Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) Worksheets
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Looking for cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, worksheets?
You’ve arrived in the right place. We’ve created a set of five printable CBT therapy worksheets that you can download for free within this article.
There are several types of psychotherapeutic modalities, including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), and more.
CBT helps people identify and change automatic thoughts, or cognitive distortions. It can also help clients identify, challenge, and replace these negative thoughts with more realistic and objective ones.
CBT can help clients manage mental health conditions and issues such as depression, social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), low self-esteem, substance use, and more.
These free CBT worksheets can be a beneficial tool for therapists working with clients on these collaborative goals during sessions—and, additionally, as a tool you can provide as homework for clients in between sessions.
What's included in these free printable CBT therapy worksheets?
One of the tenets of CBT is that it encourages active participation. In an example of a CBT therapy session, you may collaboratively discuss, problem-solve, and build skills around your client’s identified problems.
To achieve this, you might collaborate with your client on filling out various CBT worksheets.
You can do some of these activities together in session or give the sheets to your clients to complete as homework assignments before your next session.
Some of these CBT therapy worksheets can also be effective tools clients can use in their daily lives to help them monitor their disruptive thoughts as they occur.
Use these free CBT worksheets to work with your clients to help them identify disturbing thoughts, plan for activities that make them feel better, set their own goals of CBT therapy, and more. Then, you can talk about them together and formulate a plan to work through them.
‘Goals for Therapy’ CBT worksheet
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The “Goals for Therapy” CBT worksheet is a great way to help keep your sessions time-aware and more structured. Use this worksheet as an aid to set goals together for what your client hopes to achieve in therapy.
In the context of CBT, it’s helpful to think of “start” goals as opposed to “stop” goals. For instance, a goal to “start doing x” is often more helpful than a goal to “stop doing y,” which can put more pressure and actually increase anxiety in some cases.
It’s also a good idea to make sure your goals are SMART goals—meaning the goals are specific (expressed in concrete terms), meaningful (consistent with personal values), adaptive (helpful and relevant to the problem), realistic (proportionate and achievable), and timebound (clear frequency measure or timeline).
This CBT therapy worksheet is fairly easy to use.
There are three sections, one for the goal, one for the steps your client can take to reach that goal, and one for any new skills or knowledge they would need to help them reach that goal.
You can have your clients fill this out as a homework assignment and bring it into the next session to discuss, or you can fill it out together so you can help your clients formulate goals if they’re feeling stuck.
‘Dysfunctional Thought Record’ CBT worksheet
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The “Dysfunctional Thought Record” CBT worksheet helps clients identify negative or dysfunctional thoughts as they occur in daily life.
Taking action to notice and record these thoughts may help you and your clients notice a pattern of when these thoughts pop up and why—for instance, if they’re triggered by certain locations, actions, people, etc.
Observing and naming these patterns can help clients feel more prepared to deal with them, or avoid situations where possible that lead to dysfunctional thoughts.
This particular section of the CBT worksheets is split into seven parts.
First, your client will fill out the date and time the thought occurred and the context it occurred in.
Next, they’ll write down what their first or automatic thought was, and how that thought made them feel.
From there, they’ll think of an alternative, more adaptive thought, and what the long-term outcome of that new thought might be.
You can use this worksheet in sessions and fill out each section together, so your client can get comfortable with the format and understand what goes in each section.
Then, you can empower your client to make use of this thought pattern and worksheet on their own outside of sessions as well.
‘Fact-Checking’ CBT worksheet
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The “Fact-Checking” CBT worksheet is a good example of a take-home worksheet that your clients can use in their daily lives.
This CBT worksheet is helpful for reminding clients one of the basic tenets of CBT: that thoughts are not facts.
You can have the worksheet pre-populated with common thoughts that clients mistake for facts, or you can delete them and work with your clients to insert ones that are most common for them.
Then, either in session or as homework for your client, choose whether the statement is a fact or opinion. The answers will depend on the statement.
‘Scheduling Pleasant Activities’ CBT worksheet
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The “Scheduling Pleasant Activities” CBT therapy worksheet is helpful to collaborate with your clients on, because the two of you can create a list of activities that are significant to your client in some way.
In the worksheet, write one activity in the coming week that your client will do or take part in that makes them happy, and have them report back in the next session. You can also adapt this CBT worksheet to be used to mention for smaller, daily tasks that are easy to work into your client’s day (like meditation, stretching, or other small activities).
While the bigger activities are also important to make time for, if your clients are busy, easily overwhelmed, or like to see progress more quickly, the smaller daily tasks are a good way to build up.
This worksheet is useful for collaborating with your client in session.
Afterward, you can send the worksheet home with your client for them to reflect on and complete on their own outside of sessions.
For example, you can have your client schedule their activity or activities, and then use the CBT worksheets to write down how they felt after the activity was over.
Afterward, you can have them bring the worksheet back to your session so that you can discuss their emotional response together.
‘ABC Model’ CBT worksheet
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The “ABC Model” CBT worksheet is used to help explain the interaction between thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
You can use this worksheet to help your clients see clearly how their emotions and thoughts progress after an event or situation happens to them and how they can adapt their thinking to be more positive.
The worksheet is broken down into five sections:
A: Activating event or situation
B: Belief about event
C: Consequences of event
D: Disputation of beliefs
E: Exchange old beliefs for new approach
Other examples of CBT worksheets
In addition to CBT worksheets, activities like mindfulness meditation, visualization activities, and reframing one’s thoughts are all things that you can coach your clients on in sessions, and then equip them to use in their daily lives outside of sessions.
Once you show a client how mindfulness can help them, for instance, they can put that to use out in the world when they notice a dysfunctional or negative thought come up.
Additional types of CBT therapy worksheets you could assign to your clients include creating journals, thought diaries, activity schedules, or imagery-based exposure.
If you have clients dealing with negative thoughts, for example, you can share a thoughts worksheet with them, such as a Cognitive Distortions Worksheet. For individuals struggling with behavioral activation, a Behavior Chart Template may be useful.
Depending on your clients and what resonates with them or brought them to therapy in the first place, you may want to adapt or choose different CBT worksheets that will work best for them in your treatment planning.
You can put the CBT handouts in this free bundle into use in your practice right away, or you can use them as a starting point to brainstorm ideas and figure out what works best for your practice and your clients.
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