General CBT Skills worksheets
41 evidence-based resources for General CBT Skills. Preview any worksheet, then assign it to a client as an interactive digital worksheet.
Written by Tarun Vermani, Trainee Clinical Psychologist Last reviewed
These are the transdiagnostic tools that sit underneath the disorder-specific protocols. The Cross-Sectional Formulation maps a single moment across the situation, thoughts, emotions, physical sensations and behaviour — the five-part model set out by Padesky and Mooney (1990), related to but distinct from Williams' Five Areas approach (Williams & Garland, 2002) — while the Longitudinal Formulation (Beckian) traces the developmental pathway from early experience through core beliefs and assumptions to present-day maintaining behaviour.
The intervention skills follow: the 7-Column Thought Record for cognitive restructuring, the Behavioural Experiment Worksheet for the prediction-testing method codified by Bennett-Levy and colleagues (2004), the Graded Exposure Hierarchy with a matching safety behaviours drop plan, structured problem solving, and a Relapse Prevention Plan as the end-of-therapy blueprint. Two skills-led models sit here rather than in a disorder hub: the two-factor model of specific phobia (Mowrer, 1960) and the cognitive model of anger (Novaco, 1975).
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All General CBT Skills worksheets
Showing 30 of 41 resources
General CBT Skills
Safety Plan
A structured 6-step safety plan for crisis intervention and suicide prevention.
General CBT Skills
Longitudinal Formulation (Beckian)
Map the developmental pathway from early experiences through core beliefs and rules to the current maintenance cycle.
General CBT Skills
Cross-Sectional Formulation (5-Area Model)
Map how thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and behaviour interact around a triggering situation using the CBT 5-area model.
General CBT Skills
5-Column Thought Record
The classic cognitive restructuring tool. Identify automatic thoughts, evaluate the evidence, and develop more balanced alternatives.
General CBT Skills
7-Column Thought Record
The full extended thought record with evidence for and against, balanced thought, and re-rating of emotion.
General CBT Skills
Cognitive Distortions Checklist
Identify common cognitive distortions present in your automatic thoughts.
General CBT Skills
Behavioural Experiment Worksheet
Design, carry out, and reflect on behavioural experiments to test anxious predictions and unhelpful beliefs.
General CBT Skills
Values Assessment
Explore what matters most to you across key life domains to guide goal-setting and behavioural activation.
General CBT Skills
Belief Survey Worksheet
Gather normalising evidence by surveying others about whether they experience the same body sensations and fears — challenging the belief that your experience is abnormal.
General CBT Skills
Relapse Prevention Plan
A comprehensive plan for maintaining progress after therapy — covering warning signs, coping strategies, and an action plan for setbacks.
General CBT Skills
Safety Behaviours Identification & Drop Plan
Identify safety behaviours that maintain anxiety, understand their costs, and plan experiments to gradually drop them.
General CBT Skills
Theory A vs Theory B
Compare two explanations for your difficulties — the threat-based explanation (Theory A) and the anxiety-based explanation (Theory B) — to guide treatment focus.
General CBT Skills
Responsibility Pie Chart
Challenge inflated responsibility by listing all contributing factors to a negative event and assigning realistic percentages.
General CBT Skills
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Weigh up the short-term and long-term advantages and disadvantages of a behaviour, belief, or decision.
General CBT Skills
Exposure Practice Record
Log exposure exercises with SUDS ratings, safety behaviours dropped, and key learning points.
General CBT Skills
Graded Exposure Hierarchy
Build a hierarchy of feared situations ranked by anxiety level, from least to most challenging, to guide graded exposure work.
General CBT Skills
Problem-Solving Worksheet
Work through a structured problem-solving process: define the problem, brainstorm solutions, evaluate options, and create an action plan.
General CBT Skills
Positive Data Record
Collect evidence that contradicts a negative core belief and supports a more balanced alternative — building a new perspective over time.
General CBT Skills
Early Warning Signs & Action Plan
Identify your personal early warning signs across thinking, mood, behaviour, and physical health, and create a stepped action plan for responding.
General CBT Skills
Values & Activity Alignment
Identify your core values and assess how well your current activities align with them — then plan changes to close the gap.
General CBT Skills
Continuum Thinking Worksheet
Challenge all-or-nothing thinking by placing beliefs, qualities, or experiences on a continuum rather than in black-and-white categories.
General CBT Skills
Activity Pacing Worksheet
Plan a paced approach to activity — balancing rest and engagement to avoid boom-bust cycles in chronic pain, CFS, or depression.
General CBT Skills
Imagery Rescripting Worksheet
Prepare for and process an imagery rescripting session — recording the original image, its meaning, and the rescripted version.
General CBT Skills
Vicious Flower Formulation
A transdiagnostic maintenance formulation: the central fear or problem in the middle, with the processes that keep it going — avoidance, safety behaviours, self-focused attention, reassurance-seeking, unhelpful thinking, and physical sensations — drawn as petals that each feed back to the centre.
General CBT Skills
Overcoming Procrastination
Procrastination as emotion-avoidance: understand what's behind your putting-off, answer the 'task-interfering' thoughts with task-oriented ones, and make starting trivially easy with a tiny first step and a breakdown of the task.
General CBT Skills
Overcoming Perfectionism
A transdiagnostic worksheet for clinical perfectionism — where self-worth depends on meeting demanding standards. Maps the rules, the maintaining behaviours and their cost, broadens the basis of self-worth, and sets up a behavioural experiment that tests what happens when you ease a rule.
General CBT Skills
Assertiveness and Boundary-Setting
Build the skills to set clear boundaries and communicate assertively - knowing your rights, challenging the beliefs that get in the way, and practising new responses one small step at a time.
General CBT Skills
Anger Trigger and Response Record
A monitoring record that maps anger onto a clear A-B-C structure: the trigger (antecedent), the thoughts and meaning you attach to it (appraisal), and what you did and what followed (consequence). Tracking the small irritations as well as the bigger flare-ups helps you and your therapist spot the patterns that keep anger going, and build a personal plan for handling it differently.
General CBT Skills
Thought Sorting: Facts and Interpretations
Pull a stressful situation apart into what you actually know, what is uncertain, and the meanings you have added - then plan a way to check your leading interpretation out in the real world.
General CBT Skills
Emotion Regulation Skills
A practical CBT skills worksheet for working with strong emotions, drawing on DBT-style strategies. It follows three steps - identify the emotion, understand what is driving it, and choose a skill to help it settle - so that you can respond to difficult feelings on purpose rather than being swept along by them.
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Request a worksheetFrequently asked questions
When should I use a cross-sectional rather than a longitudinal formulation?
Cross-sectional formulation suits a specific recent episode and makes the maintaining cycle visible quickly, early in therapy. A longitudinal formulation earns its place once the pattern recurs across situations, when core beliefs and assumptions are clearly driving it, or when early experience needs to be part of the shared understanding.
Why do the phobia and anger models sit in this area?
Because both are skills-led rather than protocol-led. The two-factor model of specific phobia (Mowrer, 1960) leads straight into graded exposure, and Novaco's cognitive model of anger (1975) into trigger, appraisal and arousal work — so the worksheets that implement them are the general exposure, monitoring and restructuring tools already collected here.
What belongs in a relapse prevention blueprint?
In most protocols: what the difficulty was, the formulation in the client's own words, what helped and why, early warning signs, a specific plan for acting on them, and goals for continuing the work alone. Drafting it with the client across the final sessions matters more than the form it takes.
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