Check the facts is one of the emotion regulation skills that psychologist Marsha M. Linehan built into dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT. In the second edition of her DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets it is Emotion Regulation Handout 8, practiced on Worksheet 5, and Handout 8a lists the facts that fit each emotion; the 2025 revised edition regroups the handouts skill by skill. The Fact Check is a practice page HabitatZero made on its own. Neither Linehan nor her publisher had a hand in building it, and neither has endorsed it.

The feeling answers the story

Your manager moves your one-on-one to Friday, and the invite says only "quick chat." Within a second your mind has written the headline, I'm about to get fired, and your body is reacting to that headline, not to the calendar. The handout says it plainly: many emotions are set off by how we interpret an event rather than by the event itself, and a strong emotion then colors how we read what comes next.

Checking the facts is not arguing yourself out of every feeling. Sometimes the check confirms it: a real loss calls for sadness, and a real threat calls for fear. The skill gives the feeling a fair hearing before you act.

Six questions, in order

The handout asks six questions, and this page keeps their order.

1. Which emotion do you want to change, and how strong is it?
2. What happened? Describe only what you took in through your senses, and challenge judgments, absolutes and black-and-white words.
3. What are you assuming about it, and what else could it mean?
4. Are you expecting a threat? Name it and ask how likely it really is.
5. What is the catastrophe, and how would you cope if it came?
6. Does the emotion, and its intensity, fit the facts?

How the page works

The page is laid out like a newspaper, which is roughly how a mind treats a hard moment. You pick the feeling and slide how loud it is, from small print to a banner. The report holds up to three plain lines, and the page underlines any word a reporter could not confirm, such as ignored, always or rude, and asks what you saw or heard.

The headline your mind wrote goes in next, set in type as large as the feeling is loud, with other headlines the same facts could carry below it. Two boxes weigh the threat, with honest odds, and the worst case, with how you would cope. A size check then sets the feeling's strength beside those odds, since Handout 8a ties intensity to how likely the outcome is and how much it would matter.

Then you stamp a verdict: fits, fits but too big, doesn't fit, or not sure yet. Each stamp points where Linehan's Handout 9 points. A feeling that fits sends you to problem solving, which Keys for a Stuck Door walks through. One that doesn't fit, or runs too big, sends you to opposite action, and The Flip Side takes that move all the way. Not sure yet means keep checking. Rate the feeling again and the headline shrinks to match.

Filed checks become clippings. From three on, the page reads them back: which feeling most often runs past the facts, which headline keeps running, and how often the second reading came in lower. A new feeling, a new strength or a changed report takes the stamp off, because the old verdict was about something else.

Not a thought record

A CBT thought record asks whether a thought is accurate, and weighs the evidence for and against it. Step three overlaps with that work, but the final question differs: whether the emotion fits, in kind and in size. You can end with the same headline and still decide the fear was three sizes too big.

What the evidence says

No trial has tested this skill on its own. The nearest evidence is on reappraisal, the wider family it belongs to. A meta-analysis of 306 experimental comparisons found that changing how people thought about a situation shifted their emotions by a small-to-medium amount, and that reappraising the situation itself worked better than reappraising the emotional response. Most were short experiments, not the heavy days you might bring here.

Within DBT, a study of 108 women treated for borderline personality disorder found that people in DBT used about three times as many skills by the end of treatment as people in comparison treatments, and that skills use fully accounted for their drop in depression and their gains in anger control. Practicing skills looks like part of how DBT helps; no single worksheet has shown that alone.

When to use it

Reach for it once the first surge has passed and you can think in sentences: after a message that stung, or before a conversation you dread. If you cannot tell whether a feeling fits, Wise Mind is where Linehan's sixth step sends you.

This page is practice, not therapy, and DBT skills are best learned with a DBT therapist or in a skills group. If a check ever brings up thoughts of harming yourself or of not wanting to be alive, stop and talk with a person now: call or text 988 in the US, or reach your local emergency number anywhere else.