NEUROATOMIC
// cognitive behavioural therapy

CBT thought record

The seven columns of a standard CBT thought record, fillable here instead of printable. Catch the automatic thought, tag the distortion, weigh the evidence, write a fairer sentence. Entries stay on your own device.

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What each label means
All-or-nothing
The thought allows only two settings, total success or total failure, and drops everything in between, so a decent but imperfect day gets filed as a bad one.
Catastrophising
The thought skips past the likely outcome to the worst one imaginable and then treats that worst case as the thing you now have to cope with.
Mind-reading
The thought treats a guess about what someone else is thinking as something you already know, without them having said it.
Fortune-telling
The thought states how the future will go as if it had already happened, so a prediction ends up weighed as though it were evidence.
Overgeneralising
The thought takes one occasion and stretches it into a rule about every occasion, usually with a word like always or never attached.
Emotional reasoning
The thought uses the strength of the feeling as proof that the feeling is accurate: it feels true, so it gets treated as true.
“Should” statements
The thought sets a rule about how you or other people ought to behave and then measures you against the rule rather than against what actually happened.
Labelling
The thought swaps a description of what someone did for a permanent name for who they are, so one action becomes a whole identity.
Mental filter
The thought picks out the single worst detail of a situation and stays on it until the rest of the situation stops counting.
Discounting the positive
The thought takes the bad parts at face value but explains the good parts away as luck, politeness or something that does not really count.
Personalising
The thought hands you the responsibility for an outcome that had several causes, most of which were never yours to control.
Magnifying
The thought inflates the size of a problem or a mistake, often while shrinking your capacity to handle it, so the two stop being proportionate.
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Saved records

Take your records with you

Everything below happens inside this page. Download my records writes a JSON file to your device; Load records from a file reads one back and adds to what is already here rather than overwriting it; Plain text gives you something to copy or print. Nothing is uploaded.

Not therapy, not a crisis service; if you are in danger, contact your local emergency number.

What a thought record actually does

A feeling that arrives “out of nowhere” usually arrived through a sentence. Something happened, your mind narrated it in about a fifth of a second, and the narration is what you reacted to. The narration is the automatic thought, and the reason it is hard to argue with is that you did not experience it as an argument — you experienced it as the situation.

The thought record is a way of slowing that sequence down until the sentence is visible as a sentence. It does that by splitting one blurred moment into columns you have to fill in one at a time: what happened, what you thought, what you felt and how strongly, what shape the thinking took, what the actual evidence is on both sides, and what a fairer sentence would be. The columns are the whole method. There is no clever trick hiding behind them.

The target is not a nicer thought. It is a more accurate one. “Everything will be fine” is not a balanced thought, it is another unevidenced claim pointing the other way, and minds tend to reject it just as fast. “A short reply probably means she's busy; I have no evidence I'm being fired, and I'll know more tomorrow” is a balanced thought, because you could show someone the reasons for it.

Where the seven columns come from

The form descends from the Daily Record of Dysfunctional Thoughts, published in Cognitive Therapy of Depression by Aaron T. Beck, A. John Rush, Brian Shaw and Gary Emery in 1979 — a five-column sheet with situation, emotion, automatic thought, rational response, and outcome. David Burns's Feeling Good (1980) attached the now-famous list of cognitive distortions to it. Dennis Greenberger and Christine Padesky's Mind Over Mood (1995) is where the seven-column shape used above — with evidence for and evidence against as separate columns — became the standard teaching version.

That is a description of where the worksheet comes from, not a claim about what filling one in will do for you. The twelve distortion labels in step 4 are the common set from that literature; they are shorthand for shapes of reasoning, not diagnoses, and a thought can carry two or three of them at once.

A worked example

Using the placeholders already in the form:

  1. Situation. “Got a one-line reply from my manager.” Facts only, as a camera would record them. Not “got a cold reply” — cold is already an interpretation and belongs in column 2.
  2. Automatic thought. “She's angry with me. I'm about to be fired.” Write it in the words your head actually used, including the melodramatic ones. Sanding it down here removes the thing you are trying to look at.
  3. Feeling and intensity. Anxious, 70 out of 100. One word for the feeling; the number is your own read, right now.
  4. Distortions. Mind-reading (you assigned her an emotion you have no access to) and fortune-telling (you assigned a future). Naming them is not disproving them. It is noticing which move your mind made.
  5. Evidence for. “The reply was short.” Be fair here — a record where column 5 is empty is a record you were never going to believe.
  6. Evidence against. “She's always terse over email. My last review was good. Short ≠ angry.” This is the column that does the work, and the one people skip.
  7. Balanced thought and re-rating. “A short reply probably means she's busy, not furious. I have no real evidence I'm being fired.” Then re-rate the same feeling. The second number is not a score. It is a prompt to check in.

Ten minutes is a realistic first pass. Written records are slower than doing it in your head, and that slowness is the point — a thought you have to type out in full is much harder to skate over.

Honest limits

  • The 0–100 ratings are self-report, not measurement. Same rater, minutes apart, who knows what the exercise is supposed to do. Read the pair as a check-in, not as a result, and expect the number to move for reasons that have nothing to do with the worksheet.
  • The number sometimes goes up. Writing out a thought you have been half-avoiding can raise the intensity before anything else happens. That is unremarkable, not a sign you filled it in wrong.
  • It does not work on true thoughts. If the evidence-for column is strong and the evidence-against column is thin, the thought may simply be correct. A real deadline, a real conflict and a real diagnosis are not distortions, and they want a plan, not a reframe.
  • It is not a mood tracker. There is no chart, no streak and no trend line here, on purpose. Saved entries exist so you can re-read what you wrote last time, not so you can be scored.
  • Written records are the slow version. Practitioners generally treat the worksheet as training wheels for doing the same thing in your head. If you are filling in six a day, that is worth mentioning to a professional rather than optimising.
  • It is not treatment. This is a self-help worksheet, not therapy, not a diagnosis, and not a substitute for care you are already getting.

What happens to what you type

Nothing you type is uploaded. When you press Save thought record, the entry is written to your browser's own localStorage, under the key na.records, and it is stored only in this browser — there is no server copy, no account, and no sync to your phone or to another browser on the same machine. Reload the page, close the tab, restart the computer: the entries are still there. Clear your browsing data or site data for this domain and the copy in the browser is gone permanently, so if a series matters to you, download it. Private or incognito windows discard the storage when the window closes, and if your browser blocks site storage entirely the save will fail silently and the list will keep saying it is empty.

The newest 50 entries are kept; beyond that the oldest one drops off each time you save. Clear all saved asks for confirmation and then empties the key. Individual entries have their own delete button. The saved list shows the situation, the automatic thought, the distortions, the balanced view and the before-and-after numbers — the two evidence columns are stored but not re-displayed, to keep the list scannable. The one network request this page makes is a self-hosted page-view counter that records the URL, never your text.

Getting your records off this browser

Download my records assembles the file inside the page and hands it to your browser's ordinary download: one JSON file named thought-records-2026-08-12.json (today's date), shaped {"format":"neuroatomic-thought-record","version":1,"exported":"<ISO timestamp>","records":[…]}. It carries every field you filled in, including the two evidence columns the saved list does not re-display. Entries are small — a few hundred bytes each, so a full fifty is roughly 20 KB — and it is plain text, readable in any editor.

Load records from a file reads that file with your browser's FileReader and merges rather than replaces: entries you do not already have are added, entries you do are skipped, and nothing already saved is deleted. Two entries count as the same entry when their timestamp, situation and automatic thought all match, so loading the same file twice adds nothing and tells you so — Added 0 entries (12 were already here). The newest-50 rule still applies at the end, and if a merge would push past it you get a confirmation box naming how many of the oldest would drop off before anything is written. A file that is not one of these exports — other JSON, a renamed photo, a half-finished download — is refused with a single sentence and your saved entries are left exactly as they were.

Plain text, copy or print renders every saved record as a numbered seven-column block you can copy to the clipboard or send to a printer. Printing uses print-only styling that omits the navigation, the form and this article, so what comes off the printer is the records on white paper — the version to take to a session. It is plain text only: no PDF, no styling, no charts.

Being honest about the limit: this is portability, not sync and not a backup service. Nothing leaves the page unless you move the file yourself, so a laptop that dies before you press download still takes the entries with it. If you are building a series over weeks, download it at the end of a session and keep the file where the rest of your documents live.

If the intensity climbs while you are writing and you would rather settle your body first, the Breath Regulator paces slow breathing — stop if you feel light-headed. And stop the record itself if working through it is making things worse rather than clearer. If a thought is frightening you or will not let go, that is a reason to talk to a professional, not to fill in another sheet.

Related tools and reading

Weighing the evidence for a thought is cognitive restructuring, from classical CBT. The other move — leaving the content alone and loosening your grip on it instead — is cognitive defusion, from ACT, and it has its own page: the thought defuser. Both are useful, and doing one while believing you are doing the other tends to end in an argument with your own head. The tools page also has a box-breathing pacer and a focus timer, and the field guide explains the psychology underneath all four in plain language, including where the evidence is thin.

// questions

Common questions about thought records

What is a CBT thought record?

A thought record is a structured worksheet used in cognitive behavioural therapy. You write down the situation, the automatic thought that ran through your mind, the feeling and how intense it was, which thinking distortions the thought may contain, the evidence for and against it, a more balanced alternative sentence, and the intensity again afterwards. The structure exists to slow the sequence down enough that the automatic thought becomes visible as a claim you can examine rather than as the situation itself.

Where does the seven-column thought record come from?

It descends from the Daily Record of Dysfunctional Thoughts published in Cognitive Therapy of Depression by Aaron T. Beck, A. John Rush, Brian Shaw and Gary Emery in 1979. David Burns popularised a version with his list of cognitive distortions in Feeling Good in 1980, and Dennis Greenberger and Christine Padesky set out the seven-column layout used here in Mind Over Mood in 1995. This page describes that lineage and nothing more.

Where are my entries saved, and can I lose them?

They are saved by your browser, under the localStorage key na.records, only in this browser — not on a server, not in an account, and not on your other devices or other browsers. They survive closing the tab and restarting the computer. They are lost if you clear browsing data or site data for neuroatomic.com, if you use a private or incognito window, or if you open the page in a different browser. To keep a copy, use Download my records: it writes every saved entry to a JSON file on your own device, and Load records from a file reads that file back into any browser, adding entries rather than replacing the ones already there. There is still no server and no account — moving the file around is your job. The newest 50 entries are kept and older ones drop off.

Do I have to fill in every field?

No. Only the automatic thought is required — the save button asks for that one and nothing else. Every other field can be left empty, and the distortion labels are optional. A record with just the thought, the evidence against it and a balanced sentence is still a usable record. The two evidence fields are stored but are not displayed in the saved list below the form, which shows the situation, the thought, the distortions, the balanced view and the before-and-after numbers.

Is this therapy?

No. It is a self-help worksheet based on a published psychological technique, not treatment, and it is not a substitute for a licensed therapist or for any care you are already receiving. It is also not a crisis service. If you are in danger or thinking about harming yourself, contact your local emergency number or a crisis line now.