PTSD Tracker: Presta
Track PTSD symptoms, triggers, sleep disturbances, and therapy progress. Presta helps you monitor intrusions, avoidance behaviors, hyperarousal, and mood changes so your therapist can guide your recovery with better data.
Designed for trauma survivors working through CPT, PE, EMDR, or other evidence-based PTSD treatments.
Key Features
Intrusion Tracking
Log flashbacks, intrusive memories, nightmares, and emotional re-experiencing. Record their intensity, duration, and what triggered them. Tracking intrusions helps your therapist assess which trauma memories still need processing.
Avoidance Monitoring
Document situations, places, people, or activities you avoid due to trauma associations. Tracking avoidance is critical because avoidance maintains PTSD. Seeing it clearly is the first step toward working through it in therapy.
Hyperarousal Log
Track hypervigilance, startle responses, irritability, concentration difficulties, and feeling on edge. These symptoms reflect your nervous system’s heightened state and are important indicators of PTSD severity and treatment response.
Sleep & Nightmare Log
Record sleep quality, sleep onset difficulty, nightmares, and night wakings. Trauma-related sleep disturbances are among the most persistent PTSD symptoms. Tracking them guides treatment decisions around prazosin or imagery rehearsal therapy.
Therapy Progress
Log therapy sessions, homework completion (thought records, in-vivo exposures), and distress levels before and after. Track your overall PTSD severity over the course of treatment to see meaningful progress.
Coping Toolkit
Log which grounding techniques, breathing exercises, and self-care strategies you use and rate their effectiveness. Over time, build a personalized toolkit of what actually works for you during difficult moments.
Why Track Your PTSD?
PTSD recovery is not linear. There will be weeks of progress followed by setbacks, and without a record it is easy to lose perspective. Tracking provides objective evidence that your overall trajectory is improving, even when a tough week makes it feel like you are back to square one. This evidence is a powerful antidote to the hopelessness that PTSD can create.
Evidence-based treatments for PTSD (Cognitive Processing Therapy, Prolonged Exposure, and EMDR) all involve homework between sessions. CPT assigns thought records and impact statements; PE assigns in-vivo exposure exercises. Logging your completion of these assignments and your distress ratings helps your therapist adjust the pace of treatment and identify stuck points where additional processing is needed.
Trigger awareness is another major benefit of tracking. Many PTSD triggers are subtle, such as a particular smell, time of year, body position, or tone of voice. When you log your intrusions alongside contextual details, patterns emerge that help you prepare for and gradually work through your triggers rather than being blindsided by them.
How It Works
Log Daily
Record intrusions, avoidance, hyperarousal, mood, and sleep each day. Short daily entries capture the full picture over time.
See Your Progress
View trends that show how your symptom severity is changing over the course of treatment, even when it does not feel like it.
Guide Your Therapy
Share reports with your therapist to focus sessions on your most active triggers, stuck points, and symptom clusters.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will tracking my symptoms make them worse?
Brief daily check-ins about symptom severity are different from detailed trauma processing. You are rating how you felt today, not re-narrating your trauma. If a particular entry feels activating, you can keep it brief. Most people find that externalizing their experience onto a record actually reduces the sense of being overwhelmed.
What is the difference between CPT and Prolonged Exposure?
Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) focuses on identifying and challenging unhelpful beliefs about the trauma (like “it was my fault” or “the world is completely dangerous”). Prolonged Exposure (PE) focuses on gradually confronting trauma-related memories and situations you have been avoiding. Both are highly effective, and tracking helps with either approach.
How long does PTSD treatment take?
Evidence-based treatments like CPT and PE typically involve 12-16 sessions. Many people experience significant improvement within this timeframe. Complex PTSD from prolonged or repeated trauma may require longer treatment. Your tracked data helps you and your therapist gauge whether treatment is progressing at the expected pace.
Is my data private?
Your data stays on your device. You control what you share and with whom. We understand that trauma-related information is deeply personal, and we have designed the app with privacy as a core principle. You can export reports for your therapist when you choose to.
Start Your Recovery Journey Today
Track symptoms, monitor therapy progress, and see your recovery unfold with real data.
Disclaimer: Presta is a self-tracking tool designed to support PTSD recovery. It is not a medical device, does not provide diagnoses or therapy, and is not a substitute for professional mental health care. If you are in crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) or go to your nearest emergency room. Always work with a licensed trauma therapist for PTSD treatment.