The DBT Diary Card, Made Usable for Daily Life
If you are in DBT, you have almost certainly been given a diary card. Whether you are in DBT for borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, an eating disorder, PTSD, substance use, or another form of emotion dysregulation, the card is the same backbone tool. And if you are like most 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
- A DBT diary card tracks daily emotions, urges, behaviors, and coping skills used, giving your therapist a structured weekly summary to work from in session.
- Rating emotion intensity on a standardized scale helps you develop emotional granularity and awareness over time.
- Recording both unhealthy urges and the skills you used instead builds evidence that DBT techniques are working.
- Digital diary cards can be easier to maintain than paper ones and allow for trend analysis across weeks and months.
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.
DBT was developed by Marsha Linehan for borderline personality disorder, and BPD remains the diagnosis it is most often associated with, but the skills and the diary card are now used across diagnoses wherever emotion dysregulation is the central problem. For how this template fits into broader emotion tracking, see the emotion tracking and DBT guide. For the cognitive patterns diary card tracking helps you catch, see the post on splitting patterns in BPD. The condition page at claritydtx.com/bpd covers BPD specifically, the population most-served by DBT.
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 in a difficult period, and unnecessary in a stable one. This adapted template is structured around the same core data but built for independent daily use rather than clinic administration. If you have been told that tracking is just paperwork, or that your distress is too unstable to log usefully, both of those framings are wrong. The card is how the data gets in front of someone who can actually do something with it.
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 change the entire quality of the appointment. Your therapist can do real chain analysis and skills coaching 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.
Start with one week of entries. You do not need a month of data before it becomes useful. Even a week of consistent rows will surface patterns between sleep, vulnerability factors, urges, and which skills actually moved the needle, which is more than memory alone will give you on Wednesday at 2pm.
If you want to automate the daily fields, the BPD Tracker app has the diary card structure built in, with the urges, emotion ratings, and PLEASE skill log on one screen.
Medical disclaimer: This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. The content here is not a substitute for professional medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider with questions about your health or a medical condition. If you are experiencing a medical emergency, call 911 or contact your local emergency services immediately.