A, B, C: the CBT framework
You drink more on Wednesdays than you used to. You don't know why Wednesday specifically. It just seems to end up that way. Maybe it's coincidence. Maybe Wednesdays are harder than other days. You can't quite trace it.
This is what patterns look like from the inside: vague, slightly mysterious, possibly coincidence. The data tells a different story. After four weeks of logging, it shows that Wednesday is the day you have your one-on-one with your manager, that your mood score on Wednesday evenings averages 4.2 out of 10, and that the drink count on Wednesdays is reliably 2.3 units higher than any other weeknight. The mystery isn't mysterious anymore. You're drinking on Wednesdays because Wednesdays are hard, and you've been managing that with alcohol.
This is the ABC model doing what it's designed to do.
What the ABC model is
ABC is one of the foundational frameworks of CBT. Originally developed from Aaron Beck's cognitive model and B.F. Skinner's behavioural analysis, it's a structured way of understanding why behaviours happen , not in the abstract, but in the specific sequence of real events.
A , Antecedents. What came before? This includes the external situation (where you were, who you were with, what time it was, what had just happened) and the internal state (how you were feeling emotionally and physically, what you were thinking, what your stress level was). Antecedents are the conditions that set the behaviour in motion.
B , Behaviour. What actually happened? For substance use this is specific: what was consumed, how much, over what period.
C , Consequences. What followed? Both immediate consequences (the mood shift, the relief, the social ease) and longer-term consequences (the sleep quality, the next-day mood, the money spent, the impact on the following day's functioning).
In a CBT session, a therapist and client would spend significant time mapping the A, B, and C of a problem behaviour , because the map reveals the mechanisms that willpower-based approaches to change can't reach. You can't disrupt a pattern you can't see. Once you can see it , once the antecedent is visible, and the behaviour is specific, and the consequences are documented , you have something to work with.
What ayodee records across the three components
When you log with ayodee, you are building an ABC record in real time.
The A is captured in the mood rating you give before the drink, the time of day, the context you're in, and , over time , the pattern of what precedes heavier logging days. The app records the emotional state at the time of logging, not reconstructed later. This is the antecedent data: the conditions that preceded the behaviour.
The B is captured directly: what you consumed, how many units, what substance, over what evening.
The C is captured the following day. The sleep quality score. The next-day mood. Whether you felt anxious or flat or fine. These are the consequences , the actual experiential cost and benefit of the night before, recorded close enough to the event to be accurate.
Across enough entries, the app shows you the relationship between A, B, and C. Not as a theory. As your data.
What the patterns tend to show
Stress as an antecedent. One of the most consistent findings in self-monitoring data for alcohol use is the stress-drinking connection , visible in the correlation between lower mood scores earlier in the day and higher drink counts in the evening. This connection is rarely explicit in people's self-understanding ("I drink when I'm stressed" is something most people nominally know about themselves), but the magnitude of it tends to be surprising. The low-mood Wednesdays that reliably produce heavier evenings are a different scale of pattern from the vague sense that "I sometimes drink more when work is difficult."
Social situations as antecedents. The data often shows context effects that weren't consciously registered , that drink counts are reliably higher in specific social configurations (certain friends, work drinks, particular venues) and that the mood preceding those occasions correlates in a specific direction.
Consequences that contradict the expectation. The sleep data is often where the ABC picture becomes most confronting. The night that felt like it was needed , the drink to wind down, to get to sleep, to switch off a difficult day , shows up in the following morning's sleep score as one of the worst nights in the log. The short-term consequence (the immediate relief) and the longer-term consequence (the sleep, the next-day mood) turn out to be different things, and the data makes both visible simultaneously.
Why seeing the ABC changes things
In CBT, the purpose of building an ABC record isn't simply to accumulate information. It's because visible patterns are actionable in a way that invisible ones aren't.
Consider the Wednesday drinking again. Before the data, it's a vague sense that you drink more than you'd like to sometimes. After the data, it's a specific pattern: high-stress Wednesdays trigger elevated evening drinking, which correlates with worse sleep on Thursday and lower mood on Friday. The antecedent (the Wednesday meeting), the behaviour (the drinking), and the consequence (the Thursday sleep quality and Friday mood) are all there, connected, in your own data.
Once you can see the ABC, the question changes from "why do I keep doing this?" to "what is this doing, and what else could do it?" The antecedent , the difficult meeting , isn't going away. But the behaviour (drinking to manage it) is now visible as a choice rather than an inevitability, and the consequence (the sleep cost) is now part of the picture in a way it wasn't before.
CBT therapists describe this as collaborative empiricism , using real data to examine and test the patterns governing behaviour, rather than relying on theory or assumption. You are the collaborator. The data is the evidence. The pattern is the hypothesis to test.
You don't need a therapist to do this. You need a record that captures A, B, and C in sufficient granularity to reveal the pattern. That's what a daily substance use diary is for.
Starting to see the map
The ABCs don't reveal themselves immediately. One week of data shows you a week. Two weeks shows you some patterns beginning to emerge. Four to six weeks shows you enough that the recurring sequences , the antecedents that reliably precede the behaviour, the consequences that reliably follow , become hard to attribute to coincidence.
This is why the clinical literature recommends reviewing self-monitoring data regularly rather than letting it accumulate without examination. The data becomes useful when you look at it. What were the three highest-consumption days? What preceded them? What did the following day look like? The answers are in the log. The pattern is there. You're just reading the map you've been drawing.
ayodee builds your ABC picture automatically , mood before, behaviour logged in the moment, sleep and mood after. After a few weeks, the pattern is usually quite clear. Anonymous, no account needed.
References Beck, A.T. (1979). Cognitive therapy and the emotional disorders. Penguin.
Korotitsch, W.J., & Nelson-Gray, R.O. (1999). An overview of self-monitoring research in assessment and treatment. Psychological Assessment, 11(4), 415.
Cohen, J.S. et al. (2013). Using self-monitoring: implementation of collaborative empiricism in cognitive-behavioral therapy. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 20(4), 419–428.