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Track gradual reduction in body checking behaviours — setting targets, monitoring frequency, and recording what happens when you check less.
Set a target for reducing a specific checking behaviour each week. Record how often you checked, whether you met the target, and what happened to your anxiety. Build evidence that reducing checking doesn't lead to the feared outcome.
Use when body checking has been identified as a maintaining safety behaviour in health anxiety. The diary tracks checking episodes to increase awareness of their frequency, triggers, and consequences, and supports graded reduction as part of a behavioural experiment.
Explain that many people with health worries check their body without fully realising how often they do it. Frame the diary as a way to bring these automatic behaviours into awareness, which is the first step toward making a choice about whether to continue them.
For clients with multiple checking behaviours, focus on one or two key behaviours initially rather than attempting to reduce all simultaneously. For clients whose checking is habitual and automatic, introduce a brief mindful pause before checking to build awareness.
Ensure appropriate medical investigations have been completed so the client is not being asked to stop monitoring a symptom that genuinely requires attention. The goal is to reduce anxiety-driven checking, not appropriate health self-management.
The diary often reveals that checking frequency is much higher than the client realises, which itself can be motivating for change. Track the relationship between checking frequency and anxiety levels to demonstrate that checking provides diminishing returns and often increases preoccupation rather than reducing it.
Suitable for clients working with health anxiety, checking reduction, response prevention, cbt, graded reduction. This tool can be used as a standalone worksheet or as part of a structured homework plan.
Create a free account to access 10 worksheets per month.
Track health anxiety episodes — the trigger, misinterpretation, anxiety level, safety behaviour used, and the actual outcome.
Test how attention to the body creates and amplifies sensations — demonstrating that body scanning is part of the problem, not the solution.
Track urges to seek reassurance, whether you resisted, and what happened — building evidence that you can tolerate uncertainty without reassurance.
Weigh up the costs and benefits of specific health anxiety behaviours — checking, Googling, reassurance-seeking — to build motivation for change.