrying more than its share, and what it carries is this: you move first, and the mood comes along afterwards.

Praise was always built to run ahead of the feeling

Here’s what interests me clinically. The Bible never treats praise as a report on your emotional state. It claimed close to the opposite, and it’s been claiming it for about three thousand years.

One of the Hebrew words the Psalms use for praise is yadah. Its root is yad, the word for hand, and the verb carries the sense of throwing or casting [6]. So praise, in that vocabulary, isn’t primarily a feeling that rises. It’s a hand that goes up. The word is built out of a body doing something, which is a strange way to name an emotion, unless the people who named it didn’t think of it as an emotion first.

The Psalms are stranger still on this. The tense in that line from Psalm 42 is the tell: I will yet praise him. Not I am praising him, and not I praised him this morning. Yet. It is a promise made in the absence of the thing promised, by a man arguing with his own soul, and the argument is the psalm.

Then there’s the Philippian jail in Acts 16. Paul and Silas have been stripped, beaten and locked in the inner cell with their feet in stocks. At midnight they’re singing. Whatever else that is, it isn’t a report on how the evening’s going. It’s a decision made in a room with no reason in it.

And the pattern turns up in people, not only in poetry. Peter denies he even knows Jesus, and he does it to a servant girl in a courtyard, which is about as low-stakes as an interrogation gets. That’s the man at his most afraid. Weeks later he is on his feet in front of a crowd of thousands, saying out loud the exact thing he could not say to one servant girl in a courtyard. Whatever arrived in him didn’t arrive in the courtyard while he was working up to it. It arrived while he was already speaking. The capacity showed up in the doing. That isn’t a promise it always will, but it’s a strange thing for the faith to keep teaching if the order runs the other way.

Doing it before you feel it has a name

Three thousand years later, the clinic arrived at the same instruction and gave it a duller name. Moving before the feeling shows up is called behavioural activation, and it starts from one observation about how depression runs, which you can check against your own bad stretches.

Normally you feel a flicker of wanting, and you act on it. In depression the wanting doesn’t arrive, so the acting stops. The acting stops, so the reward shrinks. The reward shrinks, so the wanting arrives even less. Round it goes.

Most advice tries to break that loop at the feeling. Cheer up. Think differently. Behavioural activation doesn’t bother. It goes at the only part of the loop you can still reach on a bad day, which is the doing, and it schedules that in small survivable pieces and lets the mood catch up in its own time.

And we’ve got a phrase for this already. We use it as an insult. Going through the motions. It’s what we say about someone who keeps turning up with their heart not in it, and we mean it as a charge of being hollow.

Nobody says it in a physiotherapy room. You don’t have to want to bend the knee. You don’t have to believe in bending the knee, or feel any particular way about the knee at all. You bend it because it’s Tuesday and that’s what Tuesday is for, and the joint gets its range back anyway, and in the whole history of rehabilitation nobody has ever been accused of insincerity on a mat.

Behavioural activation is making the same claim about the rest of you. The motions aren’t the hollow part. The motions are the treatment.

Which is worth separating from fake it till you make it, because it resembles that and isn’t it. Faking it means performing a feeling you don’t have, for an audience. Going through the motions in this sense means doing something you’ve chosen while feeling exactly what you actually feel, including nothing at all. One’s a performance. The other’s a decision your feelings haven’t caught up with yet.

If that sounds like something you would want help running rather than reading about, the behavioural side of it sits inside acceptance and commitment therapy, and the mood side inside depression and mood work.

What kind of God asks to be told he is great

There is an objection to all of this, and it is not a small one. A friend put it to me on a walk, on the stretch where the gravel gives out and the trail tips upward and you both stop talking for a minute because of the hill. He said it at the top, in the flat way people say a thing they’ve been carrying a while. What kind of God demands to be told he’s great. It sounded to him like a man fishing for compliments. Then he added the part I haven’t been able to put down since: he’d wanted it to be untrue for years, and nobody had ever given him an answer that wasn’t embarrassed.

It’s a fair question, and everything above sharpens it rather than answering it. If praise is tribute, then praise you don’t feel is tribute paid dishonestly, and an instruction to sing anyway is an instruction to flatter.

C. S. Lewis worked at exactly this in his book on the Psalms, and the move he makes dissolves it [7]. He’d assumed praise was payment. Then he noticed that people praise whatever they enjoy without being asked to, and can’t easily stop. A good meal. A piece of music. A place nobody wanted to leave. On that reading praise isn’t the bill for the enjoyment, it’s the last part of enjoying it. You haven’t quite finished having a good thing until you’ve said so out loud. Whatever that answer’s worth, it’s at least not an embarrassed one.

Which changes the shape of the instruction. It isn’t a demand for flattery from people who don’t feel it. It’s a claim that the saying is part of the having.

Where the two part company

So far praise and behavioural activation have agreed with each other at every turn, and that should make you suspicious. When a spiritual practice and a clinical finding line up this neatly, the honest move is to go looking for where they don’t, because holding two things side by side and only ever finding agreement isn’t comparing them. It’s selling something. There are two places where these two come apart, and both are places where people get hurt.

First, legalism. Behavioural activation gets prescribed in a frame with no moral weight on it. Miss a scheduled walk and you’ve missed a walk. Spiritual disciplines arrive in a frame loaded with moral weight, where missing can get read as failing God. Same action, same schedule, completely different object depending on which frame it lands in. One leaves you with something. The other leaves you owing.

I’ve met the owing version wearing a suit. I have also been it, which is how I know the ledger balances beautifully right up until somebody asks how you actually are. The man who shakes your hand like he’s closing a deal, who can tell you what he’s read this year and what he’s given and how early he was up, and who has never once let the sentence run past the ledger into anything that sounds like being glad. He isn’t lazy. He’s the hardest worker in the room. That’s the trouble. The ledger scores every part of it except the gladness, and the gladness was the entire point of the thing; praise finishes off enjoying something, and a man keeping accounts is not enjoying anything. What he’s built is airtight, and there’s no door in it.

Scripture saw that coming and built its own guard. Hebrews 4 has one of the odder lines in the New Testament. It tells you to strive to enter into rest. Which reads like a joke until you’ve watched someone work themselves to exhaustion trying to be at peace. Isaiah 40 gives the strength to the ones who wait rather than the ones who push. A discipline that’s become a ledger has stopped being the practice these texts describe, and the texts say so before any clinician does.

Second, and this one’s more serious, because the failure is quieter. Praise used as a way of not feeling the bad thing isn’t behavioural activation at all. It’s avoidance, and avoiding what’s going on inside you tends to cost more than it saves.

The guard here is lament, and it isn’t a minor corner of the Hebrew scriptures. In Claus Westermann’s reading of the Psalms, lament stands as one of the two governing forms of the whole book, not a sad corner of it [4]. Walter Brueggemann sorted the whole book into three kinds, and the names are worth having. Psalms of orientation: settled life, where things are roughly as they ought to be. Psalms of disorientation: the floor giving way. Psalms of new orientation: coming out somewhere else afterwards, which is not the same thing as getting back to where you started. His point about that middle group is the one that matters here. They aren’t a detour on the way to the good ones [5]. So the book that tells you to praise before you feel it is the same book handing you fully formed language for telling God this is unbearable and you appear to be absent. Psalm 88 does exactly that, and it never resolves; it ends in the dark, with darkness named as the writer’s closest friend. Both are prescribed. Neither cancels the other.

So how do you tell whether praise is doing you any good? Ask whether you can still say the true thing beside it. If the practice has made the honest sentence unsayable, it’s become a lid.

That is a question you have to answer yourself, and no questionnaire will do it for you. A lid works by keeping the strain out of sight, which means it keeps the strain off a form as well. But if the strain is already in the open, and what you are carrying is anger at God, or doubt, or a prayer life that has gone quiet, the spiritual struggles check covers exactly that ground. It’s free and anonymous. Telling the two apart is slow work, though, and it tends to go better with someone else in the room. That is most of what spiritual and existential exploration is: your faith stays in the conversation instead of waiting outside the door.

What to try this week

So what do you actually do with any of this? Behavioural activation works because it’s small and specific. Ambition isn’t the ingredient. Applied to a Sunday morning, it comes down to three moves.

Pick the time before you consult the mood. Decide about Sunday on Thursday, because on Sunday morning you will be negotiating with a brain that would very much prefer you stayed in bed, and it argues well. And make the unit small enough to survive:

• The second half only.
• The back row.
• Twenty minutes, leaving early if you need to.

A partial attendance that happens beats a full one that doesn’t.

Keep the bar at showing up, not at feeling. If you went and felt nothing, the practice was completed. That counts. Nothing is an acceptable result and it’s the most common one early on.

And it is worth knowing what you are actually buying with that twenty minutes, because the research on churchgoing is unusually generous about it. Large studies have followed tens of thousands of people for years and found the ones who attend doing better on most of what gets measured. What those studies cannot tell you is which part is responsible: the company, the fixed hour, the sense that the week has a shape, the singing, or simply being the sort of person who turns up. And the one a believer would name before any of those, which no study of this design is built to measure at all: that God is there, and meets people who come. Those things are knotted together in the data and will not come apart, which is why the dismantling trial earlier in this piece was worth more than a big number.

But that tangle is only a problem if you are trying to prove which ingredient works. If you are lying in bed on a Sunday morning deciding whether to bother, it is the opposite of a problem. It means there are several separate things in that room with a decent chance of doing you some good, and the one you would put first is not a mechanism at all. You do not have to know which of them it will be, or feel anything on the way there. Not feeling like going is not an argument against going. Most of the time it is the argument for it.

And if the low mood has been running for weeks rather than days, it’s worth measuring rather than guessing; the PHQ-9 check takes about two minutes.

And keep lament available in the same week. If the only permitted register is gratitude, the practice will start costing you. If you want the clinical version of the same move, working out what you actually care about underneath the obligation is what a values clarification exercise is for; same question, without the religious vocabulary.

Take this further: Download A Lament, a guided worksheet for saying the true thing beside the praise.

One caution worth saying plainly. If the congregation itself is where the injury came from, none of the above applies the same way, and going back isn’t automatically the healthy move. That needs its own work first.

One last thing, if you want it. Without looking back up the page: what does yadah have to do with a hand, and why would that matter to someone who can’t feel anything on a Sunday morning?

Where faith is the frame you actually live in, Christian counselling means it stays in the room rather than being set aside for the hour. I see people from faith communities in Colwood and across the West Shore, in person and online.

Educational content; not a substitute for therapy.

References

• Jacobson NS, Dobson KS, Truax PA, et al. (1996). A component analysis of cognitive-behavioral treatment for depression. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64(2), 295-304. DOI:10.1037/0022-006X.64.2.295 (PMID:8871414)
• Uphoff E, Ekers D, Robertson L, et al. (2020). Behavioural activation therapy for depression in adults. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 7, CD013305. DOI:10.1002/14651858.CD013305.pub2
• Ekers D, Webster L, Van Straten A, et al. (2014). Behavioural activation for depression: an update of meta-analysis of effectiveness and sub group analysis. PLoS ONE, 9(6), e100100. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0100100
• Westermann C (1981). Praise and Lament in the Psalms. Atlanta: John Knox Press.
• Brueggemann W (1984). The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary. Minneapolis: Augsburg.
• Brown F, Driver SR, Briggs CA (1906). A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press. s.v. yadah (Strong’s H3034).
• Lewis CS (1958). Reflections on the Psalms. London: Geoffrey Bles. Chapter 9, on praise as the completion of enjoyment. Paraphrased, not quoted; the work is in copyright.