Anxiety Worksheets
Challenge your clients’ anxious thoughts and create rational and helpful alternatives with our Anxiety Worksheet. Engage your clients in their treatment, and empower them as they learn to recognize and dispute their anxious thoughts.
Fact Checked by Ericka Pingol.
What Is An Anxiety Worksheet?
Some level of anxiety in your clients’ daily lives is normal, but for clients with anxiety disorders, their anxiety levels can far exceed what would be considered the normal response to a certain situation. Anxiety can take many forms, but one thing is for sure – challenging anxious thoughts takes practice, and that’s why we’ve created this .
This worksheet is designed to help your clients challenge their automatic, anxious thoughts by rationally deciding on evidence for and against the thought, and identifying any unhelpful thinking styles they are unwittingly engaging in. This resource can be used by your clients independently between sessions with you in order to keep up their progress and ensure they are participating as fully as they can in the treatment of their anxiety.
Printable Anxiety Worksheets
Download these Anxiety Worksheets and help your clients strengthen their relationships and develop better communication skills.
How To Use This Anxiety Worksheet
To get an idea of how this Anxiety Worksheet can help your clients challenge their anxious thoughts, take a look at our Anxiety Worksheet example in the following section. But if you want to understand the different parts of this worksheet in more detail, just follow this simple step-by-step guide.
Step One. Download the Anxiety Worksheet PDF
The first step is to simply download a copy of our free Anxiety Worksheet. You can do this using the link on this page, which will give you access to a PDF version of the worksheet.
Step Two. Provide the Worksheet to Your Client
Next, provide a copy of this Anxiety Worksheet to your client. The PDF can be edited just by typing within the interactive textboxes, so there is no need to print it out unless your client prefers writing by hand.
Step Three. Have Your Client Complete the Worksheet
Now for the main event, your client should complete the worksheet independently and in their own time to allow them to think about their responses and remove any time pressure.
The first part of the worksheet is to identify the situation that triggered their anxiety. Next, they should try to recall the immediate thoughts that spurred their anxiety. Then it’s time to put their anxious thoughts on trial by objectively deciding on the evidence for and against their anxious thoughts. This evidence should be factual in nature rather than subjective or based on your client’s feelings.
Next, your client should identify if these thoughts contain any common unhelpful thinking styles such as catastrophizing, all-or-nothing thinking, or fortune telling. If your client is unfamiliar with these thinking styles, this may be a good section to offer them assistance during your next session together.
Lastly, your client should attempt to construct an alternative thought that provides a more balanced, helpful, and rational view of the initial situation. These alternative thoughts could include comforting statements, factual evidence from the previous sections, or positive self-talk statements.
Step Four. Discuss your Client’s Answers
The next two steps assume that your client wishes to discuss the results of this worksheet with you. If they choose to share their answers with you, the next step is for the two of you to discuss their answers and brainstorm any additional evidence, unhelpful thinking styles, or rational alternative thoughts.
Step Five. Store Securely (if applicable)
Finally, if your client chooses to share a copy of the worksheet with you, ensure you store it securely in their clinical record as this document contains private information regarding their mental health treatment that you have a legal obligation to keep confidential and secure.
Anxiety Worksheet Example (Sample)
To ensure you feel confident providing this resource to your clients, we have created an example Anxiety Worksheet to illustrate how your client might benefit from challenging their anxious thoughts. This example is based on a fictional client struggling with anxiety, and your client's own responses might look very different. Regardless of the exact nature of your client’s anxious thoughts, this worksheet can help. Take a look at the example here, or you can download the sample Anxiety Worksheet as a PDF if you prefer.
Download this Anxiety Worksheet Example (Sample) here:
Who Can Use these Printable Anxiety Worksheets (PDF)?
This Anxiety Worksheet can benefit a whole range of people, from those struggling with a generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) to those with excessive worrying or rumination. As such, there are many professionals who can benefit from offering this worksheet to their clients. There are no specific prerequisites to incorporating this worksheet into your clinical practice, and your clients need only to be motivated to challenge their automatic anxious thoughts and start making a positive contribution to their mental health treatment. Some of these professionals will include:
- Therapists
- Clinical Psychologists
- Counselors
- Psychiatrists
- Mental Health and Psychiatric Nurses
- Nurse Practitioners
- Family Doctors
This is by no means an exhaustive list, and in addition to the above, any other healthcare practitioner working in the mental health space may find this worksheet useful to offer their clients.
Why Is This Form Useful For Therapists?
Use with a range of clients
This worksheet is general enough to be beneficial for a whole range of different clients, regardless of their specific histories or diagnoses. Any kind of automatic negative thoughts, unhelpful thinking styles, or anxious worry spirals can be targeted with this worksheet.
Help your clients apply what they learn in therapy
Having a worksheet to complete with their own experiences and thoughts can help your clients solidify what they learn in their sessions with you. For instance, it’s one thing to read about all-or-nothing thinking, but another entirely to recognize it independently in your own thoughts.
Save time formatting
This template has all the headings, sub-headings, and textboxes already laid out in a clear and easy-to-follow format so your client doesn’t have to do anything except fill in the blanks. This will save you time formatting your own resources, and give you more time to get back to doing what you do best.
Why Use Carepatron For Anxiety Worksheet Software?
Carepatron is a state-of-the-art healthcare software platform with a multitude of tools designed to save you time and reduce your administrative workload.
Send out automated SMS or email appointment reminders to your clients, schedule appointments or video consultations, and utilize Carepatron’s digitally encrypted, HIPAA-compliant data storage services.
Additionally, you can access this template and many others from Carepatron’s community template library. Can’t find the one you want? No problem, through Carepatron you can create your own template for notes, worksheets, assessments, forms, or whatever meets your practice’s needs and share it with your team all through our integrated and intuitively designed platform. Try out Carepatron for free and discover why 10,000+ healthcare practitioners have chosen Carepatron to take their practice to the next level.
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Commonly asked questions
Unhelpful thinking styles are common traps many of us fall into when we try to think about something when we have high anxiety levels or strong negative emotions. These thinking styles include catastrophizing, all-or-nothing thinking, emotional reasoning, over-generalizations, or jumping to conclusions.
While for some of your clients, it may be necessary for you to offer a helping hand with examples of unhelpful thinking styles or evidence against an anxious thought, this worksheet is designed to be completed by your clients rather than you as their mental health practitioner. As such, it may be a collaborative effort, or your client may wish to complete it entirely independently.
The process of considering factual evidence for and against a particular thought is part of a process called cognitive restructuring, which aims to replace maladaptive thoughts with more balanced, rational, and helpful thoughts.
