Record and reflect on social situations to identify the role of self-focused attention, safety behaviours, and predictions.
Complete this after a social situation that caused anxiety. Focus on what you predicted would happen vs. what actually happened, and what safety behaviours you used.
Use during the intervention phase to collect detailed data about social situations where anxiety occurs. The record helps identify the specific appraisals, safety behaviours, self-focused attention, and post-event processing that maintain the client's social anxiety.
Explain that recording social situations in detail helps identify the specific patterns that keep social anxiety going. Complete one example collaboratively in session before assigning as between-session work.
For clients with high avoidance, start by recording situations they managed to enter, even briefly, before expanding to avoided situations. For clients who find real-time recording impractical in social situations, a brief post-situation record within an hour is acceptable.
Avoid if the client has not yet developed a formulation-based understanding of their social anxiety. Without this framework, the record may simply document distress without generating therapeutically useful data.
The most clinically useful entries are those where the client can identify the specific safety behaviour used and its unintended consequences (e.g., avoiding eye contact leading to appearing disinterested, which confirms the feared social outcome). Use these entries to design targeted behavioural experiments.
Suitable for clients working with social anxiety, safety behaviours, self-focused attention, predictions. This tool can be used as a standalone worksheet or as part of a structured homework plan.
Create a free account to access 10 professional CBT tools per month.
Compare your internal self-image with how you actually appear on video to challenge distorted self-perception in social anxiety.
Track changes in a specific social belief across multiple experiments — building cumulative evidence for an updated view of yourself in social situations.
Compare the effects of self-focused attention vs external focus during social situations to test whether self-focus makes anxiety worse.
Monitor and challenge the post-mortem rumination that follows social situations — a key maintenance factor in social anxiety.