Thought Diary CBT Worksheets

One of the fundamental techniques of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) relates to challenging unhelpful thoughts. This strategy requires the individual to recognise or identify an unhelpful thought, and then to test or evaluate that thought.

Often a thought diary or thought record will be introduced for the unhelpful thought to be written down and processed. Most CBT worksheets offer this strategy laid out as a 3 column thought diary to identify the situation, emotions and thoughts, or a 5 column thought diary with the addition of evidence for, evidence against and a more balanced or rational thought column at the end.

As I have been looking to review different CBT iPhone apps, I have discovered that almost all of these focus on the challenging unhelpful thoughts strategy and the thought diary in particular. The convenience and privacy of having this functionality on your iPhone makes this a great option, but only if the implementation of CBT and the workflow within the app is well executed.

A range of CBT focused worksheets are available on the Moodjuice website. We tried to design resources to most effectively facilitate this particular process of identifying and challenging unhelpful thoughts. On the site you can get a traditional 5 column thought diary (such as you might find in Mind Over Mood (Padesky & Greenberger, 1995), but you can also access a 3 column thought diary, or identifying challenging thoughts worksheet, which, coupled with a separate thought challenging worksheet gives you enough space to explore and evaluate those unhelpful thoughts. You can even get an audio version of this challenging thoughts worksheet.

As you can directly access and print-off multiple copies of these worksheets yourself from the Moodjuice Professional site (and not necessarily rely on the photocopied versions you might otherwise get), I hope you will feel better equipped to effectively challenge those unhelpful thoughts.

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