Free CBT guides and worksheets

Approaching avoidance and uncertainty

Avoidance can bring short-term relief while quietly teaching the brain that a situation, feeling or uncertainty is dangerous. This set helps you understand that cycle and plan gradual, purposeful practice.

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What is included

Three connected tools in one practical set.

Each topic includes a short, client-facing guide and a companion worksheet you can complete on screen or print.

Avoidance and safety behaviours

Notice what you avoid, escape, check, control or seek reassurance about, including strategies that are easy to miss because they happen in your head.

Graded exposure

Build a step-by-step plan for approaching a feared situation or sensation while reducing the responses that keep the fear cycle going.

Worry and rumination

Distinguish useful problem-solving from repetitive thinking and choose a different response when more thinking is not producing new information.

Using the worksheets

Use what helps; leave aside what does not fit.

These are general resources, not a test and not a course you have to complete in order. A worksheet can help you prepare for therapy, remember an idea or practise something between appointments.

01
Plan exposure collaboratively if the fear is intense, complex or linked with significant risk.
02
Choose steps that are challenging enough for learning but realistic enough to repeat.
03
Measure what you learned, not whether anxiety disappeared.
04
Do not use these worksheets to approach genuinely unsafe situations.

Free fillable PDF

Keep the complete approaching avoidance and uncertainty set together.

The PDF contains the illustrated guides and matching fillable worksheets. Typed information remains in your own copy of the file and is not sent to or stored by Axis.

Download 7-page fillable pdf

Related CBT resources

Continue with the area that is most useful to you.

CBT foundations

A practical starting point for understanding how situations, thoughts, feelings, body responses and actions can interact. This set helps you map a pattern, choose a useful direction and notice what affects mood and energy.

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Taking action

When mood, anxiety or stress has narrowed your life, waiting to feel ready can leave you stuck. This set helps you plan manageable activity, test predictions in real life and work through a problem one practical step at a time.

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Working with thoughts

Thoughts can arrive quickly and feel like facts, particularly when you are anxious, low, ashamed or under pressure. This set helps you notice automatic thoughts, examine them fairly and develop a more balanced response.

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Deeper patterns and staying well

Some patterns are held in place by deeper beliefs about yourself, other people or the world, along with rules that once made sense but now carry a cost. This set helps you explore those patterns carefully and consolidate what supports change.

View guides and worksheets

A general resource, not individual clinical advice

These worksheets do not replace assessment or personalised care. They may not suit every person, problem or stage of therapy. If a worksheet increases distress or feels unhelpful, pause and discuss that reaction with a suitably qualified health professional.

Taking the next step

Bring questions or reactions back to therapy.

A resource is most useful when it supports the work you are doing, rather than becoming another task to complete perfectly.

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