The DBT Diary Card, Made Usable for Daily Life
If you are in DBT, you have almost certainly been given a diary card. And if you are like many people in DBT, you have also lost the diary card, forgotten to fill it in, felt too overwhelmed to complete it on hard days, or turned up to session with a blank one and spent the first fifteen minutes trying to reconstruct a week you cannot clearly remember.
Key Takeaways
- The DBT diary card tracks emotions, urges, and skill use daily, forming the backbone of dialectical behavior therapy for BPD.
- Recording emotion intensity on a 0-5 scale throughout the day reveals patterns that pure memory recall in therapy sessions misses.
- Tracking which DBT skills you used and their effectiveness helps your therapist refine your skill-building plan.
- Consistent diary card completion correlates with better therapy outcomes in DBT programs.
This template is the diary card structure in a format you can actually use daily, with explanation of why each field exists and what to do when the idea of filling it in feels like too much.
For context on how this template fits into broader BPD emotion tracking, see the BPD emotion tracking and DBT guide. For understanding the specific cognitive patterns that diary card tracking helps you catch, see the post on BPD splitting patterns.
What the DBT Diary Card Is For
The diary card is the central data-collection tool of DBT. It was designed to accomplish several things simultaneously: track target behaviors and urges, document daily emotion patterns, record skill use, and provide the therapist with a structured weekly summary for chain analysis and skills coaching.
Standard diary cards are designed for clinical use and include every possible target behavior. They can feel overwhelming if you are in a difficult period, and they can feel unnecessary if you are in a stable one. This adapted template is structured around the same core data but built for independent daily use rather than for clinic administration.
The Daily Entry (Complete Once Per Day)
Date and Vulnerability Factors
- Date: ___
- Sleep hours last night: ___
- Did you eat balanced meals today: Yes / Partially / No
- Physical illness or pain today: Yes / No
- Exercise or movement today: Yes / No
- Substances (alcohol, cannabis, other): None / Present (note type if comfortable)
Why this section exists: DBT’s PLEASE skills target exactly these vulnerability factors. Mastery of PLEASE skills (treat Physical illness, balanced Eating, Avoid mood-altering substances, balanced Sleep, get Exercise) directly reduces emotional vulnerability. Tracking them daily shows you whether your PLEASE behaviors correspond to lower distress on subsequent days. For most people, the correlation is clear within a few weeks of data.
Emotions Section
List each emotion you experienced today and rate its highest intensity on a 0 to 5 scale.
- Shame: 0 1 2 3 4 5
- Anger: 0 1 2 3 4 5
- Fear: 0 1 2 3 4 5
- Sadness: 0 1 2 3 4 5
- Guilt: 0 1 2 3 4 5
- Disgust: 0 1 2 3 4 5
- Emptiness: 0 1 2 3 4 5
- Love or joy (note this too): 0 1 2 3 4 5
Do not only log the difficult emotions. Positive emotions matter for DBT tracking because building positive experiences is an explicit skill target, and because tracking them shows you what conditions produce them. If your highest joy ratings cluster around specific activities, relationships, or times of day, that is actionable information.
Below the emotion ratings, note the one or two that were most intense today and a brief category for what prompted them. You do not need to narrate. “Fear (4), interpersonal, felt dismissed” is enough.
Urges Section
For each urge type relevant to your treatment targets, note: was the urge present today? (Yes / No) If yes, what was the highest intensity? (1 to 5)
Urge types may include:
- Self-harm urges
- Substance use urges
- Suicide or self-destructive ideation
- Impulsive behavior urges (spending, ending relationships, sending messages in anger)
- Avoidance urges
In the “acted on?” column, note whether the urge was acted on. The goal is not to produce a perfect record. It is to have an honest one. Your therapist cannot help you with what they do not know, and a diary card that only reflects your best days does not serve you in treatment.
If noting this feels too exposing, start by just noting whether urges were present and at what intensity. Build toward the “acted on” column when you feel ready.
Skills Used Today
List any DBT skills you used, and rate how much they helped on a 0 to 5 scale. Common categories:
- Distress tolerance (TIPP, ACCEPTS, self-soothe, IMPROVE): _____ Rating: ___
- Emotion regulation (opposite action, check the facts, build positive events, PLEASE): _____ Rating: ___
- Interpersonal effectiveness (DEAR MAN, GIVE, FAST): _____ Rating: ___
- Mindfulness (observe, describe, participate, non-judgmental stance): _____ Rating: ___
- Other (name it): _____ Rating: ___
Note also: did you use a skill when you needed to but did not? (Yes / No). This is not a guilt prompt. It is data. If you consistently note “needed a skill but did not use one” in certain situations, that is something to work on in session, maybe through role play or identifying the specific barrier.
Mindfulness Quality
- Did you practice mindfulness today? Yes / Briefly / No
- Quality of mindfulness moments today (1 to 5): ___
- If you did not practice, what got in the way? (No time / Forgot / Felt pointless / Too activated / Other)
Mindfulness is the foundation skill in DBT. Everything else is built on the ability to observe experience without judgment and without being pulled entirely into it. Tracking it daily often reveals that mindfulness practice drops off in exactly the weeks when it would be most useful, and that barrier data is worth exploring.
Overall Distress Rating
- Overall distress today: 0 (none) to 10 (worst imaginable)
- Quality of life today: 1 (very poor) to 5 (good)
- One sentence you want to remember about today (optional):
The overall ratings give you a daily trend line. The optional sentence gives future you a human note about what the day was actually like, without requiring full narration.
The Weekly Summary: What to Bring to Session
At the end of each week, spend five minutes reviewing your daily entries and complete a weekly summary:
- Average overall distress this week: ___
- Highest emotion intensity moments (top 2): ___
- Number of days urges were present: ___
- Number of days skills were used: ___
- PLEASE skill adherence (days with good sleep, eating, no substances, exercise): ___/7
- One thing that worked this week: ___
- One thing I want to work on in session: ___
Bring this to your session. It is twelve lines of data that changes the entire quality of the appointment. Your therapist can do actual DBT work with this. Without it, the session often starts from scratch.
When the Diary Card Itself Feels Like Too Much
There will be weeks where filling in a full diary card is not possible. That is real. Here is a minimum viable entry for difficult days:
- Overall distress: 0 to 10 (one number)
- Urges present: Yes / No
- Skills used: Yes / No
Three fields. Thirty seconds. It keeps the record intact and it gives your therapist the essential information even in a week when everything else is hard.
For the BPD Tracker app with diary card structure built in, visit claritydtx.com/bpd or download on the App Store. Also available at bravita.app.link.
This content is for informational purposes only and does not replace professional medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider before making changes to your treatment plan.