The Catching Your Thoughts (CYP) worksheet supports young clients in recognizing and recording automatic thoughts, facilitating cognitive restructuring.
Offers theory, guidance, and prompts for mental health professionals. Downloads are in Fillable PDF format where appropriate.
Includes client-friendly guidance. Downloads are in Fillable PDF format where appropriate.
An editable Microsoft PowerPoint version of the resource.
This worksheet is designed for a young audience, focusing on helping them identify and understand automatic thoughts, situations triggering these thoughts, and their emotional responses. It serves as a practical tool for clinicians to guide cognitive restructuring. Therapists can use it as a springboard for conversations about how thoughts influence feelings, introducing the foundational cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) principle that while we may not choose our first thought, we can learn to evaluate and respond to it.
Automatic thoughts can significantly impact emotional well-being. Catching Your Thoughts enables clinicians to:
Managing overwhelming worries and catastrophizing thoughts.
Addressing cognitive distortions such as discounting positives.
Challenging thoughts of inadequacy and low self-worth.
Enhancing emotional awareness and regulation.
Encourage clients to notice strong emotions as triggers for automatic thoughts.
Record the context using "Who? What? When? Where?".
Catalog emotions with intensity ratings from 0 to 10.
Reflect on the thoughts, images, or memories preceding the feelings.
Use the gathered data to assist in cognitive restructuring exercises.
Guide clients in reframing thoughts with focus on accuracy.
Foster ongoing usage of the worksheet to track and manage thought patterns.
Catching Your Thoughts is a CBT self-monitoring record for young people. Self-monitoring helps clients become aware of the links between situations, thoughts, and emotional responses (Beck et al., 1979), while thought records supports the process of identifying, evaluating, and restructuring maladaptive cognitions (Beck & Beck, 1995).
Self-monitoring in CBT is grounded in Beck’s cognitive model, which posits that automatic thoughts — quick, situation-specific interpretations — have a powerful influence on emotion and behavior. When distorted or negatively biased, these thoughts can contribute to psychological distress across a range of disorders. Recording these thoughts enables clients to notice patterns, reflect on the accuracy of their appraisals, and consider more balanced alternatives.
This tool is particularly useful for young clients, who often benefit from external structure and concrete language when learning CBT skills (Kendall, 2000). The prompts guide children and adolescents to break down emotionally charged moments into component parts: the situation, their feelings, and the thoughts that preceded them. This process lays the groundwork for cognitive restructuring, which involves testing the helpfulness and accuracy of automatic thoughts and generating more adaptive responses.
In addition, using a thought record encourages cognitive decentering — the ability to view thoughts as mental events rather than truths—which has been shown to improve emotional regulation and reduce vulnerability to mood disorders (Teasdale et al., 2002). By repeatedly engaging in this structured reflection, clients build metacognitive awareness and learn to respond to their thoughts with greater flexibility.
