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Track pain levels alongside activity, mood, and coping strategies to identify patterns.
Record pain levels, activity, mood, and what you did to cope at regular intervals. This reveals patterns — which activities help, which aggravate, and how mood and pain interact.
Introduce early in treatment to establish baseline data on pain patterns and identify relationships between pain, activity, mood, sleep, and medication use. Continue throughout treatment to track progress and identify patterns.
Frame as a tool for understanding pain patterns rather than proving pain is real. Explain that pain fluctuates, and understanding what influences these fluctuations helps identify modifiable factors. Emphasise recording both increases and decreases in pain.
For clients with widespread pain or multiple pain sites, focus on the most distressing area or use an overall rating. For those who find pain rating scales meaningless, use functional impact ratings instead (how much did pain interfere with activities?). Simplify for clients who find detailed recording burdensome.
If monitoring increases pain focus and catastrophising, discuss this in session and consider reducing monitoring frequency. Some clients benefit from monitoring activity and mood without a pain rating, to shift focus from pain to function.
Look for patterns linking pain to activity levels (boom-bust cycle), sleep quality, stress, weather, and social context. Also note the client's use of pain medication — patterns of use often reveal important information about coping strategies and beliefs about pain.
Suitable for clients working with chronic pain, pain diary, cbt, monitoring, pain management. This tool can be used as a standalone worksheet or as part of a structured homework plan.
Create a free account to access 10 worksheets per month.
Plan a gradual, time-based increase in activity from a sustainable baseline — not guided by pain, but by a pre-set schedule.
Create a plan for managing pain flare-ups — covering prevention, early action, and what to do at each level of severity.
Identify and challenge catastrophic thoughts about pain — helplessness, magnification, and rumination.
A biopsychosocial formulation for chronic pain — mapping biological, psychological, and social maintaining factors.