Anxiety disorders may be the most common type of mental illness in today’s world, and mental health professionals have developed many tools to combat these conditions. One common method is to provide patients with structured exercises designed to help the user assess and modify their mental habits. These worksheets might enable you to gain new insights into your condition and suggest strategies for change.
Worksheets for anxiety disorders can take many different approaches. Some focus on giving you a clearer picture of your mental health symptoms. Others may encourage you to confront unhelpful patterns of thinking or behavior. You might also benefit from worksheets meant to identify the strengths and resources you can bring to bear. Choosing the right anxiety worksheet may depend on the specifics of your anxiety disorder.
Getty/AnnaStills
Learn evidence-based techniques for managing anxiety
Psychoeducation and worksheets for anxiety disorders
The World Health Organization reported in 2023 that anxiety disorders were the most widespread form of mental illness around the globe, affecting 301 million adults, children, and adolescents. Their exact symptoms can vary, but all of them involve recurrent or persistent negative feelings like worry, dread, fear, or panic.
Anxiety disorders often involve certain counterproductive attitudes and ways of thinking about the world. Examples include:
Overestimating threats
Remaining on constant alert for dangers or negative scenarios
Intense fear in response to minimal dangers
Hypersensitivity to stimuli
Avoiding worrying situations
Psychological treatment of anxiety disorders aims to help patients replace these anxiety-reinforcing tendencies with more rational and constructive ways of thinking. One therapy modality for which there’s particularly strong evidence is cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT typically includes psychoeducation — during which clinicians teach patients about psychological illness and mental health to help them understand their conditions and reduce their symptoms.
Informational worksheets and written exercises are among the most common psychoeducation tools. They can provide evidence-based mental health information in a concise, digestible format. A worksheet can also guide clients through self-directed activities that may help them think in new ways about their own behavior. We’ll review some widely used types of anxiety worksheets to help you find the ones that may work best for you.
Symptom self-assessment worksheets
When you start receiving therapy for anxiety, your treatment provider may give you a worksheet you can use to note the symptoms you’re experiencing.
Not only can this help your therapist assess the nature and severity of your condition, but it can also help you take a clear-eyed look at what you’re dealing with. The simple act of describing your mental illness in terms of specific symptoms may help it seem more manageable.
An anxiety symptom worksheet might take the form of a simple checklist featuring the potential symptoms of anxiety disorders. These may be grouped into different symptom categories, including:
Cognitive symptoms like difficulty concentrating, intrusive thoughts, inability to stop thinking about worrying situations, racing thoughts, or fixation on worst-case scenarios.
Emotional symptoms like persistent worry, panic, dread, helplessness, or urges to run away.
Physical symptoms like sweating, heart palpitations, muscle tension, difficulty sleeping, or gastrointestinal distress.
Behavioral symptoms like avoiding situations you’d normally enjoy, distancing yourself from family and friends, or diminished performance at work.
Your therapist might also ask you to keep a log of the symptoms you feel during a given day or week. Noting down when and where you experience particular symptoms could reveal your specific triggers and patterns.
Unhelpful thinking styles worksheets
Another tool that could help you better understand your psychological difficulties is a worksheet identifying cognitive distortions. These are inaccurate and dysfunctional attitudes, beliefs, and ways of thinking that may play a role in maintaining unhealthy anxiety. Research studies have found evidence that people with anxiety disorders experience more cognitive distortions than those without mental illnesses.
At times, though, it can be hard to identify these thought patterns. A cognitive distortion anxiety worksheet will typically list common types of unhelpful thinking styles and encourage you to identify any that seem to crop up often in your own thinking. It might also note how these distortions can manifest in anxiety disorders. Examples include:
All-or-nothing thinking: Assuming that people or situations must be all good or all bad. “If I don’t ace this presentation, my career is done for.”
Magnification: Exaggerating the importance of something negative. “I got a negative review. Everyone thinks my art is terrible.”
Discounting the positive: Finding reasons to downplay good qualities or events. “They were just being polite when they invited me.”
Mind reading: Jumping to conclusions about what other people think. “She didn’t laugh at my joke. She must think I’m boring and insensitive.”
Fortune telling: Assuming you know how something will go in the future. “If I go to that party, everyone is going to ignore me and I’ll have a terrible time.'
iStock
Visualization worksheets
If you’re feeling anxious about a particular situation, you may try to avoid thinking about it — yet this can often cause your worries about it to grow stronger. A visualization worksheet could help by guiding you through an imagined experience of the threatening event in a structured way.
First, it might encourage you to imagine a range of specific details—such as the weather, the location, the decor, and the background noise—helping you to ground it in a sense of what’s real. Next, it may suggest that you picture yourself interacting with the environment and other people there.
A visualization worksheet will typically encourage you to picture the event proceeding in a successful, enjoyable way. Creating a detailed mental picture of a good outcome may help you diminish your worries about things going wrong.
Goal setting and planning worksheets
For some people, anxiety can make ordinary tasks feel overwhelming and unmanageable. Having a worksheet on which you can map out your approach to a particular goal or achievement may make the process less intimidating and help you feel less stressed.
This type of worksheet often directs users to break down a particular task into the individual, concrete steps they’ll need to take. These smaller actions often feel much more achievable. Meanwhile, checking them as you complete them can help you build a sense of accomplishment, momentum, and confidence.
Mindfulness worksheets
Therapy for anxiety often incorporates practices designed to help you mindfully accept your anxiety rather than trying to fight or control it. This may help decrease your feelings of distress and let you release your worries naturally. Evidence suggests that mindfulness-based methods like acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) can achieve substantial reductions in anxiety symptoms.
Mindfulness worksheets offer instructions on facing your anxiety with calm acceptance and provide an overview of the key principles of this form of meditation. Some may suggest simple techniques such as paying attention to the bodily sensations accompanying your anxious feelings, letting your mind rest on them without trying to push them away. They might also outline relaxing breathing techniques to help you release mental and physical tension.
Other worksheets may provide guidance on mindfulness meditation and related techniques. Simple methods such as sitting in a comfortable position and focusing on your breathing may reduce anxiety if practiced regularly.
Getty/Vadym Pastukh
Learn evidence-based techniques for managing anxiety
Along with worksheets directly targeting your anxiety symptoms, you might benefit from taking an inventory of your positive qualities or the things in your life that offer reasons for optimism. This could help make your mind less likely to fixate on negativity. Some specific examples you may find helpful include:
Inventories of coping skills that you can refer to when you’re feeling worried
Gratitude lists or journals
Noting people, places, or activities that make you feel safe
Recording your achievements in areas of life about which you feel anxious
Listing positive personal qualities
Replacing negative thinking worksheets
Identifying thoughts that reinforce your symptoms and countering them with more helpful ideas is a common technique in CBT. This method, known as “thought replacement”, has been found to effectively reduce excessive worry in people with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).
Some anxiety worksheets are designed to guide you through the process of spotting and replacing dysfunctional thoughts. They’ll often give examples of possible patterns of negative thinking that can arise in common situations, along with positive thoughts you can use to challenge them. Your worksheet will also usually include space for you to include examples from your own life.
For example, you may believe that other people are frequently judging you in social situations, which could contribute to symptoms of social anxiety. By practicing thought replacement in these written exercises, you may be better able to address such anxious thoughts when they arise in everyday life.
Exploring anxiety worksheets in therapy
While you can often find helpful anxiety worksheets online, they may be more effective when used with the help and guidance of a mental health professional. A trained therapist can identify which kinds of psychoeducation might benefit you most and supplement them with evidence-based counseling.
Going to therapy online may be an attractive option if your anxiety makes it challenging to seek help in person. Many patients find that therapy seems less intimidating over the Internet, making it easier to trust in the process.
Although therapy over the web is a newer method, repeated studies have concluded that it can achieve positive results. A 2016 meta-analysis of clinical research found that in-person and online CBT worked equally well for a wide variety of anxiety disorders.
Takeaway
Completing anxiety worksheets can help you learn more about your psychology while building effective strategies for managing and reducing your symptoms. Some worksheets place more emphasis on analyzing your thoughts and feelings while others aim to develop wellness skills such as mindfulness. You may benefit most from trying several kinds of anxiety worksheets and seeing which ones you find most helpful.
The information on this page is not intended to be a substitution for diagnosis, treatment, or informed professional advice. You should not take any action or avoid taking any action without consulting with a qualified mental health professional. For more information, please read our terms of use.
Search
Get the support you need from one of our therapistsGet started