What is a Mental Wellness Toolkit and Why Do you Need One?
What is it?
A mental wellness toolkit is a collection of personalized strategies, activities and tools one can use to manage their mental wellness. Ensuring that you always have some sort for way to control your emotions, lower stress and handle all of the things life can throw at you – big or small – without spiraling into a mental wellness crisis.
It’s important to note that mental wellness toolkits do not replace therapy or prescribed medication but can work before and alongside those things to help you better regulate emotions and how to best help yourself when dealing feelings of overwhelm, stress, and depression.
Mental Wellness toolkits can include multiple things, most commonly they can include yoga, journaling, dancing, faith, exercising meditation, and baking or cooking. No two toolkits look the same because each person has certain activities or practices that they turn to that work best for themselves and handling stress, emotions and more.
Now that we know what a mental wellness toolkit is, you’re probably asking, “Why do I need one?”
Whether you realize it or not you are probably already managing emotions, overwhelm, stress, and more without actively realizing it. If you have ever been upset with a friend and wrote them a letter but never planned to send it or maybe you were feeling overly anxious and the only way to calm your nervous system was to go on a walk you were actively using tools in your mental wellness toolkit to calm yourself. You just didn’t realize it!
You need a mental wellness toolkit so that when these feelings occur you know the best way for you personally to deal with them.
Your mental wellness toolkit is not meant to be static, the best personal coping strategies for different feelings and emotions can change overtime and that’s ok. It’s important to regularly self-reflect and identify any strategies or tools that you feel may need to be changed or redeveloped.
Check out the list below of coping mechanisms our team uses in their own personal mental wellness toolkits that can help you get started building your own, or you can reflect on a time when you were using a coping strategy maybe without knowing!
Yoga
Bicycling
Walking
Running
Journaling
Listening to Music
Lifting Weights
Writing a letter
Box Breathing
Meditation
Body Scan Meditation
Drawing/Painting
The goal is for you to have a set of solutions that you know works for you and your mental wellness toolkit, so that you aren’t scrambling while actively in a difficult moment.