DBT has required patients to do this daily for 30 years. Now you can do it yourself.

Dialectical behaviour therapy is one of the most rigorously studied psychological treatments in existence. Developed by Marsha Linehan in the late 1980s, originally for people with borderline personality disorder, it has since been validated for a wide range of presentations involving emotional dysregulation — including substance use disorders, eating disorders, and depression.

At the centre of DBT is a tool that every patient in DBT treatment completes every single day without exception. Not as homework. Not as optional between-session activity. As a core, non-negotiable component of the treatment itself.

It's called the diary card. And it is, structurally, almost identical to what ayodee asks you to do.

What a DBT diary card is

A DBT diary card is a daily structured record. Patients rate the intensity of specific emotions — misery, shame, anger, fear, happiness — on a numerical scale. They record urges: to self-harm, to use substances, to engage in other target behaviours. They note whether they used substances. They record which DBT skills they attempted and whether they helped.

The card is completed daily, usually in the evening, and brought to every therapy session. The therapist reviews it before the session proper begins. The review of the diary card is not administrative. It is the therapy. It shows what actually happened — not the reconstructed, emotionally-tidied version of what happened that memory provides — and it is the foundation on which every session's work is built.

Linehan was emphatic about this. The diary card is not a monitoring tool bolted onto DBT. It is the self-monitoring component of DBT, and without it the therapy does not function as intended.

Why the diary card is therapeutic in itself

The mechanism is the same one that CBT self-monitoring relies on: observation changes the observed behaviour. But DBT articulates it differently, and for a specific reason.

DBT is built on the concept of dialectics — the holding of two apparently contradictory positions simultaneously. The central dialectic is acceptance and change: accepting yourself exactly as you are right now, while also committing to changing the behaviours that are making your life unworkable. These are not opposites. They are simultaneous truths.

The diary card operationalises this. By recording an urge without acting on it, the person is doing something specific: they are accepting that the urge exists (not fighting it, not denying it, not being ashamed of it) while also not obeying it. The act of noticing and recording is itself the practice of the central DBT dialectic.

By recording substance use without shame — just: this happened, at this intensity, in this context — the person is practising radical acceptance of their current reality. Not approval of it. Acceptance of it, as the prerequisite for change.

This is different from other frameworks. It's not "this behaviour is a problem to be corrected." It's "this is what is actually happening, and I'm willing to see it clearly, because seeing it clearly is the first move."

What ayodee captures that maps to the diary card

The parallel is direct enough to be worth laying out explicitly.

Emotions/mood: DBT diary cards rate multiple emotional states daily. ayodee captures mood, stress, and energy as daily ratings — the emotional picture that precedes and follows substance use.

Urges: DBT diary cards have a specific field for urges to use substances, rated by intensity. ayodee's urge log does the same — one tap, record the craving, note the intensity. The urge is separated from the behaviour: logging that the craving was there is different from logging that you acted on it.

Behaviours: DBT records whether target behaviours occurred. ayodee records substance use — type, quantity, timing. The behaviour is captured without evaluation, exactly as the DBT card captures it.

Skills: DBT records which coping skills were attempted. ayodee doesn't use DBT skill terminology, but the notes field — what else was happening, what you tried, what helped — captures the same information in open form.

Daily cadence: DBT requires daily completion. ayodee is built as a daily diary, with a reminder system designed to prompt completion at the same time each day.

The access problem that ayodee solves

DBT in its full form is a structured, intensive treatment: weekly individual therapy, weekly group skills training, phone coaching, therapist consultation team. It is resource-intensive to deliver and typically accessed only by people who have received a diagnosis, been referred, and joined a waiting list that in Australia can extend to months or years.

The diary card — the daily self-monitoring component — is the one part of DBT that doesn't require any of this. It requires a structured form and the habit of completing it. Both of which are available to anyone, at any point, regardless of whether they've been referred for anything.

What this means practically: a person in the pre-treatment population — someone who hasn't identified a clinical problem, hasn't been referred, wouldn't describe themselves as someone who needs therapy — can be running the core therapeutic mechanism of DBT daily, simply by logging.

The evidence that the diary card works doesn't disappear because you're not in treatment. The mechanism operates wherever the observation occurs.

Starting tonight

The DBT diary card, in its clinical version, asks patients to rate emotions from 0 to 5, note urge intensities, and tick skill boxes. You can approximate this entirely adequately with ayodee's daily log.

Rate your mood before the evening. Log what you use, if anything. Record any urges — including the ones you didn't act on. Note your sleep quality and next-day mood. Do it tomorrow. Do it the day after.

That is a diary card. It is the tool at the centre of one of the most evidence-supported psychological treatments ever developed. It's available to you right now, tonight, without a referral or a diagnosis or a waiting list.

The only requirement is that you fill it in.

ayodee is a 90-second daily diary for substance use, mood, and urges — built on the same daily self-monitoring structure as the DBT diary card. Anonymous, no account needed.

References Linehan, M.M. (1993). Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. Guilford Press.

Linehan, M.M., Schmidt, H., Dimeff, L.A., Craft, J.C., Kanter, J., & Comtois, K.A. (1999). Dialectical behavior therapy for patients with borderline personality disorder and drug-dependence. The American Journal on Addictions, 8(4), 279–292.