Strengths spotting worksheet
Summary
Use this countering negative thoughts thought log to help clients identify, evaluate, and reframe cognitive distortions like catastrophizing and all-or-nothing thinking.
Incorporating this CBT technique into your sessions strengthens client emotional regulation, improves self-esteem, and builds long-term resilience against negative thought patterns.
This downloadable countering negative thoughts worksheet can be used for in-session psychoeducation, collaborative exercises, homework assignments, or group therapy interventions.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can be a helpful intervention for clients who are stuck in negative thought patterns. This article provides an overview of countering negative thoughts, with examples.
We’ve included a free downloadable countering negative thoughts thought log to save to your electronic health record (EHR) for your practice.
What are the benefits of countering negative thoughts?
Countering negative thoughts is a CBT technique that helps to increase awareness of unhelpful thoughts and reframe them into more realistic and balanced thoughts.
Using this technique has several benefits, including:
Increases awareness of how these thoughts may be impacting the client’s emotions, behaviors, and perception of situations or events
Highlights common thought errors that may be contributing to mental health conditions, like anxiety or depression
Strengthens emotional regulation and distress tolerance skills
Improves mood, self-esteem, and resilience
Empowers clients with the skills to think more effectively about situations
For example, someone experiencing a stressful situation might be thinking to themselves, “I am so overwhelmed. There’s just no way I can handle this. It’s going to be a disaster.”
This example illustrates a thought error (cognitive distortion) known as catastrophizing, where individuals may overthink the worst possible outcome of a situation, often blowing it out of proportion. This may then lead to feelings of helplessness, anxiety, and depression. They may then give up before they’ve even tried to deal with the situation or challenge.
Some other common thought distortions include:
All-or-nothing thinking: Also called “black-and-white thinking,” this distortion is extreme thinking, like believing everybody hates you.
Emotional reasoning: This error involves the belief that feeling a certain way automatically means the thoughts associated with that feeling are true.
Labeling: Thinking that an isolated event or behavior shapes your view of a person as an absolute, both then and in all future interactions.
Mental filtering: This is a type of distorted thinking that focuses on failures and refuses to acknowledge successes. This distortion may also be referred to as “disqualifying the positive” because the person filters out any positive elements of the situation.
Personalization: This thought error involves taking things personally, even if they are not remotely related to the person, such as blaming yourself for a situation that is outside of your control.
Overgeneralization: Believing that one negative experience may repeat itself, using words like “always” and “never.”
“Should” statements: This distortion is often rooted in familial expectations and plays out in statements like things should or ought to be done a certain way.
Jumping to conclusions: Assuming what the other person is thinking or is about to do/behave. It may also involve making a pessimistic view of the future.
How to challenge negative thoughts
The way to counter negative thoughts includes the following simple steps:
Identify the thought.
Examine the evidence to support the thoughts.
Consider any cognitive distortions at play.
Reframe the thought in a more balanced way.
Examples of countering negative thoughts
Using the above example, a new way of thinking about the situation might be considering:
Is that thought true?
What evidence do I have to support this thought?
What are some examples of things I have overcome in the past?
Am I blowing things out of proportion?
Having reviewed the evidence and identified this as an example of catastrophic thinking, a reframed thought might be: “This may feel overwhelming, but you have overcome stressful situations before. The way you did that was by taking a breath and breaking it down into smaller and more manageable tasks.”
How to use the countering negative thoughts thought log
The downloadable countering negative thoughts thought log walks through this same process using a different scenario—receiving mixed feedback at work—to show how these steps apply across a range of situations, not just catastrophizing.
You can download and use the countering negative thoughts worksheet in several ways:
Use the countering negative thoughts worksheet to provide psychoeducation about automatic thoughts.
Complete the worksheet collaboratively in session, identifying the client’s automatic thoughts and providing countering negative thoughts examples.
Ask the client to reflect on the countering negative thoughts worksheet and complete the reflection questions between sessions and report their findings at their next therapy appointment.
Use the worksheet in a CBT group therapy session to encourage clients to identify and share the impact of their automatic thoughts.
Combine this worksheet with other CBT worksheets, such as our CBT triangle worksheet, CBT for anxiety worksheet, or our cognitive restructuring worksheet.
Share the worksheet with coworkers or leave copies in your office for clients to take home.
Use this worksheet to provide training to interns or supervisees.
Sources
Beck Institute. (2018). Testing Your Thoughts: Side One Worksheet.
Sokol, L., & Fox, M. G. (2020). The Comprehensive Clinician’s Guide to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. PESI.
U.S. National Library of Medicine. (2022). In brief: Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). InformedHealth.org [Internet].
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