Mindfulness represents an in-the-moment and nonjudgmental way of responding to thoughts and feelings (Kabat-Zinn, 2005).

It involves “Paying attention to something, in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn, 2012, p. 1).

Given its ability to enhance emotional balance and well-being, mindfulness represents a useful therapeutic approach among psychologists. Fortunately, many helpful mindfulness Worksheets are available for therapists and clients alike.

Given the diverse applicability of mindfulness in the field of psychology, mindfulness worksheets cover a variety of mental health topics (e.g., anxiety, addiction, stress, etc.). Such worksheets also target specific audiences (e.g., children, adults, groups, etc.) and treatment approaches (e.g., cognitive therapy, DBT, etc.).

This article will present 65+ mindfulness worksheets across issues, people, and treatment approaches. Many links to informative books, articles, and downloadable worksheets are also provided. In doing so, those interested in enhancing mindfulness in themselves or others will find an abundance of resources at their fingertips.

The importance of mindfulness tools cannot be overstated, after all:

If you abandon the present moment, you cannot live the moments of your daily life deeply.

Thich Nhat Hanh

18 Best Mindfulness Worksheets

In her book: Mindfulness Skills Workbook for Clinicians and Clients, Burdick (2003) provides many excellent mindfulness worksheets. Here are four examples:

Handout 2-8: Loving-kindness for Self and Others

This worksheet guides individuals in picturing different people in their minds (including themselves) and learning how to send them love and kindness.

For example:

Handout 2-9: Journal About Your Understanding of What Mindfulness is

Using prompts, this worksheet helps individuals to learn mindfulness while processing their feelings through journaling.

For example:

Handout 2-16: Journal About a Time You Felt Afraid

Using prompts, this worksheet helps individuals to learn how to get in touch with implicit memories that may be associated with fear.

For example:

Handout 2-13: The Prefrontal Cortex

This worksheet helps individuals to understand the functions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) by using an orchestra conductor analogy.

For example:

ACT Made Simple: Your Values

In his book: The Complete Set of Client Handouts and Worksheets from ACT books, Harris (2009) also presents numerous useful worksheets centered around acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).

Here are several examples:

– The Brief Bullseye Worksheet

Individuals are asked to consider what matters to them, what they want to do with their time on the planet, the sort of person they want to be, and the strengths they want to develop. They are then asked to make an X in the dartboard below to indicate where they are today based on the following categories:

1. Work/Education
2. Relationships
3. Personal Growth/Health
4. Leisure

– Join the Dots (p. 8)

Individuals are asked to consider the methods they have used to avoid unpleasant thoughts and feelings, along with the long-term impact of such practices. They are then asked to write about their attempted solutions and long-term outcomes.

Methods include:

D – Distraction
O – Opting Out
T – Thinking Strategies
S – Substances & Other Strategies

The Happiness Trap

– Informal Mindfulness Practice

Individuals are asked to choose regular activities that are part of their daily routines and then to focus on each aspect of it while it is happening. They are also asked to experience these activities as mindfulness practices.

– Control of Thoughts and Feelings

Individuals are asked to consider the following questions and then how they would make life changes in each area.

– The Life Values Questionnaire

Individuals are asked about their deeply held values, desired qualities in oneself and in relationships, etc.

Examples of valued areas of life include:

Family relations
Parenting
Recreation/fun/leisure
Health/physical well-being

– The Willingness and Action Plan

Individuals are asked to complete an action plan that includes specific goals, values, underlying goals, actions needed to achieve goals, thoughts and other sensations they are willing to be open to in order to fulfill goals, as well as other useful reminders such as small steps.

– What to Do in a Crisis

Individuals are asked to follow the S.T.O.P. approach in times of crisis.

This approach involves the following steps:

S: Slow your breathing
T: Take note
O: Open up
P: Pursue your values

There are several additional worksheets, here are seven well worth checking out:

• Costs of Avoidance Worksheet
• Avoidance and Suffering Diary
• Expansion Practice Worksheet
• Mindful Breathing Practice Worksheet
• Detailed Bull’s Eye Worksheet
• Goal Setting Worksheet
• Overcoming F.E.A.R. Worksheet

10 Worksheets for Kids and Students

Current research suggests that mindfulness is related to many benefits among children and teens—such as increased self-esteem, social skills, self-acceptance, calmness, emotion regulation, decreased anxiety, ADHD behaviors, depression, and conduct problems (Burke, 2009).

Mindfulness training also has been associated with increased psychological well-being, self-regulation, and self-esteem among adolescents (Shruti, Uma, & Dinesh, 2018).

Education.com

The Education.com website is an excellent resource for free mindfulness worksheets designed for children. Worksheets are provided across grades and cover a range of topics. Filtering the site for mindfulness results in more than 50 results!

Here are six great examples:

– Feelings Worksheet

This worksheet helps 4th and 5th-grade children to better understand and talk about feelings by explaining feeling words to an adult.

– Mindfulness: The Present Moment

This worksheet helps preschool to 5th-grade children to use five sentences to learn about the meaning of mindfulness.

– Mindful Eating

This worksheet helps kindergarteners and 1st graders to practice mindful eating by focusing on various sensations during a meal or snack.

– Emotions Wheel

This worksheet helps 2nd and 3rd graders to better understand their feelings by creating an emotions wheel.

– Gratitude Jar

This worksheet promotes gratitude in kindergarteners and 1st graders by thinking about the positive impact of gratitude on their lives.

– Mindful Listening Game

With this fun worksheet, 2nd and 3rd-graders design their own skit or video that helps others to learn about mindful listening. In doing so, children learn various socio-emotional skills.

Susan Epstein

Mindfulness worksheets also have been designed to help kids and teens deal with anger and explosive behavior. Here are several examples from the following book: Over 60 Techniques, Activities & Worksheets for Challenging Children (Epstein, 2012).

– Birthday Cake

This worksheet provides exercises designed to promote emotion regulation and relaxation in children ages 5-12.

Counselors are instructed to read a script aloud to a child, make a recording of the script, and share it with parents or provide a copy for children. Here is an example:

“Get ready to relax. You can sit in a chair, on the floor or lie down on a bed.
Close your eyes and pretend you are blowing the candles out on your birthday cake…
Now squeeze your hands into fists…
Now relax and let your hands go limp…”

– Name It, Don’t Blame it!

This worksheet is designed to diffuse explosive situations among youths of all ages.

Children learn how to diffuse volatile situations, for example:

Stay calm: “Imagine you are a robot in a science fiction film, and you are up for an academy award. You cannot show emotion, or you will not be nominated.”
No lecture: “Lectures put kids into the freezing zone of tuning out. All they hear is blah, blah, blah, blah. They also feel ashamed, which we learned before, can lead to explosive behaviors.”
No questions…
Be clear…
Name the behavior…

– Visual Cue Cards: Ending the Explosions

This exercise involves creating index cards so that youths aged 9-18 can change negative reactions to more mindful responses.

Kids and teens are asked to decorate four index cards with the words:
STOP, BREATHE, REFLECT, CHOOSE

They are then asked to write several things on the back of each card. For example, on the back of the STOP card, they would write: “What am I feeling?” “Where am I feeling it in my body?” “It is okay to feel this feeling.”

Each card has its own unique set of questions and suggestions on the back. Youths are asked to brainstorm options, choices, and questions. They may also keep the cards for future use.

– Putting It All Together: Building a Cooling Down Kit

This exercise involves creating index cards that help youths of all ages to create cooling down kits aimed at calming down, reducing conflict, and regulating emotions.

By having kids and teens create and decorate a container in which to keep their cooling down techniques, the toolbox will be available for use as needed, in various contexts.

Two Other Useful Worksheet Sources

Along with the above useful worksheets, there also are many terrific insights and worksheets for young people in the following book by Burdick (2014): Mindfulness Skills for Kids & Teens: A Workbook for Clinicians & Clients.

Additionally, the Nebraska Honors Program Clc Expanded Learning Opportunity Clubs Information Sheet (Schendt, 2019) contains the following fun and creative worksheets aimed at increasing healthy habits among middle school children:

• Noodle Tower (for cognitive stress coping)
• Fluffy Slime (for diversion stress coping)
• Stress Balls (for diversion stress coping)
• Gratitude Letters (for social/interpersonal stress coping)
• Letters to Future Self (for cognitive stress coping)
• Positive Affirmations/Mantras (for cognitive stress coping)
• Music and Coloring (for diversion stress coping)
• Team Building and Mindfulness
• Yoga and Mediation

6 Mindfulness Coloring Worksheets

Coloring activities offer a creative way for people of all ages to enhance mindfulness.

In fact, mindfulness coloring books used as part of art therapy are related to significantly reduced anxiety and stress among young adults (Ashlock, Miller-Perrin, & Krumrei-Mancuso, 2019; Simmons, 2016, respectively). Here are some excellent examples:

The coloring book: The Mindfulness Coloring Book: Anti-Stress Art Therapy for Busy People (Farrarons, 2015) helps both adults and children to reduce stress through creativity.

It contains 70 attractive drawing patterns (e.g., butterflies, flowers, and kaleidoscopic designs) intended to promote a sense of serenity.

Education.com also provides many mindfulness-focused coloring worksheets.

Here are six examples:

Mandala Coloring.

This mandala coloring worksheet is designed to foster social-emotional and mindfulness skills among kindergarteners and 1st graders.

Puppy Mind Artwork.

This social-emotional worksheet is designed to promote mindfulness and kindness among 2nd and 3rd graders.

Look Out the Window.

This worksheet is designed to help children to see the incredible world around them.

Family Pride: My Family Rainbow.

This worksheet is designed to help children to celebrate and be more mindful of the palette of their families and communities.

Yoga for Kids: Mountain Pose.

This coloring worksheet and movement activity is designed to improve children’s attention, performance, and focus, as demonstrated by ‘Roly.’

Yoga for Kids: Happy Baby Pose.

This coloring worksheet and movement activity is designed to improve children’s attention, performance, and focus, as demonstrated by ‘Muggo.’

For Anxiety and Stress-Reduction

Mindfulness techniques have been found to help anxious and stressed individuals by promoting relaxation while removing negative judgments (Blanck, Perleth, & Heidenreich et al., 2018). Many mindfulness-focused worksheets have been created to reduce stress and anxiety, and we share 11 examples:

In the book The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety (Forsyth & Eifert, 2016), a great deal of information about anxiety is included, along with how ACT may help to disarm anxiety and fear. The goal is to equip readers with a new way of responding to their fear and stress.

The book teaches numerous skills designed to enable anxious individuals to be “less avoidant and less tangled up with difficult thoughts, and more present, flexible, compassionate, kind with [themselves], and accepting of [their] internal experiences just as they are” (Forsyth & Eifert, 2016, prologue, p. 2).

For each type of anxiety disorder, readers checkmark the symptoms that refer to them. They also are provided with a vignette describing one individual’s experience with that particular disorder. The book is loaded with worksheet exercises, such as the following:

• Your Life Book of Possibilities. This mindfulness exercise helps readers to shift perspective to the here and now, rather than looking backward.
  
  
• Centering into Your Heart. This exercise allows readers to understand the difference between anxiety and fear by providing a list of potential situations within each category.
  
  
• Has Responding with Fear and Worry Been Useful to Me? With this exercise, readers describe a dangerous event along with their responses to it. By also noting how useful their response was, they can see how fear sometimes results in actions that promote safety.

The book The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Social Anxiety and Shyness (Fleming & Kocovski, 2013) includes a wealth of information about what social anxiety looks like and the various mindfulness approaches that may result in substantial relief from it.

It includes both guided mindfulness exercises (with audio downloads available online), as well as written exercises.

Like the previous book, Fleming and Kocovski are focused on an ACT approach to anxiety. Here are a few worksheet examples:

• Situations Involving Social Interaction. This worksheet provides information about different social situations along with a checklist of specific cases where social anxiety may be triggered. The worksheet is followed by two more with the same format but focused on the anxiety situations that involve being observed by others and performing in front of others.
  
  
• Top Three Feared Social Situations. With this exercise, readers are asked to describe their top three most feared situations.
  
  
• The Costs of Outright Avoidance. This exercise helps readers to identify how avoiding difficult social situations has a cost. It involves listing each avoided situation in one column and the associated costs in the next column (e.g., situation: avoiding parties; cost: loneliness).
  
  
• What Are You Giving Up for Safety? This exercise helps individuals identify the various costs for their safety behaviors as pertaining to their top three feared situations.

Education.com also provides several mindfulness-focused worksheets specific to children dealing with stress and anxiety. Here are four examples:

• Let’s Breathe, Five-Finger Style! This exercise is designed to help kindergarteners and 1st graders learn five fingers mindful breathing.
  
  
• Range of Emotions. This exercise is designed to help kindergarteners and 1st graders learn to recognize their range of emotions.
  
  
• Belly Breathing to Calm, Focus, and De-Stress. This exercise is designed to help kindergarteners and 1st graders use belly breathing to calm themselves and deal with stress.
  
  
• Negativity Bias. This exercise is intended to help 2nd and 3rd graders to understand why humans tend to remember negative experiences. It enhances stress management by asking kids to write or draw ten recent positive experiences, as well as to send positive messages to others.

Useful Worksheets for DBT Sessions

Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is a therapy technique used for the treatment of a variety of mental issues and disorders, such as borderline personality disorder, depression, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation.

Developed by Marsha Linehan, DBT teaches individuals the skills to deal with their painful emotions. Given Linehan’s extensive Buddhism background, DBT is grounded in mindfulness philosophy. Indeed, Linehan uses this experience

as a subtle learning device that opens up the current moment without reserve or grudges including emotions (feeling states) and understandings of the inner world of being.

Eist, 2015, p. 887

In the book Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises (McKay, Wood, and Brantley, 2019), a number of useful DBT worksheets and exercises are provided. Here are five examples:

• Exercise: Take a REST. Using the ‘REST’ strategy, readers are reminded to Relax, Evaluate, Set an Intention, and Take Action. After recalling a recent tricky situation, they are then asked several questions such as: “What happened?” “How they responded?” And “how they might have coped better using the REST approach.”
  
  
• Radical Acceptance. With this exercise, individuals are asked to accept situations without judgment.
  
  
• Distract Yourself from Self-Destructive Behaviors. This exercise involves coming up with relatively safe ways to distract oneself from self-destructive feelings and behaviors.
  
  
• Create Your Distraction Plan. For this exercise, individuals come up with distraction skills following the REST approach to use when encountering a painful situation. After writing their distraction techniques in a list, they are then asked to write them on sticky notes (or on their phones) to be taken with them to use during tough situations.
  
  
• Create A Relaxation Plan. With this exercise, readers create a list of soothing and relaxing skills (using their five senses) that they can use at home.

For a highly useful workbook on DBT, readers are encouraged to check-out Linehan’s book DBT? Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets (2015).

This book is packed with DBT exercises, worksheets, and handouts that cover each of the DBT skills modules.

For Your Cognitive Therapy Sessions

Cognitive therapy is a standard psychological treatment for various mental disorders.

It involves working with therapists to identify the feelings, thoughts, and beliefs that impact an individual’s ability to modify behaviors.

Mindfulness activities (e.g., relaxation while removing negative or stressful judgments) are often combined with cognitive therapy to create a powerful way of dealing with anxiety and other emotional challenges.

Various mindfulness-based cognitive therapy worksheets are available online. For example, therapistaid.com provides numerous free worksheets, such as the following six examples:

– Core Beliefs Info Sheet

This worksheet helps individuals to identify their core beliefs about themselves, others, and the world as a whole. A core belief definition is provided along with various facts and examples regarding common core beliefs.

– Core Beliefs: Examining the Evidence

This worksheet helps individuals to learn about evidence in support of or against core beliefs, as well as an opportunity to challenge such views.

– Cognitive Restructuring: Socratic Questions

This worksheet helps individuals to challenge irrational thoughts. Readers select 3-5 Socratic questions per irrational thought to assist in consciously questioning such thoughts.

– Cognitive Restructuring: Decatastrophizing

This worksheet helps individuals learn how to avoid exaggerating problems by more closely examining them.

– Challenging Anxious Thoughts

This worksheet teaches individuals about the link between anxiety and irrational thoughts. It contains helpful examples while helping individuals learn about their own anxiety-provoking experiences.

– CBT for Kids: Thoughts, Feelings, & Actions

Kids and teens use this colorful worksheet to learn about CBT and the connections between thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

For Treating Addiction and Relapse Prevention

Relapse is a significant challenge for individuals dealing with addiction. Relapse prevention is grounded in cognitive-behavioral theory and is aimed at preventing relapse (as defined by the individual’s treatment goals), as well as relapse management (Marlatt & Donovan, 2005).

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy also has been found effective for the prevention of depression relapse (Williams, Crane, & Barnhofer et al., 2014). Worksheets provide helpful tools for relapse prevention professionals.

Here are eight examples:

In this book The Mindfulness Workbook for Addiction: A Guide to Coping with the Grief, Stress, and Anger that Trigger Addictive Behaviors (Williams & Kraft, 2012), several relapse prevention-focused worksheets are included.

For example:

• Identifying Your False Beliefs about Emotions. This exercise involves having individuals go through a list of false self-beliefs that may be influencing them negatively (e.g., “If I tell others how I feel, they will think I’m weak”).
  
  
• Emotion-Dodging Methods. This exercise involves having individuals identify various ways to dodge feelings from a list that is provided (e.g., gambling, overeating, etc.).
  
  
• How Would You Feel? This exercise involves having individuals identify feelings they experience in particular situations. They are then asked to identify an emotion they experience during each situation provided (e.g., “The person I love is in love with someone else.”).
  
  
• Connecting Emotions to Life Situations. This exercise involves having individuals identify past experiences when they felt particular emotions (e.g., anger, fear, etc.) to enable them to connect feelings with situations.
  
  
• Identifying Your Repeat-Offender Thoughts. This exercise involves having individuals identify repeat-offender thoughts (i.e., habitual thoughts about oneself and the world that cause emotional pain). Potential repeat-offender thoughts include: “I can’t do it;” “I am not smart enough,” etc.)

Free relapse prevention worksheets are also available on therapistaid.com For example:

– Relapse Prevention Plan

This worksheet helps individuals to identify relapse red flags, people they can contact to deal with cravings, and things they can do to distract themselves from relapsing.

– Relapse Prevention Plan (Version 2)

This worksheet helps individuals to create relapse prevention plans that will support their addiction recovery process.

– Coping Skills: Addictions

This worksheet helps individuals to develop coping skills across the categories of social support, building new habits, managing emotions, diversions, and prevention.

5+ Group Mindfulness Worksheets

Mindfulness techniques also may be offered in a group setting. This approach may be advantageous for some because it is often cheaper than individual therapy and enables participants to experience feedback from multiple group members.

Group leaders may incorporate mindfulness worksheets as a way of enhancing clients’ self-understanding and identifying useful tools to promote mindfulness. Numerous group-focused sheets for children are available on education.com.

Here are two examples:

• Mentors: Mindfulness of Anger. This worksheet helps students to develop a lesson for mentoring younger kids in developing the skills to deal with stress and anger.
  
  
• Lead Others with Mindfulness. This worksheet helps young children to learn about the benefits of mindfulness while creating their own mindfulness exercise and leading others through it.

Practicing group mindfulness also may be fun! Here are two examples of printable worksheets that teachers or group counselors might want to check out:

• Mindfulness Bingo
• Mindfulness Scavenger Hunt

Mindfulness-based team-building worksheets also provide terrific ways to promote positive emotional health. Here are three examples from Belmont Wellness:

Stress Management and Team Building Activity

This fun team building activity uses stress balls to teach participants about the stressful consequences of failing to focus on the present.

Stress Kit Handouts

This resource provides individuals with reminders of metaphors for how best to deal with stress, as well as tools to do so in a healthy way.

Flexible Thinking Activity

This group exercise includes two activities designed to promote flexible thinking.

Finally, group-focused mindfulness scripts are available online here.

It is also worth noting that many of the mindfulness worksheets available to parents, clinicians, and teachers may be adapted to meet the needs of classrooms or group therapy sessions.

Valuable Resources from PositivePsychology.com

Of course, our very own site provides plenty of excellent resources for promoting mindfulness. For example, 22 mindfulness exercises, techniques, and activities are available on our website and include such approaches as:

• The Raisin Exercise
• The Body Scan
• The Self-Compassion Pause Worksheet
• The 3-Step Mindfulness Exercise
• Mindful Eating for Four Minutes

The following exercises are part of our Toolkit, which is a science-based online platform with over 300 exercises, activities, and other tools for professionals:

• Connecting to your intuition
• Mindfully meeting other people
• Cultivating mindfulness through single-tasking
• Walking down the street
• Informal mindfulness practices

If you would like to explore even more on the topic of mindfulness, here is an excellent selection of popular blog posts:

• The 7 Most Inspirational Mindfulness TED Talks
• 76 Most Powerful Mindfulness Quotes: Your Daily Dose of Inspiration
• Mindfulness Coaching Using The Mindfulness X Program
• The Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS)
• How to Benefit from Mindful Running and Mindful Exercise on Your Fitness Journey

Last but not least, there is Mindfulness-X!

Designed for professionals, this online package allows you to personalize a demonstrated, science-based, 8-session mindfulness training and use it to inspire the lives of your clients and students. The course is based on scientific research and is fully referenced. It is an invaluable tool not only for you to master the eight pillars of mindfulness, but to impact others positively by teaching them mindfulness.

These are just a few examples of the numerous mindfulness tools and worksheets provided by PositivePsychology.com; there are many more resources available for those interested in bringing more mindfulness into their lives.

A Take-Home Message

There may never have been a time in history when practicing mindfulness has been more important. With our fast-paced society and technological advances, many of us find ourselves constantly overexposed to stressful messages and situations.

Or, in the words of Kabat-Zinn:

Even before smartphones and the Internet, we had many ways to distract ourselves. Now that’s compounded by a factor of trillions.

Learning how to live-in-the-moment and to accept emotions and thoughts without judgment (i.e., mindfulness) is an effective way to experience greater tranquility and contentment.

Fortunately, modern-day technology also boasts some important perks, namely, a vast amount of accessible information for individuals interested in learning or teaching mindfulness.

In this article, 80+ worksheets have been provided, along with numerous printable handouts. These resources cover more general mindfulness topics, as well as mindfulness for kids and teens, for anxiety reduction, for DBT, for cognitive therapy, for addiction and relapse prevention, and for group therapy.

Therefore, whether you are a therapist, teacher, parent, or simply someone who wants to experience a more mindful existence, a plethora of tools are available to help you. So, go ahead and give mindfulness a try, as you may find that:

with mindfulness, you can establish yourself in the present in order to touch the wonders of life that are available in that moment.

Thich Nhat Hanh

The post 65+ Mindfulness Worksheets for Adults, Kids and Your Therapy Sessions appeared first on PositivePsychology.com.