Clinical Resource Library

Search and filter 40+ evidence-linked therapist guides, client-ready worksheets, and research digests. Every item is reviewed before publishing.

38 psychologist-authored worksheets and clinician guides, grouped by clinical area.

ACT

  • 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding Worksheet — A sensory grounding handout that walks clients through naming five things they can see, four they can hear, three they can touch, two they can smell, and one they can taste, anchoring attention in the present moment when the mind is caught up in rumination, worry, or memory.
  • Acceptance & Willingness Practice Sheet — A daily practice sheet that distinguishes "clean" pain — the natural discomfort of being alive — from "dirty" pain — the additional suffering created by fighting, avoiding, or fusing with that discomfort — and asks clients to rate their willingness (0–10) to make room for a feeling in service of what matters to them.
  • ACT Matrix Worksheet — A structured, fillable version of the ACT Matrix (Polk and Schoendorff): a four-quadrant map that helps a client see, on one page, how much of their day is organised around moving away from discomfort rather than toward what matters to them, without needing ACT terminology explained first.
  • Cognitive Defusion Worksheet — A structured worksheet guiding clients through six defusion techniques — repeating the thought aloud, singing it, prefacing it with "I notice I am having the thought that…", writing it on a card, imagining it as a leaf on a stream, and physicalising it — to loosen the grip of a fused, unhelpful thought without trying to argue it away.
  • Committed Action Plan Worksheet — An expanded committed-action worksheet that helps clients set one specific, values-aligned SMART goal per life domain — relationships, work, health, personal growth — anticipate the internal barriers likely to arise for each, and track willingness-based action daily over a two-week period.
  • Creative Hopelessness: The Struggle Switch Worksheet — A worksheet built around the "struggle switch" metaphor: when the switch is on, the client fights, avoids, or argues with an uncomfortable feeling; when it is off, the feeling is allowed to be there without being fought. The exercise audits everything the client has already tried to control an inner experience and whether any of it has worked long-term.
  • Passengers on the Bus Worksheet — The classic ACT "passengers on the bus" metaphor in worksheet form: the client is the driver, and difficult thoughts and feelings are loud, unwelcome passengers who can ride along but cannot take the wheel. The worksheet asks the client to name their own passengers and identify whether they have been stopping the bus, arguing with passengers, or driving on toward what matters regardless.
  • Self-as-Context: The Observer Exercise — A guided experiential worksheet that helps clients discover the "observing self" — the stable, continuous sense of awareness that watches thoughts and feelings come and go without being identical to them — as a resource distinct from whichever thought or feeling is currently present.
  • Values Clarification Worksheet — A foundational ACT planning framework to help clients explore, define, and sort their core self-directed values across major life domains. This worksheet serves as a behavioral guide, aligning daily tasks with meaning rather than escape.
  • Values-to-Action Committed Step Planner — A bridge worksheet between values clarification and behaviour change: it helps clients translate an identified value into one small, SMART, values-aligned step, while explicitly planning for the thoughts and feelings that will try to stop them — and logging their willingness to act with those thoughts and feelings present, rather than waiting for them to pass.

Anxiety

  • Anxiety Cycle Mapping Worksheet — A collaborative, whiteboard-style formulation tool that maps a client's anxiety onto three connected elements — physical sensations, catastrophising thoughts and avoidance behaviour — so the cycle that keeps anxiety going becomes visible in one diagram rather than three separate conversations.
  • Worry Postponement Worksheet — An actionable daily logging sheet based on Wells' Metacognitive Therapy and Borkovec's stimulus control. It trains clients with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) to distinguish between practical, solvable problems and chronic, hypothetical worries.

Avoidance

  • Avoidance Cycle Worksheet — A highly visual, client-facing formulation worksheet mapping the negative reinforcement loop of anxiety. It demonstrates how escaping or avoiding a feared scenario brings immediate distress reduction, but actively prevents cognitive re-evaluation and shrinks the client's life space.
  • Safety Behaviour Drop Plan — A structured worksheet for planning the gradual, hierarchical elimination of safety behaviours — listing each behaviour, the function it serves, the feared consequence of dropping it, and a stepwise reduction plan paired with specific exposure exercises.
  • Safety Behaviours Worksheet — A highly structured clinical tool to audit and drop "stealth" safety behaviors (reassurance-seeking, holding escape medications, sit close to doors). These habits are critical to identify because they active block processing of expectancy violation and keep fear loops alive.

CBT

  • ABCDE Thought Record — A structured five-column thought record — Activating event, Beliefs, Consequences, Disputation, Effective new belief — that guides clients from a triggering event through the automatic belief it produced, its emotional and behavioural consequences, a Socratic disputation of the belief, and finally a more balanced alternative belief.
  • Behavioural Experiment Worksheet — A cornerstone CBT worksheet that acts as a structured scientific record. It guides clients to treat anxious cognitions not as facts, but as hypotheses that can be tested in the real world through deliberate empirical testing.
  • Downward Arrow Technique Worksheet — A structured, column-by-column record of the downward arrow technique: a Socratic drill that traces a specific automatic thought down to the underlying core belief that generates it, so a belief such as "I am not good enough" becomes explicit and available for cognitive restructuring rather than staying implicit.
  • Identifying Cognitive Distortions Worksheet — A reference worksheet listing ten common cognitive distortions — all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralisation, mental filter, disqualifying the positive, jumping to conclusions, magnification, emotional reasoning, should statements, labelling, and personalisation — each with a client-friendly example, to build recognition of distortions as they occur.
  • Intolerance of Uncertainty Worksheet — A highly structured cognitive behavioral worksheet designed to address the intolerance of unexpected or ambiguous outcomes. It guides clients to identify subtle checking, checking apps, googling, and reassurance-seeking habits, and designs structured experiments to build tolerance for uncertainty.

CFT

  • Compassionate Image Building Worksheet — A guided imagery worksheet for building an ideal compassionate image — carrying the qualities of wisdom, strength, warmth and non-judgment — as an internal resource clients can call on for self-soothing and affect regulation between sessions.
  • Compassionate Letter Writing Guide — A structured guide for writing a letter to oneself in the voice of an ideal compassionate other — wise, strong, warm, and non-judgmental — that addresses the client's suffering directly, validates the struggle, and offers encouragement toward growth.
  • Compassionate Self-Correction Worksheet — A worksheet that helps clients distinguish hostile self-criticism, which activates the threat system, from compassionate self-correction, which activates the soothing system — and guides them through reframing a specific instance of self-criticism into an honest but warm, encouraging alternative.
  • Soothing Rhythm Breathing Practice Sheet — A daily practice sheet for soothing rhythm breathing — roughly five to six breaths per minute, with an extended exhalation — paired with tracking of body posture, facial expression, and felt sense of parasympathetic activation, to build the affect-regulation foundation that later CFT compassion work depends on.
  • Three Systems Worksheet (Threat, Drive, Soothing) — A printable, proportionally-drawn version of Gilbert's three circles: a shared formulation tool that maps the threat and self-protection system, the drive and resource-seeking system and the soothing and affiliative system, so a client can see their own imbalance rather than reading it as personal failing.

Depression

  • Activity-Values Mapping Worksheet — A worksheet that helps depressed clients map small, planned activities to personal values across life domains — relationships, work, leisure, health — increasing motivation through meaning rather than waiting for motivation to appear first.
  • Behavioural Activation Worksheet — A structured behavioural activation worksheet built on the functional-analytic model of depression, not the older pleasant-activity scheduling grid it is often confused with. It combines baseline activity and mood monitoring, TRAP/TRAC avoidance analysis and values-linked activity scheduling, with adaptations for ADHD and autistic clients built in rather than added on afterwards.

Exposure

  • ERP Inhibitory Learning Log — A structured log for tracking Exposure and Response Prevention exercises across each trial: the trigger, the client's predicted outcome, which safety behaviours were deliberately dropped, what actually happened, an expectancy-violation rating, and which generalisation cues were varied.
  • Expectancy Violation Worksheet — A worksheet that structures every exposure exercise around an explicit, gradable prediction — what the client expects to happen, and how strongly they believe it (0–100%) — compared afterward with what actually happened, so the size of the mismatch, not the drop in distress, is what the client and clinician track.
  • Exposure Hierarchy Worksheet — A systematic framework grounded in modern Inhibitory Learning Theory. Rather than focusing on simple habituation (waiting for distress to decline), this protocol is designed to systematically violate catastrophic expectations across multiple environmental contexts.
  • Generalisation Cues Checklist — A checklist of twelve generalisation cues — time of day, location, social context, mood state, interoceptive state, and more — for clients and clinicians to vary deliberately across exposure trials, so learning that a situation is safe extends beyond the exact conditions it was first tested in.
  • Understanding Threat and Extinction Handout — A client-facing companion to exposure therapy that explains, in plain language, why anxiety during exposure is expected and useful, and how staying in a feared situation without escaping or using safety behaviours teaches the brain that the situation is safe.

Health Anxiety

  • Health Anxiety Worksheet — A printable clinician worksheet for health anxiety, sometimes called illness anxiety. It maps the maintenance cycle one behaviour at a time across body checking, symptom searching, reassurance seeking and avoidance, then plans graded withdrawal using expectancy violation rather than endurance. The layout mirrors the site's Expectancy Violation Worksheet, so a clinician already using that format is not learning a second one.

Panic

  • Interoceptive Exposure Worksheet — A structured record for planning and running interoceptive exposure exercises: deliberately inducing feared bodily sensations such as dizziness, breathlessness or a racing heart so a client can test a catastrophic prediction against what actually happens, rather than simply waiting for the sensation to pass.
  • Panic Cycle Worksheet — A visual psychoeducational diagram and personal mapping tool based on Clark's classic cognitive model of panic. This template helps clients map how benign somatic sensations are misinterpreted as immediate life threats, creating a spiral of intense physical panic.

Perfectionism

  • Deconstructing Perfectionism Worksheet — A structured worksheet that separates helpful standards (which motivate and bring satisfaction) from unhelpful perfectionism (rigid, punitive, driven by fear of failure), and guides the client through a genuine cost-benefit analysis of a specific rule before rewriting it as a flexible, compassionate guideline.

Relapse Prevention

  • Relapse Prevention Blueprint — A client-held blueprint completed collaboratively near the end of treatment, distinguishing a temporary, manageable "lapse" from a full "relapse" back into old patterns, and setting out specific early warning signs, coping resources, and who to contact if those signs appear.

Self-Compassion

  • Fear of Compassion Handout — A psychoeducational handout explaining why self-compassion can feel threatening rather than soothing for clients with histories of trauma or emotional neglect — the "backdraft" phenomenon, where opening the door to warmth briefly intensifies distress before it settles — with guidance on approaching compassion gradually rather than avoiding it.