"What if...?" questions are a powerful way in which anxious individuals generate or maintain anxious states. Asking oneself a "what if...?" questions invites an individual to worry about low-probability / high-consequence possibilities - to catastrophize. What If...? is a worksheet for identifying and challenging "what if ... ?" cognitions. It contains elements of psychoeducation, threat identification, and cognitive restructuring.
This worksheet presupposes that anxious "what if...?" thinking is a biased form of cognition in which an individual selectively attends to possibilities with negative consequences. This can be framed as a habitual (but inaccurate) form of thinking. Using this worksheet clients are invited to counter their biased thinking by deliberately attending to positive as well as negative consequences of a situation / event. For every negative "what if...?" thought clients should be encouraged to generate three positive "what if...?" alternatives.
