Your Free Cognitive Restructuring Worksheet

There may be a reason you keep doing it.

Putting something off can bring immediate relief. Checking your phone can offer a welcome distraction. Going over your work again can feel reassuring. Those benefits belong on the page too. Alongside them, you can write down the costs—such as lost time, unfinished work or frustration later. Seeing both sides on paper gives you something specific to examine. Which benefits matter to you? Which costs have become too high? Could a different approach meet the same need?

When the same thought keeps coming back

Sometimes a thought keeps going round in your head, and thinking about it some more doesn’t get you anywhere. This is where it can help to put it on paper and work through it, one question at a time.

This seven-column thought record gives you a structure for doing that. You’ll look at what happened, how you interpreted it, and what evidence you have. The aim is to arrive at an interpretation that accounts for the facts—including the uncomfortable ones.

Pick one specific situation and one thought to start with.

1. What happened?

Describe the situation. Where were you? Who was involved? What was said or done?

Imagine you’re describing a recording of the event. What would someone actually see or hear?

“She hasn’t replied to the email I sent on Monday” describes what happened. “She’s ignoring me because she thinks I’m incompetent” adds an interpretation. We’ll look at that in the next step.

2. What went through your mind?

Write down the actual sentence that came into your head. It might be:

“I’m going to mess this up.”
“She thinks I’m incompetent.”
“Nothing is ever going to change.”

If several thoughts turn up, start with the one that feels most upsetting.

How strongly do you believe it right now? Give it a rating from 0% to 100%, where 100% means you’re completely convinced.

3. What did you feel?

Try to be a little more specific than “bad.” Were you anxious, frustrated, ashamed, angry, disappointed, sad or helpless?

You might have felt several emotions. Write them down and rate how intense each one felt from 0% to 100%.

These are your estimates. You don’t need to agonise over whether something was 65% or 70%.

4. What evidence supports the thought?

Give your concern a fair hearing. What do you actually know that supports it?

If you think you’re going to struggle with a task, perhaps you haven’t done it before, or you’re missing an important skill. That belongs here.

Try to distinguish a fact from another thought. “I made two mistakes in the report” is evidence. “I always get everything wrong” is another conclusion that needs examining.

5. What evidence does not support the thought?

Now look for information you may have left out.

Have there been exceptions? Have you handled something similar before? Are you making a prediction, or assuming you know what somebody else thinks?

In the email example, perhaps this person often takes several days to reply. Perhaps their previous feedback has been positive. Those facts matter too.

Another possible explanation can help you question your certainty, but it is still a possibility. You don’t have to replace one assumption with another.

6. What is a more balanced interpretation?

Read both sides. What could you say now that takes all of that information into account?

For example, “She thinks I’m incompetent” might become:

“I don’t know why she hasn’t replied. She has taken a few days to respond before, and her previous feedback has been positive. I can follow up if I haven’t heard from her by Friday.”

Use words you can actually believe. If your new thought feels forced, go back to the evidence and make it more precise.

Then rate how strongly you believe this new interpretation from 0% to 100%.

7. Check the emotion again

Return to the emotions you wrote down in step three. Rate their intensity again, using the same 0% to 100% scale.

Has anything shifted?

You might notice a clear difference, a small change, or no change yet. The rating is information, not a score you need to improve.

Sometimes you’ll find that your concern is realistic. Then the useful next step may be to solve a problem, prepare for a difficult conversation or ask for support.

With practice, you’re learning to pause and examine a thought before letting it determine what happens next.

What it is and why it works:

Cognitive restructuring is a core CBT technique that helps people identify automatic or unhelpful thoughts, examine the evidence for and against them, and develop a more balanced interpretation of the situation. Using a structured worksheet can make this process more concrete by separating the situation, thoughts, emotional responses, evidence, and alternative appraisal, while also allowing people to compare distress before and after the exercise. Repeated practice can improve awareness of thinking patterns, support more realistic appraisals, and reduce emotional distress and avoidance across a range of psychological difficulties (Wenzel, 2017; Wiltsey Stirman et al., 2018; Ezawa & Hollon, 2023; Santos et al., 2024). 

The mechanism appears to involve both cognitive reappraisal and emotion regulation. Psychologically, restructuring changes the meaning assigned to a situation by encouraging people to question the accuracy and usefulness of their initial interpretation and generate a more adaptive one (McRae et al., 2012; Clark, 2022). Neuroimaging research suggests that reappraisal recruits prefrontal and parietal systems involved in cognitive control, planning and reinterpretation, while altering activity and connectivity in emotion-related regions such as the amygdala (Ochsner et al., 2004; Berboth & Morawetz, 2021; Sutoh et al., 2015). Rather than simply “switching off” emotion, the process appears to depend on coordinated interaction between regulatory and emotion-processing networks, allowing the emotional response to change as the appraisal of the situation changes (Goldin et al., 2013; Berboth & Morawetz, 2021).

References

Berboth, S., & Morawetz, C. (2021). Amygdala-prefrontal connectivity during emotion regulation: A meta-analysis of psychophysiological interactions. Neuropsychologia, 153, 107767. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2021.107767

Clark, D. A. (2022). Cognitive reappraisal. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cbpra.2022.02.018

Ezawa, I. D., & Hollon, S. D. (2023). Cognitive restructuring and psychotherapy outcome: A meta-analytic review. Psychotherapy. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000474

Goldin, P. R., Ziv, M., Jazaieri, H., et al. (2013). Impact of cognitive behavioral therapy for social anxiety disorder on the neural dynamics of cognitive reappraisal of negative self-beliefs: Randomized clinical trial. JAMA Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2013.234

McRae, K., Ciesielski, B., & Gross, J. J. (2012). Unpacking cognitive reappraisal: Goals, tactics, and outcomes. Emotion, 12, 250–255. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026351

Ochsner, K. N., Ray, R. D., Cooper, J. C., et al. (2004). For better or for worse: Neural systems supporting the cognitive down- and up-regulation of negative emotion. NeuroImage, 23, 483–499. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2004.06.030

Santos, B., Pinho, L., Nogueira, M. J., et al. (2024). Cognitive restructuring during depressive symptoms: A scoping review. Healthcare, 12, 1292. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare12131292

Sutoh, C., Matsuzawa, D., Hirano, Y., et al. (2015). Transient contribution of left posterior parietal cortex to cognitive restructuring. Scientific Reports, 5, 9199. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep09199

Wenzel, A. (2017). Basic strategies of cognitive behavioral therapy. Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 40, 597–609. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psc.2017.07.001

Wiltsey Stirman, S., Marques, L., Creed, T. A., & La Bash, H. (2018). Leveraging routine clinical materials and mobile technology to assess CBT fidelity: The Innovative Methods to Assess Psychotherapy Practices (imAPP) study. Implementation Science. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-018-0756-3