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Bay Area CBT Center · Worksheet

Behavioral Experiment Log

You can argue with an anxious thought all day and still believe it. What actually shifts a belief is finding out what happens — running the thing you’re afraid of as a small, deliberate test and watching the result with your own eyes. Thinking differently rarely changes behavior. Behaving differently reliably changes thinking.

How to run one

  1. Name the prediction in falsifiable terms. Not “it’ll go badly” — “if I say I disagree in the meeting, my manager will shut me down and my colleagues will think I’m difficult.” If you couldn’t tell afterward whether it came true, it isn’t specific enough yet.
  2. Rate how much you believe it, 0 to 100%. Do this before, not from memory afterward — memory quietly revises it downward once you know how things turned out.
  3. Write the alternative you’d like to be true but don’t yet buy, and rate that too.
  4. Drop the safety behaviors. This is the step that decides whether the experiment works. If you over-prepare, bring a friend, drink first, rehearse every line, or keep one hand on the exit, then when nothing bad happens your mind credits the crutch instead of updating the belief.
  5. Run it, then write what actually happened — observable facts, the kind another person present would agree with.
  6. Re-rate both beliefs. The gap between the two numbers is the experiment’s result.

A note on scale

One experiment moves a belief a few points, not from 90 to 5. That’s normal and it’s not failure — beliefs built over years come down over a series of tests. What matters is that the number moved at all, and that you have a next experiment.

The logOne experiment at a time

Before and after

Fill blocks 1 to 3 before you run it. Fill block 4 afterward, as soon as you can.

Experiment 1

1The prediction I’m testing

What do you expect to happen? Specific enough that you’d know afterward whether it came true.

e.g. “If I disagree out loud in the meeting, my manager will cut me off and people will think I’m difficult.”

→%

2The alternative I’d like to be true

The more balanced version — the one you can argue for but don’t yet feel.

→%

3The experiment

What I will do, exactly

How I’ll know either way

Safety behaviors I’m dropping for this. The crutches that would let your mind explain away a good outcome — over-preparing, bringing someone, rehearsing, drinking, apologizing in advance, keeping an exit ready.

4What actually happened

Facts first — what someone else in the room would agree they saw.

What I learned

The next experiment

Prediction — before—
Prediction — after—
Shift—
Alternative — after—

Rate the prediction before and after and the shift will show up here. Rate it before you run the experiment — afterward, memory quietly adjusts the number.

Your privacy. Everything you enter stays in your own browser. Nothing is sent to Bay Area CBT Center and nothing is stored on our servers. Your entries are saved on this device only — use Clear all to erase them. This worksheet is an educational tool and is not therapy, a diagnosis, or a substitute for care. For trauma, OCD, or panic, design your experiments with a therapist rather than alone.