Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an active form of treatment that highlights the connection between your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. CBT helps you change unhelpful thinking patterns and behaviors.
In CBT you also learn coping skills for managing emotions and reducing anxiety and distress. CBT often involves the use of CBT worksheets or handouts to help track your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, practice strategies learned in session, and/or assist with relaxation techniques.
CBT Worksheets help reinforce the work you’re doing in therapy. For example, if you are working on evaluating or challenging unhelpful thinking patterns, you can use a thought record or tracker to help you come up with more adaptive thoughts on your own.
CBT Worksheets can also help you become more aware of your emotions and moods and learn what is triggering them and ways to change your feelings. CBT Worksheets with specific techniques, like relaxation breathing exercises, will help you remember and learn how to apply these skills on your own. The more you practice outside of session, the more likely you are to remember and use these strategies when you need them.
Our therapists at MindWell NYC developed some CBT Worksheets that you can use in conjunction with your therapy. These handouts are not meant to be a stand alone treatment, though some are guides for practicing relaxation exercises that you can do on your own.
These CBT Worksheets can be especially helpful if you review them with your therapist. Ready to get started? Our CBT Worksheets Bundle includes:
Download the free CBT worksheets
Challenging Unhelpful Thoughts Worksheet
Our thoughts and feelings are extremely connected. Sometimes, our automatic thoughts about a situation are not entirely true or helpful, leading us to feel a negative emotion. It can be helpful to adjust our automatic thought into a more helpful, realistic view of the situation.
Use this resource to help monitor your automatic thoughts and also help become more mindful of how your thoughts are influencing your emotions. Your therapist can help you learn strategies for coming up with more adaptive thoughts and then you can use this to practice on your own.
Gratitude Journal Prompts
Practicing gratitude is a great way to improve your mood, and help bring you back to the present moment. Using gratitude journal prompts can help you notice the thoughts and emotions you are currently experiencing. Use this gratitude journal to take a 5-minute journaling break.
Remember, you can be grateful for big things like getting a job and success, and also small things like beautiful weather and coffee. Try to tap into the feeling of gratitude and notice what you are feeling grateful for right now in this moment. Do not judge your responses – there is no right or wrong. Also be sure not to just write what you think you should be grateful for. This is about tapping into your own gratitude. The more you practice gratitude, the more it will come to you naturally. Practicing gratitude regularly can help combat negative thinking and depressed mood.
Breathing Exercises Worksheets
Deep breathing exercises are quick and effective tools to help us to decrease emotional arousal and initiate a relaxation response in our bodies when we’re feeling stressed or anxious. The goal for these exercises is to slow the pace of breathing and feel the abdomen expanding as we inhale.
Deep breathing can also be a helpful strategy for returning to mindful awareness of the present moment. We have two CBT Worksheets on deep breathing: Square Breathing and 4-7-8 Breathing. Each of these provide simple and effective directions for practicing deep breathing. We like breathing exercises because you can do them anytime anywhere. You always have your breath as a tool for changing how your body feels in order to change your thinking and feeling.
Grounding Techniques Worksheet
When our body’s stress response system is activated, we may start to feel the physical sensations of anxiety or panic kick in. These can include increased heart rate, shortness of breath, dizziness, and muscle tension.
Grounding techniques are tools that help us manage distress by redirecting our focus in these moments to what’s actually going on around us. They literally help us ground in the present moment. Our Five Senses Grounding Technique Worksheet will help you refocus away from your panic symptoms and ground yourself in the present moment to decrease anxiety.
Mood and Habit Trackers
These logs are simple but effective tools for keeping track of our activities throughout the day. These CBT worksheets help us to evaluate daily progress towards our goals and understand factors affecting our moods. Try using the Habit Tracker to monitor sleep, eating, exercise, and other activities that contribute to mental and physical well-being.
Tracking your habits can help you feel more accountable and therefore increase the likelihood that you will engage in the behaviors that you’re trying to do more.
Try to be specific about the habits you are tracking. You can also bring this tracker to individual therapy to help you problem solve and understand factors that make you more or less likely to engage in healthy behaviors.
The Mood Tracker worksheet can be especially helpful for identifying patterns in how our moods change in intensity and duration across different situations. Tracking your mood will help you develop more effective strategies for regulating and managing your emotions.
It will also give you important information on how the environment and different activities affect your mood and feelings throughout the day. In addition to gaining insight about your feelings, you can also use this information to plan pleasant activities that are likely to increase opportunities for you to feel positive emotions.
CBT Worksheets Bundle Conclusion
CBT worksheets are a great resource to use along with your individual therapy. They can help you make the most out of your therapy by using the tools you learn in session in your daily life.
Our therapists at MindWell NYC put together this CBT Worksheets bundle to jumpstart your CBT work and help you to make the changes you want to make in order to feel more in control of your life and not let your thoughts and emotions control you.
