Anxiety Worksheets

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 worksheets designed to help the user assess and modify their anxiety. These worksheets might enable you to gain new insights into your condition and suggest strategies for change.

Worksheets for anxiety disorders can use 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 anxious thinking or behavior. You might also benefit from anxiety 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.

Psychoeducation for anxiety disorders

• Overestimating threats
• Remaining on constant alert for dangers or negative scenarios
• Intense fear in response to minimal dangers
• Hypersensitivity to stimuli
• Avoiding worrying situations

These patterns can cause a cycle of anxiety where:

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 anxiety that has 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 anxiety 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. An anxiety 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 worksheets that may work best for you.

Anxiety worksheets to help with symptom management

Worksheets allow you to track, evaluate, and understand symptoms of anxiety. The following are common types of anxiety worksheets. 

Symptom self-assessment worksheets

Not only can this help your therapist assess the nature and severity of your anxiety condition, but it can also help you take a clear-eyed look at what you’re dealing with. The simple act of describing your anxiety 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 anxiety symptoms you feel during a given day or week. Noting down when and where you experience particular anxiety symptoms could reveal your specific triggers and patterns.

Thinking styles worksheets

• 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.'

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 anxiety 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, the worksheet 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 anxiety 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 anxious.

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.

Personal strengths and gratitude resources

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

Exploring therapy for anxiety

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. 

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.