Printable Coping Skills Worksheet Set
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Looking for a coping skills worksheet?
You’ve arrived in the right place. We’ve got you covered with a free downloadable set of printable coping skills worksheets that can be used in session with clients or given to clients to fill out on their own outside of session.
Coping skills worksheets can be helpful to utilize while teaching and instilling therapeutic approaches with clients.
Anxiety can show up in a multitude of ways, and it’s associated with a variety of sources and diagnoses.
Consequently, therapists need a diverse set of tools and skills to help our clients to address and cope with challenges and stresses. Every therapist’s toolkit will benefit from a set of printable coping skills worksheets, which we provide below for you to download.
The goals of these coping skills for anxiety worksheets include increasing the client’s awareness of their own anxiety experience, improving their confidence in managing their anxiety, and helping establish new behavioral, emotional, and cognitive patterns in the client’s life.
Expectations of a coping skills worksheet
The way in which providers explain skills worksheets to their clients is important and sets the tone for their usage.
Be sure to instill appropriate expectations of the benefits and limits of each particular coping skills worksheet.
Printable coping skills worksheets can be helpful tools increasing insight for clients and even becoming catalysts for change.
They can provide the translation of therapeutic theory into practical reality for client’s lives.
As a mental health clinician it’s important to be confident in the worksheets that one selects and utilizes with clients.
However, at the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that worksheets are not magic solutions. They are unlikely to radically change the life of a client after one use.
Coping skills worksheets can best be viewed as supportive tools in the often subtle process of client change.
Worksheets are facilitators of learning, self awareness and change that are used in conjunction with appropriate therapeutic modalities.
Coping skills for anxiety worksheets
There are free downloadable and printable coping skills worksheets linked from this article for clinicians’ use.
These anxiety coping skills worksheets are focused on various approaches to treating anxiety.
They can be utilized when initially introducing new concepts, but can also be used in an ongoing manner to reinforce healthy client patterns.
Below are explanations of each worksheet and how to most effectively use them with clients.
Worksheet #1: The whole picture of anxiety
This worksheet is designed to help clients understand the various ways anxiety manifests itself in their lives.
This is a skills worksheet for youth or adults. Teens and older individuals alike can benefit from this simple, visually oriented worksheet.
It is best utilized directly in a moment of anxiety or soon after that moment.
This coping skills worksheet prompts the client to do the following:
1. Name their anxiety with specific language
2. Identify where they feel the anxiety in their body
3. Identify a thought that is feeding their anxiety
4. Rate the intensity level of their anxiety
5. Identify any associated behaviors
6. Notice the effects of their anxiety
These six prompts are helpful for the client to create an increased awareness, and in turn, to manage their anxiety more effectively.
Naming the experience of anxiety with specific language helps the client connect the emotional and rational parts of their brain, which helps them to facilitate better emotion regulation.
Gaining awareness and insight into their own cognitive and behavioral experience and patterns of anxiety is foundational to the client rehabituating their reactions to anxiety.
As anxiety is often a very somatic experience, it is also essential to help clients connect with the associated physical experiences in their body.
Rating the intensity of the anxiety is important because it helps the client to acknowledge the ever-changing nature of emotions, and may instill hope in them for change during their moments of peak anxiety levels.
The second side of the worksheet helps clients to take their awareness and turn it into supportive actions.
On the second side of this worksheet, the client is prompted to:
1. Identify an alternative thought that can help reduce the intensity of anxiety
2. Think of some activities that can calm their body and nervous system
3. Brainstorm some anxiety reducing behaviors they can implement
After attempting these self-identified anxiety reducing strategies they are prompted to:
- Reassess the intensity of their anxiety
- Notice the effects of the efforts
This reflection helps the client to gain insight into what works for them. Additionally, the reward of their efforts being effective can reinforce new patterns for the client.
Worksheet #2: Anxiety in control
This coping skills worksheet can also be used with teens or adults. This worksheet is best used for clients whose anxiety is fueled by issues of control.
Anxiety can be prompted when clients repeatedly try to control people, places and situations that are out of their control and/or when they avoid taking appropriate control of things that are within their realm of influence.
This worksheet asks the client to identify a specific situation, and then separate the specific components of that situation which are within or outside of their control.
Once they’ve identified this separation, they are prompted at the bottom of the page to develop acceptance based statements for the things they have acknowledged that they cannot control.
Finally, they are prompted to pick one of the things they can control, and to list out a few tangible action steps.
This last step is intended to help clients acknowledge any agency they do have and start taking more control.
Worksheet #3: What ifs
This printable coping skills worksheet is intended for adults but could also be tried with teens as well given the simple layout.
“What if”s can be major orchestrators of anxiety and panic.
While it is normal to plan for the future or think of possible outcomes, anxiety producing “What if”s have a strong negative bias and can take clients into loops of rumination and over-thinking.
The main problem is that negative possible outcomes become the primary focus while other, less negative possibilities fade into the background.
This worksheet helps clients to identify the negative thoughts they may be fixating on and identify how they may be dwelling on negative predictions.
The other columns of the worksheet help clients to balance their thinking by also brainstorming moderate “What if”s and positive “What If”s.
If clients start to consider and imagine a balanced picture of all future possibilities in a given situation, it can greatly reduce their anxiety.
Worksheet #4: Social anxiety
This coping skills worksheet is intended for use with adult clients, and it’s best utilized soon after a social interaction.
Social interaction is another realm of life that is riddled with anxiety for many people.
The anxiety often relates to mind-reading and negatively predicting how certain interactions will play out.
The fear of judgment, embarrassment, or interactions going poorly can lead to high levels of anxiety and avoidance behaviors.
In many instances, the reality of an actual social interaction does not go as badly as was initially predicted.
This worksheet helps clients to gain awareness of their social predictions and the level of anxiety they produce.
The client is then prompted to reflect on what actually happened during the interaction and their level of anxiety during and after the event.
Finally, the client is prompted to compare their initial predictions to the reality of what happened in order to develop insights and conclusions.
When they are later tempted to worry about upcoming social interactions, they can use these learnings from the worksheet to temper their anxious thoughts.
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