I’ve been a therapist for 30 years, and here’s what I know: there are a lot of mental health strategies that work, but few work every single time. When you’re feeling distressed, overwhelmed, or stuck, it’s very helpful to have a whole toolbox of tools to choose from so you have options when your go-to strategy isn’t effective.
That toolbox will be a list of mental health strategies that you’ve tried and that generally work for you. Once you have your list, you’ll put it somewhere you can easily find it. You don’t want to have to try to remember the tools when you’re in a hard moment – you want them written down and easily findable.
I recommend sorting your tools into categories. Categories will help you select the most helpful tools for that particular moment. Examples of categories include:
Tools for thoughts
Tools for feelings
Tools that help you feel grounded and present
Tools that help solidify your sense of self
If you don’t have effective tools in your toolbox, I’ll get you started! I’m opening my ginormous toolbox and sharing some of my favorite mental health strategies with you. Try them, even if they sound kind of odd, and see how it goes. They might surprise you!
Write down the ones that resonate. By the end, you’ll have the start of a quality custom toolbox.
Tools for Thoughts
When it comes to thoughts and feelings, we’re not trying to get rid of the “bad” ones. That’s not realistic. Instead, we’re trying to get distance from the thoughts and feelings that are unhelpful. The more distance we have, the easier it is to manage their impact.
The tools for managing thoughts help you recognize that you can decide which thoughts to pay attention to. We’re not supposed to listen to all of our thoughts – we have thoughts every day that are irrelevant, untrue, and/or unhelpful. Our job is to focus on the ones that are helpful and let go of the others. These three tools help you do that.
The more choice you have about whether to pay attention to a thought, the more you – not your thoughts – are in charge of how impactful they are.
1. Cognitive Defusion
When you’re stuck in a thought, or when your feelings or behavior are being ruled by a thought and you don’t want them to be, we can say you are fused with that thought.
Try this: cover your face with the palm of your hand. You are now fused with your hand. When you’re fused with your hand, it’s all you can see. If you move your hand away and put some distance between your hand and your face, you still see your hand, but you can also see other stuff. This gives you the power to choose to focus on that other stuff instead of focusing on your hand.
When you’re fused with a thought, it’s all you can “see”, it’s all you can think about, and it has a huge impact on your focus, your feelings, and your behavior. As an example, let’s use the thought, “I’m so ugly. No one’s ever going to love me.” When you think this way, it’s hard to see (or feel) anything else.
To de-fuse from such a sticky thought, say to yourself, “I am having the thought that I am so ugly no one’s every going to love me.” That gives you one degree of separation from the thought. Then say, “I realize I am having the thought that I am so ugly no one’s every going to love me” (two degrees). Then, “I notice that I realized that I’m having the thought that I am so ugly no one’s ever going to love me” (three degrees).
With each iteration of that statement, you’re holding your hand further away from your face; you’re getting distance from the power of the thought by pointing out to yourself that it’s just a thought. By seeing it as just a thought, you become the holder of the power and the thought loses its power.
Notice that we’re not trying to evaluate whether the thought is true; that’s not the point of this tool. The point is to get some distance from it so you can then decide if it’s helpful. A helpful thought is one that does not keep you stuck or acting in ways that don’t align with what you want for yourself.
If it’s not helpful, the goal is to not pay attention to it. Now you can start to pay attention to other things that are helpful to pay attention to.
2. Leaves on the Stream
This mindfulness exercise teaches us how to not attach to our thoughts. It’s another strategy that helps us de-fuse from our thoughts.
With this tool, we learn to notice our thoughts the same way we notice a leaf floating down a stream, without “picking it up”, focusing on it, or feeling attached to it. That gives us the power to decide which thoughts we want to pay attention to. It helps us to not automatically believe every thought that crosses our minds.
Watch this video to practice Leaves on the Stream.
If you don’t love this particular video, there are many others out there!
3. Iffirmations
When we want to get our mind to let go of a particular thought, it’s helpful to point it toward an iffirmation (nope, that’s not a typo!).
You are familiar with affirmations, statements that tell our brain to consider a different perspective. For example, if you want to change your thinking about your worth, an affirmation might be: “I am as worthy as everyone else.”
Iffirmations are questions, not statements. Specifically, they’re “What if” questions. They invite – rather than tell – our brain to consider a different thought. “What if I am as worthy as everyone else?”
The question format is the secret sauce; when we ask ourselves an iffirmation, the creativity center of our brain gets activated. Iffirmations get our brain to ponder the question, which helps us detach from the original, unhelpful thought with more ease.
So if you’re stuck in a certain thought, try asking, “What if this isn’t the only thing I have to focus on?” “What if I don’t need to think about that?” “What if I’d be better served thinking about something else?”
Here are two articles that will give you examples of iffirmations and how to use them:
46 Iffirmations to Change Your Life
22 Iffirmations to Get a Beach Body
Tools for Feelings
Tools for feelings have a similar goal to the tools for thoughts: we want to have enough distance or detachment from them to be able to decide whether it’s helpful to pay attention to them. To be able to do this, we have to recognize that feelings, like thoughts, are not always helpful, true, or relevant and that it’s our job to decide which feelings to lean into. We also have to learn not to fight against them. Fighting with a feeling only keeps us attached to and focused on it.
4. Microscopic Observer
This is one of my very favorite exercises, and almost everyone I’ve used it with has found it to be helpful. This exercise invites you to observe your feeling as if you don’t know what it is. It encourages your to learn about it instead of judging it. This helps you change your relationship with the feeling.
When you observe something, you are naturally putting some distance between you and it. You are acknowledging that there is a “you” separate from the feeling. That gives you the power to interact with it as you want to, separate from how the feeling is influencing you to act.
Click here for a video that will take you through this exercise. This video has other exercises for working with feelings; The Microscopic Explorer starts at minute 19. For a written version, go here (in this article, I called it “The Impartial Observer”).
5. The Broom Closet Exercise
This tool takes a minute or less! Like the Microscopic Explorer, this is a visualization exercise that helps you learn how to get some distance from your feeling. The more distance you have, the more you can see and attach to other feelings, thoughts, and relationships.
Click here for an article walking you through the Broom Closet exercise.
6. Butterfly Tapping
There are all kinds of physical strategies that can help calm strong feelings. When a feeling has lost some of its power, it is easier to get distance from it and connect with other feelings.
Butterfly tapping is relatively simple: Cross your arms in front of your chest, so that your right hand is touching your left shoulder and your left hand is touching your right shoulder. For two to three minutes, alternate tapping your left and right shoulders. The tapping should be rhythmic and at a pace that feels good, not frantic.
This tool helps reduce the power of a feeling by using bilateral stimulation. When you cross the midline of your body (e.g., reaching from left to right or right to left), you are engaging in bilateral stimulation, which engages the prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain that uses rational thinking) and calms the amygdala (the part of your brain that keeps the “alarm” part of a feeling active).
Tools for Feeling Grounded
When you are feeling unstable, unmoored, or not in your body, you don’t feel in control. You can’t easily access good judgment and decision making. Getting grounded helps you feel connected with yourself in the present moment, which is empowering and stabilizing.
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Connecting to your 5 senses is one surefire way of getting back into your body and connected with yourself in the present moment.
This tool asks you to notice:
5 things you can see
4 things you can hear
3 things you can feel
2 things you can smell
1 thing you can taste
Once you’ve done all of that, you will be in the present and in your body.
8. Sensory Items
Since connecting with your senses helps you connect with yourself, plan to have something with you that will quickly connect you to one of your five senses. For example, you can suck on a sour candy, smell an essential oil, gently smooth lotion onto your skin, listen to a favorite song loudly, or look at a favorite painting or photo.
9. Narrate What You Are Doing
This one may sound kind of odd, but it really works! Whatever you’re doing right now, start narrating it (out loud if possible). So you might say, “I’m reading this article. I’m reading about getting connected with myself.” Or you might say, “I’m walking into the kitchen. I’m opening the cabinet and getting out a plate. I’m opening the fridge and getting the leftover chicken from last night, and now I’m heating it up in the microwave.”
There’s no analysis with this tool; we’re not judging anything as we narrate. We’re just stating what we’re doing as we’re doing it. It’s hard for our brains to be elsewhere when we are asking them to be in the immediate present.
Tools for Feeling Empowered
All of the tools in your toolbox will help you feel empowered, but these four tools are specifically focused on putting you in charge of your life. They will help you remember that you – not your feelings, thoughts or other people – are in charge of deciding how you want to show up in your life and for yourself.
10. Values Card Sort
Painful, loud emotions and thoughts are very compelling. We tend to listen to them without even thinking about it, unless we have something else to listen to. This tool gives you something more useful to listen to. It keeps you in touch with what is most meaningful to you about life – your values – so you don’t get sidelined by everything else.
When you stay focused on your values, life feels more meaningful, more fulfilling. That’s one of the best parts about being empowered and in charge of yourself!
This Values Card Sort will help you identify your top values, the concepts that are most important to you about being alive. Once you know what they are, you can decide how you’re going to focus on them.
Do a Values Card Sort with me!
11. Monsters on the Bus
This tool reminds you that although your thoughts and feelings can be compelling in how loud and painful they are, you still don’t have to listen to them (and in fact, life feels better when you don’t!). You are in charge of how you live your life. You can choose to stay connected to what’s important to you even when you’re in pain.
For example, you can feel anxious or scared about doing something, and you can do the thing anyway because doing the thing is meaningful to you. You can think that you are unworthy and you can act worthy anyway, because acting as if you are as good as everyone else is meaningful to you.
Once you identify your “monsters” (e.g., fear, low self-esteem, depression), you can more easily choose not to listen to them and drive your bus however you want to.
To try Monsters on the Bus, watch this video!
12. Talk to Yourself Like You Talk to Your Friends
This is one of those tools that’s so simple it almost feels not worth mentioning, but I’m mentioning it because we are terrible at doing it!
When you notice how you talk to yourself, you’ll probably notice that you are often unkind to yourself. You might be really critical of yourself or hold yourself to unrealistic expectations. You might be a full-on jerk to yourself.
We don’t talk to our friends this way. We would never! We understand that talking to a friend that way could impact their mood or self-esteem or damage our relationship with them. So why do we talk to ourselves this way?
The answer to that is too long to go into here. In brief, we are trained by our environment about how to talk to and treat ourselves. We learn not to give ourselves the same grace we give everyone else, and it costs us. It keeps us stuck in an incorrect, unhelpful image of ourselves.
Treating yourself more harshly than you treat your friends is not helpful. It’s not toughening you up or motivating you to “be better.” It’s doing the opposite. It’s disempowering you. It’s hard to feel empowered when you also feel inferior/stupid/wrong.
This tool asks you to notice how you talk to yourself and change it. If you didn’t get something you wanted, don’t tell yourself that you didn’t deserve it or didn’t try hard enough. Tell yourself whatever you would tell your friend if the same thing happened to them. If you make a mistake, talk to yourself the way you would talk to a friend who made that same mistake.
Start practicing talking to yourself the way you talk to your friends, and notice how it feels!
13. Self-Compassion
This tool is really important for self-empowerment, and really hard to do. It’s similar to the last tool, but a bit more specific. Self-compassion is about being kind to yourself when you’re in pain.
Self-compassion asks you to recognize that we are all in the same soup; all humans feel pain, and we are all imperfect. Those aren’t things to judge ourselves for. We wouldn’t be mean to a friend if she were in emotional pain, so let’s stop being uncompassionate to ourselves.
In fact, if we are kind and comforting to ourselves when we’re in pain or make a mistake, studies show that we become more resilient, less stressed, and less depressed. That is empowering! That keeps us in charge in the face of feelings or thoughts that want to be in charge.
To practice self-compassion, notice when you’re in pain, and offer yourself comfort. Treat yourself the same way you would treat a friend who was in that same kind of pain. Say the same words, give yourself a hug (putting one hand on your heart and one on your belly feels like a hug to your nervous system). Don’t be unkind about it. That’s it!
Now you’ve got 13 tools to help you manage your thoughts and feelings and stay connected to yourself! Keep an eye on your tools; it’s easy to forget about them when things feel hard.
I’d love to hear about any other tools that work for you – please share them in the comments!