What Does Therapy Homework Look Like? 9 Examples and What Each One Is For

Therapy homework usually looks small and ordinary: a thought record filled in at lunch, a 15-minute worry slot at the same time every day, a DBT diary card on the fridge, a 10-minute walk written into tomorrow's plan. The nine examples below vary by approach, but they share one job: taking what you talked about into your actual week.

Do any of these sound familiar?

• Your therapist hands you a worksheet with five columns. You nod like you've filled in hundreds of them, and somewhere on the bus home you realize you have no idea what goes in column four.
• You're told to schedule twenty minutes a day for worrying, which sounds like advice from someone who has never seen you worry. You don't need an appointment. You're fully booked.
• A friend in therapy fills something in every week. Your therapist hasn't given you a single thing in three months. Is one of you doing therapy wrong?

Why therapy sends you home with a task:

The anxiety turns up on a Tuesday at 11pm, not in a quiet room on Thursday at 10am. Homework (what the textbooks call client homework) gets what you talked about practiced where the problem lives, and brings the week back to the session as information instead of a fuzzy impression.

The kind of task also gives away the approach (more on what CBT, DBT and other approaches feel like). Some therapists don't give homework at all, which is a different style, not a worse therapy.

The session is where you plan the practice. The week is where it happens.

Therapy homework examples, sorted by where they come from:

Common therapy homework examples include thought records, activity scheduling, worry time, gradual exposure planned with a therapist, DBT diary cards, mood or sleep logs, values exercises, unsent letters, grounding practice and notes for the next session.

From CBT

• Thought record. The classic piece of CBT homework, for catching the thought behind a sudden drop in mood. At lunch you write down the situation (your boss replied "ok."), the feeling, the thought ("he's annoyed with me") and the evidence both ways. The goal is a more realistic thought, not a more positive one, and it starts with catching what set the feeling off.
• Behavioral activation, or activity scheduling. When mood is low, waiting for motivation rarely works, so action comes first. You plan tomorrow with one pleasant and one necessary thing, each with a time ("10-minute walk after lunch, call my sister at 6"), and rate your mood before and after. Yes, "shower" counts. Some days it's the headline.
• Worry time. Worry gets postponed instead of fought all day. When one shows up at 2pm, you write it down in a sentence and park it until your slot: 15-30 minutes, same place every day, not in bed. More on constructive worry, done earlier in the evening.
• Exposure hierarchy. A ladder of situations you avoid, easiest to hardest, built with your therapist so the fear can drop on its own. With social anxiety, for example, an early rung might be asking a shop assistant a question, long before any party. Your therapist sets the steps and the pace. With trauma, OCD or intense fear, don't build this ladder alone from a list online.

From DBT

• DBT diary card and skills practice. Two minutes in the evening: a few ratings for emotions and urges, and a tick next to the skill you used, or an honest "none", so the session starts from what happened rather than what you remember. The skills themselves, like cold water on your face when an emotion spikes, get rehearsed on calm days so they're there on hard ones. A fire drill works best when nothing is on fire.

From ACT and other approaches

• Values work. Telling what you care about apart from what you're afraid of, then one small step a week toward the first, like the message to a friend you've been putting off for a month.
• Unsent letter. Saying something all the way to the end that you can't say directly: to someone who's gone, to an ex, to yourself at nineteen. With grief and difficult relationships, talk it through with your therapist before and after.
• Grounding practice. A way back to the here and now when your body sounds the alarm, practiced daily at a calm moment (naming five things you can see, say) so it runs on autopilot later.

Across almost every approach

• Mood or sleep log, and notes for next time. One rating a day plus a word of context turns "it was a bad week" into a pattern. The evening before the session, you pick two or three things to bring (here's how to prepare for a therapy session).

Most therapists adapt these to you, so your version may look different.

Different worksheets, same job: bringing Tuesday into the room.

What research turned up:

In 1996, Jacobson and colleagues took cognitive therapy for depression apart to see which piece did the work (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology). Among 150 outpatients, the full treatment did no better than behavioral activation alone, at the end or six months later. The walk scheduled for 1pm isn't the light version.

In 2005, Kazantzis, Lampropoulos and Deane ran a national survey of 827 practicing psychologists (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology): 68% assigned homework often or almost always, and psychodynamic therapists used it more than the researchers expected. Common well beyond CBT, then, but not a requirement.

In 2010, Mausbach and colleagues pooled 23 studies with 2,183 people (Cognitive Therapy and Research) and found a small to medium link between doing the homework and how therapy turned out, r = .26. The honest caveat: it's a correlation, and people who are already improving may just find the tasks easier.

In 2013, McGowan and Behar gave 53 people who worried a lot a daily 30-minute worry period in a fixed time and place for two weeks (Behavior Modification). Worry, anxiety and insomnia dropped more than in people who worried as usual. Small sample, two weeks, and the authors called it preliminary.

For most other forms on the list, like unsent letters or values work, nobody has compared doing the task with skipping it. That's better news than it sounds: there's no single correct assignment, so whether this one works for you is a fair question for your therapist.

The worksheet isn't the treatment. Using it on a real Tuesday might be.

How to get more out of your homework:

1. Ask what it's for. Try: "What is this supposed to show us by next week?"
2. Ask for a filled-in example. Try: "Can we do the first line together so I know what a good entry looks like?" It saves an evening of staring at column four.
3. Change the form, keep the purpose, and say so. A voice note instead of a worksheet is fine if your therapist knows what they're looking at (more on what to do between therapy sessions).
4. Bring the messy version. Half a diary card is still information. If the problem is getting it done at all, here's how to actually get therapy homework done.
5. Leave the hard ones to the room. Exposure, trauma work and anything meant to stir up strong fear get planned with your therapist, not with a list from the internet. If a task turns out to be too much, you can stop and say so.

If a task, or the week around it, brings up more than you can carry, don't wait for your next session. Contact your therapist, and in a crisis in the US, call or text 988 (or 911 if your life is in danger).

Homework you understand is homework you can adapt.

Where MindSync fits:

This is what MindSync's Focus Areas check-ins are for. Log what your homework asks you to watch (your worry on worry-slot days, your sleep, your mood after the scheduled walk) with a 1 to 10 rating, in under a minute. Give it time, and the ratings stop being a blur of good and bad days and start showing a pattern you can point at. Then bring it to your next session, next to whatever worksheet you're on.

Focus Areas check-ins
Rate what your homework asks you to watch from 1 to 10 in under a minute, and the week shows up at your session as a pattern. Try it free in MindSync →

Keep track of what your homework asks you to notice.

If your therapist asked you to keep track of just one thing this week, what would you secretly hope it was, and what do you think it should be?

Frequently asked questions

What does therapy homework look like, and what are some examples?

Mostly small, ordinary tasks you do between therapy sessions. Common examples include thought records, activity scheduling, worry time, exposure practice planned with your therapist, a DBT diary card, mood or sleep logs, values exercises, unsent letters, grounding practice and notes for the next session. Which ones you get depends mostly on the approach your therapist uses. If a task arrives without an explanation, ask what it's meant to show.

Do all therapists give homework?

No. Homework is most common in CBT and DBT, but it's widespread: in a 2005 national survey of 827 practicing psychologists, 68% said they assigned it often or almost always, including some psychodynamic therapists. If you'd like something to work on between therapy sessions, you can simply ask for it.

What is a thought record?

A thought record is a CBT worksheet where you write down a situation, what you felt and how strongly, the thought that came with it, and the evidence for and against that thought. The aim is a more realistic thought, not a more positive one. Your therapist will usually show you the version they use and can fill in the first line with you.

What is a DBT diary card?

A DBT diary card is a daily form used in dialectical behavior therapy to rate your emotions and urges and note which skills you used. It takes a few minutes a day. The point is that each session starts from what happened during the week, not from what you remember on the way in.

What is scheduled worry time?

Scheduled worry time is a CBT technique where you note worries during the day and postpone them to a set 15-30 minute slot, at the same time and place every day, and not in bed. A small 2013 study found it reduced worry, anxiety and insomnia more than a comparison condition over two weeks. It's best set up with your therapist, who can tell you whether it fits your kind of worry.