The Urges – Self-Monitoring Record is an easy-to-use worksheet that helps clients observe and document problematic urges.
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.
The Urges – Self-Monitoring Record worksheet is designed to help clients capture information about their urges and cravings. It includes columns to record information about: situational context; the focus and intensity of urges; cognitive, emotional, and physiological reactions accompanying urges; responses to the urges; and consequences of those actions.
Self-monitoring serves as both an assessment tool and an intervention. It supports:
Monitoring urges to use substances.
Understanding compulsive behaviors and triggers such as skin picking.
Monitoring thoughts and urges related to self-injury.
Tracking urges to binge or purge.
Pinpoint a specific target behavior for monitoring.
Ensure monitoring occurs shortly after urges to increase accuracy.
Record situational triggers for urges.
Gauge the strength and nature of the urge.
Capture thoughts, feelings, and body sensations accompanying urges.
Document actions, including whether the urge was resisted or acted upon.
Optionally explore consequences of the client's responses to an urge.
Self-monitoring is a technique in which clients learn to systematically observe and record specific targets such as their own thoughts, body feelings, emotions, and behaviors. The aim is to improve clients’ awareness of their experiences and the contexts in which they occur, in order to help them gain insight into their symptoms and difficulties. Self-monitoring supports collaboration between the therapist and client, and creates opportunities to formulate and test hypotheses about these difficulties. Self-monitoring is usually introduced early in therapy, and provides an inexpensive and continuous measure of problem symptoms and behaviors throughout treatment.
Practitioners should help clients identify clear targets for self-monitoring, enabling focused data collection. Self-monitoring tends to be more accurate when clients are aware that what they record will be compared with therapist observation or checked in some way (Korotitsch & Nelson-Gray, 1999). To support this, self-monitoring records should be reviewed in each session and the data should contribute to client-therapist collaboration, formulation and intervention planning.
