CBT records
Activity and avoidance log for seeing what anxiety has taken
One week, day by day, with a column for what you did and a column for what the anxiety talked you out of. At the bottom you choose one thing to take back.
A4, free, no sign-up. The PDF is tagged for screen readers.
Avoidance rarely feels like a decision. Each small change, such as shopping late at night or
declining an invitation, is reasonable on its own, and the log makes the pattern visible.
Seen together across a week, they show how much of ordinary life the anxiety is now
arranging.
Who it suits and when it is used
The sheet is for adults with panic and agoraphobia, social anxiety or generalised anxiety,
and it is useful early in treatment, before any goals are agreed. A week of this log picks
up the small changes as well as the big ones, which are easy to leave out when you think
about avoidance in general.
What a day might look like
Example day | Day | What I did | What I avoided or left early | How I felt afterwards |
|---|
| Wed | Worked from home. Walked the dog round the block | Did the big shop at 10pm instead of after work. Left Jo’s birthday drinks after twenty minutes | Relieved in the car, then flat and annoyed with myself |
Count something as avoided if you changed it because of the anxiety, not only if you
cancelled it, so going at a different time, leaving early or taking someone with you all
belong in the middle column. Relief followed by a flat feeling, as in this example, is worth
recording.
Two things to watch for
The first is filling in the whole week from memory on the evening before the session, which
leaves the middle column thin, when a couple of minutes each night is enough. The second is
choosing too large a first step. If the thing you want back is a weekend away, the first
step might be a meal at a restaurant forty minutes from home.
The idea that avoidance keeps fear going has strong support, set out in a 2015 review by
Krypotos and colleagues, though much of that research uses laboratory tasks that may not
capture the slow, partial avoidance a log like this shows.