Therapy Activities: How To Easily Build & Send Online Exercises

Therapy activities can be incredibly productive ways to encourage a client’s growth outside of your scheduled therapy sessions. Not only do they encourage clients to apply their skills in real-world settings, but they also foster an engagement that can encourage proactive progress.

If you’re getting started with digital therapy, this guide will give you a look at some of Quenza’s top psychology activities for therapy.

Before you get started, we think you’ll enjoy designing and sending your own therapy activities with Quenza’s $1, 30-day trial.

Our online therapy software will help you craft and share unique, personalized counseling and mental health tools effortlessly, and will give you everything you need to run your practice digitally.

Using Activities in Therapy: Practitioner’s Guide

It goes without saying that therapy outcomes rely heavily on the collaboration that takes place during your sessions.

But for clients to benefit from the skills, techniques, and approaches they learn, it’s important that they apply them in real-world settings – without the support of a therapist.

Sending therapy activities is a popular and effective way to encourage clients to implement their learnings in their day-to-day lives, and it gives clients the freedom to practice, apply, and progress even when a live session isn’t convenient or possible.

What Does It Involve?

Mental health specialists generally share activities with clients as ‘homework,’ but they can also play a vital role in sessions, with a practitioner guiding a client through a therapy exercise.

Digital activities can easily be tailored to a client’s unique requirements, making them more engaging and improving the chances that clients will learn from them

In blended counseling or therapy, this involves designing or selecting a digital resource such as a worksheet, meditation, or lesson, then sharing it with clients using telehealth software.

4 Proven Therapeutic Benefits of Activities

Besides the obvious advantages of applying skills in the real world, here’s a list of further reasons that therapists use digital activities:

1. They’re a strategic way to structure a client’s growth or recovery, often comprising key developmental ‘steps’ in a treatment plan (e.g. psychoeducation, techniques, then maintenance of important skills)
2. They facilitate positive progress between sessions, as clients can complete them at convenient times or locations
3. Digital activities can easily be tailored to a client’s unique requirements, often making them more engaging and improving the chances that clients will learn from them, and
4. They can be useful reference points, as clients can easily download or refer back to their activities to refresh their memories and skills.

5 Examples of Activities For Adults and Kids

Even for practitioners new to e-therapy, creating or customizing activities for various target audiences is simple with the right tools.

2 Activities For Groups & Couples

One of the best ways to create a personalized therapy activity is by amending an existing template, like Quenza’s Expansions.

Quenza’s Eye of the Hurricane Meditation and Finding Silver Linings are both beautifully simple to apply with groups or couples.

– Eye of the Hurricane Meditation

The Eye of the Hurricane Meditation, shown below, is an audio meditation that can be played in group therapy or assigned as between-session homework:

This Expansion can help clients connect to an inner place of tranquility when stress gets hard to deal with, and can equip them with self-help strategies for managing anxiety.

– Finding Silver Linings

Finding Silver Linings can be brilliantly useful for clients with a goal of building personal resilience.

The activity takes the reader through a few steps:

1. Shifting to a positive mindset
2. Identifying a recent difficulty in their lives
3. Identifying the costs of the loss or challenge, and
4. Finding the positive things that came out of it, to build optimism and resilience.

3 Best Activities For Teens & Kids

A few therapy worksheets that can be adapted for teenagers and children include:

1. The Break-Up Plan: Ending Friendships That No Longer Work: This Quenza Expansion exercise can help children or young adults explore friendships that have stopped working for them, and design a Break-Up Plan that they can use to end them gracefully and respectfully.
2. Creating a Positive Body Image: Quenza Expansion Pathways are guided programs that span a longer period. With this program, kids or teenagers can receive therapy activities at daily, weekly, or custom intervals to help them foster a healthier body image.
3. Daily Exceptions Journal: In this Expansion Pathway, younger clients go through a series of exercises where they focus on what went right each day. An ideal activity for therapists who work with gratitude or positive psychology, this helps clients cultivate a more optimistic outlook to move away from problem-focused thinking.

5 Effective Activities For Online Therapists

The range of ways you can engage clients with activities is wide, from collaborating on an in-session exercise to assigning interactive homework between appointments.

Here’s a sample of 3 activities that you can easily customize to suit different age groups:

1. Acceptance of Emotion Meditation: This guided audio meditation is a fantastic tool for helping clients deal with their emotions using acceptance, rather than suppression
2. Progressive Muscle Relaxation: Use this to teach clients a deep relaxation technique for reducing stress and anxiety, and
3. Cognitive Restructuring: An iCBT exercise that clients can use to replace negative thinking patterns with helpful thoughts.

Online Art Therapy: 2 Activities

If you’re working with creative individuals, or even children and teens, some activities that you might use in art therapy include Quenza’s:

• Self-Compassion Box – this Expansion Activity asks clients to create physical reminders of self-compassionate behavior, and
• A Value Tattoo – which helps clients connect with their values by thinking of a tattoo design or piece of art.

How To Build and Send Activities To Clients Online

Quenza makes it beautifully simple for you to build your own activities for clients, share them digitally, and track their progress along the way.

There are two ways to craft therapy activities online:

1. Creating your own exercises, worksheets, assessments, or homework from a blank template, or
2. Customizing a pre-made Activity from Quenza’s Expansion library.

Create Your Own Therapy Activities

Designing your own activities is a great choice when you’d like to share a completely bespoke resource with clients, such as a niche-specific intervention or a personalized assessment.

You can do this using simple drag-and-drop tools in Quenza’s Activity Builder, shown below:

Creating a custom tool in your Activity builder allows you to develop your own resources from a blank template, structuring each resource with page breaks, text boxes, and more. When you’re done, save your Activity to add it to your Library for repurposing in other treatment plans!

Customize a Quenza Expansion

Modifying one of Quenza’s many pre-made therapy templates is a fast, almost effortless way to share personalized solutions with clients.

You can find exercises, meditations, assessments, reflections, and more that suit your plan when you search your Expansion Library by Type or Tag, as below:

To customize Quenza Expansions in your Activity builder, add them to your library and open them for editing.

Customizing Expansions is super efficient because it enables you to pick and choose what elements of an activity you’d like to include, while also giving you the freedom to add your own sections, multimedia, text, or questions:

A Look At Quenza’s Care Pathways & Activities

Once you’ve finished creating an Activity, Quenza makes it simple for you to share it directly with your clients.

Sending Activities To Clients

When you’d like to share an Activity with a client, you can either search for it in your Activity library and click ‘Send’, or include it as a step in a Quenza Pathway.

Creating a Pathway means you can schedule your activities in advance, and clients will receive them according to a program that you’ve decided on together in therapy.

Simply open your Pathway Builder and select an Activity as a step, along with an optional custom interval between each step in your program as pictured:

With your Pathway builder, you can also set client notifications in advance, so they receive a prompt to complete their homework or assessment after a certain interval.

Put simply, Quenza makes it straightforward for you to craft, personalize, and share all kinds of bespoke and popular tools with clients, meaning that you can deliver high-caliber treatment efficiently and effectively in a way that suits you both.

6 Telehealth Features Included in Quenza

Along with its core toolkit, Quenza’s telehealth features allow you to deliver uniquely customized therapy experiences.

Some of the features that you can use to brand your content, stay in touch with clients, or build patient satisfaction include:

1. Quenza Chat – a secure, HIPAA-compliant instant messaging service that you can use with groups or individuals
2. White label branding and emails – so you can share therapy activities and updates from your own email, and with your practice logo
3. Live results tracking – showing you patient progress in real-time
4. Quenza’s exclusive Wheel of Life feature – allowing you to design custom assessments and worksheets based on the Wheel of Life exercise
5. A multilingual client app – which your clients can use to navigate Quenza in 16 languages, and
6. Client notes – a handy section for jotting down session or coaching notes in client files.

Final Thoughts

If you’ve largely relied on generic therapy activities to help your clients so far, customizing your own digital templates will massively enhance your efficiency.

With less time spent personalizing hard-copies, you’ll have a lot more time for in-session work with clients. Don’t forget to leave us a comment and share your activities ideas with your peers!

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this article. To get started building your own therapy activities, don’t forget to start your Quenza $1 trial.

With Quenza’s e-therapy toolbox you’ll have all you need to design and deliver personalized treatments effectively, so that you can enhance your professional impact and help your clients enjoy better mental health.