Anxiety Tracker

What is an Anxiety Tracker?

An Anxiety Tracker or chart is a document that clients and practitioners can use to track one's mood fluctuations and check for patterns. Generally, Anxiety Trackers can look different depending on the practitioner who provides them or the patient who creates them from scratch. In fact, Anxiety Trackers nowadays come in the form of accessible apps that one can download.

If you're a therapist caring for a patient who will benefit from having an Anxiety Tracker and don't want to start from scratch or download a separate application, we have the template just for you.

Our template contains a chart wherein the patient will write down the answers to the following:

• Date, day, and time
• The situation that led to them feeling anxious
• What they were thinking or feeling during that situation
• Any coping mechanisms they tried, if any
• How they feel after using said coping strategies

Having a tracker will assist your patients as they manage anxiety and build coping skills in everyday life.

If you want to find out more about treating patients with anxiety, have a look at our video on an Anxiety and Depression Assessment:

How does it work?

Negative thinking can make an individual fear certain social situations too that they tend to become stress and develop inappropriate behaviors. You can help ease their worries and social anxiety, starting with our Anxiety Tracker template. Just follow these steps to gain advantage:

Step 1: Access the template

To access and download a copy of our printable Anxiety Tracker.

Step 2: Explain the tracker to the client

Since our template mainly consists of empty boxes where patients can write their answers to the questions, we recommend that you explain to your client when and how to fill out the boxes in a way that will help both of you.

Step 3: Fill out the tracker

Give your client a copy of the tracker to your client so they can write down their answers. If they are in-patients who can't write down their answers, you can ask someone caring for them to write down what the client says verbally.

Step 4: Process the answers with the client

Once the worksheet is complete, you must review and process their answers with the client during your next session. We will leave it up to you how you will process the answers on the template with your client.

Step 5: Securely store

After the session, remember to store the worksheet and notes you wrote in a secure physical location or a HIPAA-compliant electronic health record software like Carepatron.

When would you use this template?

Your client, for whom the Anxiety Tracker template is designed, can use it whenever they feel anxious. On the other hand, you, the therapist caring for the client, will benefit more from a filled-out Anxiety Tracker template. However, if you're deciding which patients to give an empty copy to, here's a list of situations where it may be beneficial to see the changes in a patient's mood:

• When they're experiencing or exhibiting panic disorder symptoms
• When they're taking medications for their anxiety
• When they haven't identified their triggers
• When you and the client are coming up with coping techniques
• When they're figuring out which aspects of their life are affected by their change in mood
• When they're undergoing a massive change or major life event
• When they feel like writing down their thoughts and feelings will help give them a sense of peace or control

It's ideal if they use it after an anxiety attack so they can focus on managing their thoughts and feelings while they have the attack and write and elaborate upon what happened during the attack.

Benefits

Here are some ways that using an Anxiety Tracker can benefit you and your clients:

Helps establish baselines for comparison later on

If our template is given to a patient who hasn't been diagnosed or provided with a treatment plan, the therapist in charge can use the first tracker they fill out as a baseline.

Tracks progress

In connection to the benefit above, the following trackers that the patient will fill out or trackers that patients in the middle of a treatment plan can be used as evidence of whether or not a specific therapy or medication is working.

Empowers clients

For certain clients, seeing the positive changes or progress they're making while receiving treatment or the effectiveness of their chosen coping mechanisms can make them feel empowered to continue their treatment plan. Through this, they can also be more proactive in dealing with their emotions

Fully digital and accessible

Since our free Anxiety Tracker template is entirely digital, you can download, access, and share it with your client on any gadget and vice versa. Aside from that, your client can fill them out using a local PDF editor or Carepatron. After your session, you don't have to worry about storage if you plan to keep it as a digital file because you can save it on Carepatron, a HIPAA-compliant EHR where you can store documents.