This is the fastest way to start a nightly self-tracking habit modeled on the DBT diary card, the tool dialectical behavior therapy uses to track daily emotions and urges. One note before you start: the real diary card is part of a full therapy treatment, reviewed weekly by a therapist. What follows is a self-tracking habit borrowed from its format, not DBT itself. If you're in DBT already, use your therapist's actual card categories instead of these; if you're not, this is monitoring, not treatment.
You need
- A voice journal app, or a notes app
- Two numbers you care about tonight: one feeling, one urge or craving
- One minute, right before bed
That's it.
Day 1: your first entry
Tonight, before you sleep, say or type three things:
- One emotion, rated 0 to 5. "Anxiety, 3."
- One urge or craving, rated 0 to 5. "Urge to skip my run tomorrow, 2."
- One thing you did about it, if anything. "Did nothing, just noticed it."
That's the whole first entry. Fifteen seconds, maybe.
Week 1: build the habit
Keep the same three questions every night. Add tags if your app supports them, so you can pull up a week at once later:
- Emotion (0-5)
- Urge or craving (0-5)
- What you did about it, one sentence
Pick a consistent time. Right before bed works because it's close to the day you're rating, and it's easier to remember than "sometime today."
If you want to track more, DBT's real categories are emotions, urges toward a specific target behavior, whether that behavior happened, which coping skill you used, and how well it worked. Add one category at a time. A card with ten fields you abandon by Thursday is worse than three fields you actually fill in every night.
When you miss a day
Skip it and keep going the next night. Don't try to reconstruct a missed day from memory two days later, the numbers won't mean much by then. A gap in your week is fine. A week of guessed numbers is worse than a real gap, because it looks like data and isn't.
If you notice you keep skipping the same kind of day (the worst days, usually), that itself is worth noticing. Say so in the next entry: "Skipped Tuesday, it was a bad day and I didn't want to look at it." That sentence is more useful than a fabricated rating.
What this can't replace
Speaking three numbers a night is a habit, not a treatment. The real DBT diary card exists inside a full course of therapy, and its value comes largely from a therapist reading your week and building the session around your worst day. If you're tracking urges toward self-harm, substance use, or anything safety-related, talk to a therapist about it directly rather than treating a private voice memo as the plan. See the full method page for what the evidence does and doesn't support, and for the difference between DBT as a whole and this kind of self-monitoring.
Related: the full DBT diary card method · ACT values journaling