Emotional Regulation Worksheets PDF: 5 Sheets for Adults

If you searched for emotional regulation worksheets PDF files to hand an adult client, this page is built to be one. It has five printable worksheets written to your client in plain words: naming an emotion from its body cues, rating it from 0 to 10, choosing a strategy from a menu, checking the sleep, food and movement habits that make emotions harder to manage, and logging a week of practice. Print this page or save it as a PDF from your browser, and fill in the first sheet together in session.

After the worksheets comes the part for you: what emotion regulation is, James Gross's process model and what the research says about each strategy, how CBT and DBT approach regulation, a worked example across all five sheets, how to teach them, how to adapt them for teens and neurodivergent clients, when to screen for more, and how to note the work in a progress note.

About this page. The worksheets are our own wording and layout. They follow the five points of regulation in Gross's process model and skills that CBT and DBT share. They are not copies of Marsha Linehan's DBT handouts, which are copyrighted.

Every client in this article is invented. Any resemblance to a real person is a coincidence.

How to print this page or save it as a PDF

The lines are for a pen. A client who would rather type can copy the bold headings into a note on their phone.

Five emotional regulation worksheets for adults

Before you start

Emotions aren't the problem. They tell you something matters, and they push you to act. Sometimes, though, a feeling comes on too fast, gets too big, lasts too long, or pushes you toward something you later regret.

Regulating an emotion doesn't mean switching it off or hiding it. It means having more say in how strong it gets, how long it stays and what you do next. These five worksheets help you notice a feeling early, give it a name and a number, choose what to try, look after the habits that make feelings easier to manage, and keep track of what works. Fill in the first one with your therapist, then use them on your own and bring them to your next session.

Worksheet 1: Naming my emotions, and where I feel them

Your body often notices a feeling before your mind finds a word for it. Circle the signs you notice for each emotion. Yours may be different, so add your own.

Find a more exact word. "Bad", "upset" and "stressed" cover many different feelings, and each one needs something different. Try one of these:

One feeling, start to finish

Pick one moment from this week when a feeling took over.

Worksheet 2: Emotion intensity tracker, 0 to 10

A number helps you notice a feeling rising before it takes over, and shows you when something you tried has helped. Use your own sense of the numbers. There's no right answer.

My scale. Write what each level looks like for you.

What I'll do at each level

Tracker. Fill in a line whenever a feeling reaches your early warning number.

Worksheet 3: My regulation strategies menu

There are four points where you can change how a feeling goes: the situation itself, where your attention goes, what the situation means to you, and what you do once the feeling is here. No strategy works every time, so it helps to have a few at each point. Circle one or two in each group to try, and add what already works for you.

Strategies near the top of the menu work on a feeling before it's at full strength. Holding in a feeling that's already at full strength is hard work, and it rarely makes the feeling smaller inside.

1. Choose or change the situation

2. Shift my attention

3. Rethink it

4. Change my response

Strategies that help now but cost later

These can bring a feeling down for a while, but they often make it stronger or longer-lasting over time. If any of them are on your list, tell your therapist. You're not in trouble. It's a sign the feeling needs other tools.

Worksheet 4: Lowering my vulnerability: sleep, food and movement

The same event can feel much bigger on some days than others. Poor sleep, hunger, illness, alcohol and drugs, and a week without moving all make feelings stronger and harder to manage. Fill this in at the end of the week. Small changes count.

This week

Next week

If you have a health condition, an eating disorder, or a doctor's plan for food, sleep or exercise, follow that plan, and talk with your therapist before changing anything here.

Worksheet 5: Weekly practice log

Each day, write down one time you used a strategy, even if it didn't work. The times it didn't work tell you and your therapist the most.

End of the week

If I'm not safe

If you might hurt yourself or someone else, or you're in danger, call or text 988 (the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US), call 911, or go to the nearest emergency room.

End of the worksheets. The rest of this page is for therapists.

What is emotion regulation?

In his 1998 review, psychologist James Gross described the field as the study of "how individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them" (Gross, 1998). Three things follow from that definition, and each one matters when you explain the worksheets to a client:

Emotion regulation shows up across diagnoses, which is why these worksheets aren't tied to one. A meta-analysis of 114 studies linked rumination, avoidance and suppression with more symptoms of anxiety, depression, eating and substance-related disorders, and problem solving with fewer. The links for reappraisal and acceptance were smaller than the authors expected, given how central both are to CBT and acceptance-based therapies (Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema & Schweizer, 2010). A later systematic review of 67 treatment studies found that, whatever the therapy or disorder, emotion dysregulation and the use of unhelpful strategies fell after treatment in all but two studies, alongside symptoms (Sloan et al., 2017).

Gross's process model: the 5 emotion regulation strategies

Gross's process model treats an emotion as something that unfolds over time. A situation happens, you pay attention to some part of it, you appraise what it means for you, and a response follows in your feelings, body and behavior. The response often changes the situation, and the cycle runs again. You can step in at any point.

That gives the five families of strategies the model is known for, and the usual answer to "what are the 5 emotion regulation strategies?" In Gross's words, emotion "may be regulated at five points": "(a) selection of the situation, (b) modification of the situation, (c) deployment of attention, (d) change of cognitions, and (e) modulation of responses" (Gross, 1998). In clinical terms:

Worksheet 3 merges the first two into one group, "choose or change the situation", because the two blur together in daily life. That's why the menu has four groups, not five.

Early strategies and late ones. Gross also split the model into antecedent-focused strategies, which act before the emotional response is fully under way, and response-focused ones, which act on it after. In a 1998 experiment, 120 participants watched a disgusting film. Those told to reappraise it and those told to hide their feelings both showed less disgust in their expressions, but only reappraisal reduced how disgusted they felt, while hiding it increased their sympathetic arousal (Gross, 1998). Across five studies of habits in daily life, people who often reappraised experienced more positive emotion and less negative emotion, and had better relationships and well-being; people who often suppressed showed the reverse (Gross & John, 2003).

What works, across 306 experimental comparisons. A meta-analysis of strategies from the process model compared their effects in laboratory studies (Webb, Miles & Sheeran, 2012):

Two cautions before you share this with clients. These are mostly short laboratory tasks, so they say more about which strategy works in the moment than about long-term change. And no strategy is good everywhere. Bonanno and Burton call the assumption that one strategy is always helpful "the fallacy of uniform efficacy", and describe regulatory flexibility in three parts: reading the context, having a varied repertoire of strategies, and responding to feedback about whether a strategy is working (Bonanno & Burton, 2013). Distraction can be the right call in a waiting room and the wrong one as a way of life.

The extended process model. In 2015 Gross added stages to the model: identification (whether to regulate at all), selection (which strategy) and implementation (carrying it out) (Gross, 2015). The worksheets follow the same order. Worksheets 1 and 2 help a client notice and name the feeling and decide whether it needs regulating, Worksheet 3 is selection, and Worksheet 5 records implementation and gives the feedback that flexibility depends on.

Where Worksheet 4 fits. Sleep, food, illness and substances aren't one of the five points; they change how strongly every point runs. A review that used the process model to organize the research on sleep describes a growing body of evidence that disrupted sleep is a robust risk and maintenance factor for a range of psychiatric conditions, with problems at several stages of emotion generation and regulation (Palmer & Alfano, 2017). In one study, people who exercised little reported more depression, anxiety and stress. Thirty minutes of cycling, compared with stretching, before a stressful speech task didn't change the first reaction to the stress, but it weakened the delay in recovery that came with rumination and difficulty regulating emotions (Bernstein & McNally, 2018).

Why naming comes first. Putting a feeling into words is a form of regulation in its own right. In a brain imaging study, labeling the emotion in a negative image reduced the amygdala's response more than other ways of processing the image (Lieberman et al., 2007), and a later review describes this affect labeling as implicit emotion regulation, which may not even feel like regulating while it happens (Torre & Lieberman, 2018). Precision matters too: people who describe their emotions in finer detail are less likely, when intensely distressed, to binge drink, act aggressively or harm themselves (Kashdan, Barrett & McKnight, 2015). The body list on Worksheet 1 draws on the same idea: in five experiments with 701 participants, people colored different body regions for different emotions, and the maps were similar across West European and East Asian samples (Nummenmaa et al., 2014). Those are group averages; a client's own signs are the ones that count.

How CBT and DBT approach emotion regulation

Both therapies teach regulation directly, with practice between sessions. They weigh the five points differently.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)

Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT)

Where the two meet in these worksheets

These sheets are transdiagnostic skills practice, not a full CBT protocol and not comprehensive DBT. If you teach DBT skills in individual sessions without the skills group, phone coaching and consultation team, describe it as DBT-informed.

A worked example across all five worksheets

Invented client: a 34-year-old emergency room nurse we'll call Jonah, in his fourth session of individual CBT for irritability and arguments at home. He says he "goes from zero to a hundred" with his partner after night shifts.

What the example shows:

How to teach emotion regulation skills in session

A short explanation you can read aloud and adapt:

When a client says "nothing works"

By video

Medical cautions. Before suggesting cold water, hard exercise or a change in eating, check for heart conditions, eating disorders or other medical reasons to avoid them, and involve the client's medical provider when in doubt.

Which worksheet to use when

Adapting the worksheets for teens

DBT for adolescents teaches skills to teens and their caregivers together, usually in a multifamily group, and adds a module called Walking the Middle Path (Rathus & Miller, 2015). Even outside DBT, the same two ideas help: keep the sheets short, and bring the adults in.

Our therapy questions for teens include questions about feelings and coping that pair well with Worksheet 1.

Adapting the worksheets for neurodivergent clients

Ask each client how they prefer to be described, how they notice their emotions, and what already helps. Differences in how someone experiences emotion aren't a defect to correct, and the goal is the client's own, not looking calm to other people.

Autistic clients

Clients with ADHD

When to screen for more

The worksheets teach skills. They don't assess anything. Screen, or refer, when the picture suggests more than a skills gap:

To measure regulation itself over time, the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) has 36 items (Gratz & Roemer, 2004), and a 16-item version, the DERS-16, kept good reliability and validity in clinical and community samples (Bjureberg et al., 2016). The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire from Gross & John (2003) measures habitual reappraisal and suppression in 10 items. Check each measure's terms of use before you copy it or upload it anywhere. For depression, anxiety and stress in one measure, the DASS-21 calculator does the scoring. Repeat whatever you use every few weeks so you and the client can see change.

How to note emotion regulation work in a progress note

"Worked on emotion regulation" tells a reviewer almost nothing. A useful note names what you taught, ties it to a treatment goal and records what the client could do.

An example in BIRP format for the invented client above, two weeks after the first session with the worksheets:

A treatment plan objective this note supports: "Within 8 weeks, client will use a chosen regulation strategy in at least 4 logged situations a week, with ratings dropping 2 points or more in most entries, and arguments at home will fall to 1 a week or fewer." Our treatment plan template shows how to write goals and objectives around a skill.

Phrases you can adapt:

The same content fits other formats. In a DAP note, the log, ratings and rehearsal go in Data and your reading of the pattern goes in Assessment. The BIRP note examples compare formats line by line, and the progress notes cheat sheet lists clinical words for interventions and client response.

How to describe this work on your practice website

People rarely search for "emotion regulation". They search for help with a temper, with worry that won't stop, or with feeling overwhelmed. Plain words on your website help the right clients recognize themselves and book. A starting point for the "My approach" or "Services" section:

Name the therapy you use (CBT, DBT-informed skills, the Unified Protocol) only if you're trained in it, and say whether you offer a skills group.

How this works in TranqBay

TranqBay is practice software for therapists in private practice: a practice website, online booking, video sessions and session notes in one place. Here's where these worksheets fit.

At practice.tranqbay.health you can browse the practice website designs, see the "My approach" and "Services" sections where you'd describe skills-based work, and look at the booking page a new client would use.

Frequently asked questions about emotional regulation worksheets

Before your next session

Pick one client whose feelings outrun their skills. Fill in Worksheet 1 together from a moment in their week, build their 0 to 10 scale, choose two strategies from the menu, and send them home with the log. Review the log first next time, and keep only what worked.

If you're building a practice around skills-based work, see how TranqBay works for private practice: you can browse the practice website designs, including sample sites for a trauma therapist and a child and family therapist, and see the booking page your clients would use to book the session where you review their log. If you're deciding whether to join, this page explains how joining TranqBay works.

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