Understand your anxiety by taking this free CBT course for anxiety. Learn practical CBT skills. Start taking back control.
Anxiety can make your world feel smaller. You may find yourself worrying about things that haven’t happened, avoiding situations, seeking reassurance, overthinking decisions or constantly preparing for what might go wrong.
The good news is that these patterns can change.
I’ve created this free CBT course for anxiety/CBT self-help online course to teach you some of the same practical Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) principles and techniques that I use in my work as a CBT therapist.
There is no sign-up and no cost. You can work through the course at your own pace and download the accompanying CBT worksheets to practise the techniques.
Who is this course for?
This course may be helpful if you:
- worry excessively or find it difficult to switch off
- frequently think “What if…?”
- expect things to go wrong
- avoid situations because they make you anxious
- seek reassurance from other people
- overthink conversations or decisions
- experience physical anxiety such as a racing heart, tension, trembling or butterflies
- would simply like to understand anxiety better and learn some practical CBT skills
What will you learn?
1. Understanding CBT
Learn how your thoughts, emotions, physical sensations and behaviour influence each other and how anxiety can become a self-perpetuating cycle.
2. Understanding your body’s alarm system
Discover what happens during fight, flight and freeze, why anxiety can create such powerful physical symptoms, and why a racing heart or trembling body doesn’t necessarily mean you are in danger.
3. Grounding and calming your body
Learn simple grounding techniques to bring your attention back to the present and help your nervous system settle when anxiety takes over.
4. Real worries vs hypothetical worries
Learn to distinguish between a real problem you can do something about and a hypothetical “What if?” worry that your mind is trying unsuccessfully to solve.
5. Errors in thinking
Anxiety can make us catastrophise, predict the future, assume we know what other people think and treat feelings as facts. You’ll learn how to recognise these patterns and develop more balanced ways of thinking.
6. The HEAL Thought Diary
I’ll introduce you to my simple HEAL approach for working with anxious thoughts:
H – Helpful: Is this thought helping me?
E – Evidence: What is the evidence for and against it?
A – Alternative: Is there another, more balanced way of looking at this?
L – Loved One: What would I say to somebody I loved if they were thinking this way?
That final question can be particularly powerful because we are often much kinder and more reasonable with other people than we are with ourselves.
7. Safety behaviours
Learn how reassurance seeking, checking, over-preparing, rehearsing, monitoring yourself and other subtle coping strategies can make you feel safer temporarily while unintentionally keeping anxiety going.
8. Approach rather than avoid
Avoidance provides immediate relief, but it can gradually make your world smaller.
You’ll learn how to reverse this process by taking manageable steps towards rather than away from anxiety, allowing your brain to discover:
“I can feel anxious and still cope.”
9. Behavioural experiments
CBT isn’t only about thinking differently. It’s also about discovering what happens when we test our anxious predictions in real life.
You’ll learn how to become a curious scientist: make a prediction, design a small experiment, see what actually happens and use the evidence to update your thinking.
10. Build your own anxiety toolkit
Finally, you’ll bring everything together into a practical plan that you can return to whenever anxiety begins taking over again.
Your free CBT workbook
I’ve also created a free downloadable CBT Anxiety Workbook to accompany the course.
It includes:
- HEAL Thought Diary
- Worry Tree
- Errors in Thinking guide
- Safety Behaviours worksheet
- Behavioural Experiment planner
- Approach Rather Than Avoid ladder
- Real vs Hypothetical Worry diary
- Grounding & Calm Body guide
- Personal Anxiety Toolkit and Staying-Well Plan
A different way to think about anxiety
One of the most important things I’d like you to take from this course is that the goal isn’t necessarily to eliminate anxiety.
Anxiety is part of being human.
The goal is to understand it well enough that it stops making your decisions for you.
Anxiety often tells us:
Wait until you’re certain.
Wait until you feel confident.
Avoid it just in case.
CBT encourages something different:
Take a manageable step. See what actually happens. Discover that you can cope. Then take another.
Confidence often comes after action, not before it.
Ready to begin?
You don’t need to complete the whole course today.
Start with Module 1, experiment with the exercises and take your time. Even understanding one anxiety pattern and responding to it differently is progress.
Free CBT Course – CLICK HERE
About Mandy Kloppers
I’m Mandy Kloppers, a BABCP-accredited CBT therapist with more than 20 years’ experience working in mental health. I created Thoughts on Life and Love to make psychological ideas and practical mental-health strategies easier to understand and use in everyday life.
I’m also the founder of COWCH, a digital mental-health platform being developed to make practical, evidence-informed psychological support easier to access when people need it.
Important information
This course provides general psychoeducation and self-help strategies and is not a substitute for individual psychological or medical assessment, diagnosis or treatment. CBT techniques are not appropriate for every person or every difficulty. If your symptoms are severe, worsening, significantly affecting your daily life, or you are concerned about your safety, please seek support from an appropriately qualified healthcare professional.
If you are in immediate danger or experiencing a mental-health emergency, please contact the appropriate emergency or crisis service in your area.