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Emotional Self-Help Toolkit
Bring Your Life Into Balance
A Free Self-Guided Program to Help You Relieve Stress and Take Control of Your Life
Stress or mood swings rock everyone's balance from time to time. However, when too much stress, anxiety, depression, or worry interferes with your health, career or personal relationships, it’s time to make a change. No matter how difficult things seem, by learning how to harness overwhelming stress and manage your emotions, you can become healthier and happier, and have a more positive effect on those around you.
Off the emotional rollercoaster: Becoming a healthier, happier you
Daily life can seem like a never-ending ride, leaving you feeling frustrated, anxious, depressed, and unfulfilled. But it doesn’t have to be this way; you can get off the emotional rollercoaster. You can bring your life into balance by learning more about:
- Stress and how to avoid becoming overwhelmed.
- Why your emotions matter to you and to others.
- What you can do to harness the energy of your emotions and make them work for you.
- How you can become calm, energized, focused and more aware of yourself and others.
Like anything worthwhile, achieving the balance emotional awareness delivers will take practice. But no matter how long you’ve felt stressed, overwhelmed, or out-of-sync with yourself, other people, or your life, today you can take the first step to getting off the emotional rollercoaster.
Could this program benefit YOU? Take this quiz and find out!
- Do you feel overwhelmed by responsibilities and stressed -out too much of the time?
- Do you feel misunderstood in your relationships? Do you have a hard time connecting with others?
- Do you feel overwhelmed by your responsibilities as a parent? Are you having a hard time connecting emotionally with your infant or child?
- Do you struggle with chronic depression, anxiety, worry, or negativity?
- Are you having trouble getting ahead in your career, despite your job talents? Have you received complaints about the way you interact with customers or co-workers?
- Do your loved ones complain about your mood swings, temper, irrational fears, or your emotional distance?
- Do you find yourself getting annoyed or upset at little things that don’t seem to bother other people? Do you have a hard time rolling with the punches?
- Do you often say or do things you know you shouldn’t, only to regret it later? Do you feel trapped in a negative cycle, repeating the same mistakes over and over again?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, this emotional skills program may help you break free and bring your life into balance.
Beyond traditional self-help
Traditional self-help that relies on using plans, strategies, or other reasoning processes doesn't work when we are overwhelmed by stress. As soon as your nervous system becomes overly stressed—in the middle of a heated argument with your boss or your spouse, for example—you’re left with only three choices: fight, flight, or freeze. Those responses may be appropriate when faced with a predator in the wild, but they’re not going to help you in a meeting at work or when you’re stuck in traffic or trying to deal with a toddler’s tantrums. In order to remain calm, energized, and focused in the face of these and other daily challenges, you have to prevent your nervous system from becoming overwhelmed. That’s where this toolkit comes in.
Bring Your Life Into Balance goes beyond coping and traditional self-help by repairing your nervous system's ability to remain in balance. It will help you become emotionally aware in your daily life, even in situations when you’d normally feel stressed or overwhelmed. It's designed to actually change your brain and provide you with an internal, decision-making compass that you can rely on—even when you can't think clearly.
This toolkit teaches you these skills in five straightforward parts that you can follow at your own pace.
Program Guide
Part 1: Getting started
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1a. Print: Roadmap / Checklist (Optional) |
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1b. Watch the video: Emotions Matter! (4:03) |
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1c. Watch the video: Roadblocks to Awareness (2:54) |
Part 2: Learn quick stress relief (1st core skill)
Being able to manage and relieve stress in the moment is the key to staying balanced, focused, and in control, no matter what challenges you face. Part 2 teaches you how to recognize when you’re stressed and quickly bring yourself back into balance.
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2a. Watch the video: Quick Stress Relief (4:11) |
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2b. Read: Quick Stress Relief: Fast and Effective Ways to Rapidly Reduce Stress |
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2c. Read: Be a Stress Busting Detective |
Part 3: Learn why emotional awareness matters (2nd core skill)
You can’t effectively manage your emotions or harness their power unless you’re aware of them. It sounds simple, but many people aren’t in touch with how they feel from moment-to-moment. Part 3 teaches you about the importance of emotional awareness and how you can use it to understand yourself better and regain your balance.
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3a. Watch the video: Developing Emotional Awareness (2:50) |
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3b. Read: Developing Emotional Awareness: Recognizing and Harnessing the Power of Your Emotions |
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3c. Watch the video: Harness Your Emotions (3:31) |
Part 4: Practice the Ride the Wild Horse audio meditation
Ride the Wild Horse is a 2-part audio mindfulness meditation designed to help you build your emotional awareness while staying calm and in control. Part 4 teaches you how to safely connect to what you feel without becoming overwhelmed.
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4a. Read: How to Ride the Wild Horse: Guidelines for Learning and Practicing the Meditation |
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4b. Listen and Practice: Ride the Wild Horse Beginning and Advanced Meditations |
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4c. Read the Transcript (Optional): Meditation Script |
Part 5: Integrate the program into your life
To integrate the skills you’ve learned into your life, you’ll need to practice until they become habit, something you do without even thinking about it—like riding a bike or driving a car. With regular practice, you can actually change your brain in ways that will make you feel more confident, resilient, and in control. These final steps will help you use the skills in real world situations and groove them into your brain.
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5a. Talk to a good listener. Talk to an interested, non–judgmental listener about your experiences with the Ride the Wild Horse meditation. Try to do this within 36 hours if possible. |
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5b. Continue to practice the meditation until you’re able to stay connected to your physical and emotional feelings, and are secure in your ability to remain calm and focused under stress. |
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5c. Watch the video: Unexpected Rewards (4:30) |
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5d. Watch the video: It’s Up To You (3:50) |
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Science supporting this program
This toolkit is based on the transformations that have taken place in the field of psychology. Emotion is now at the heart of clinical theory and is seen as the foundation to psychological change. Moreover, we also now know that all of our thinking benefits greatly from having an emotional component.
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Watch: Why is emotion so important? (6:14) – Dr. Allan Schore – Clinical Faculty & Researcher, Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA |
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Watch: What’s new in Neuroscience? (5:03) – Mary Helen Immordino–Yang, Ed.D. – Cognitive Neuroscientist, Brain and Creativity Institute, USC |
Helping others: Parents, students, clients, patients, and loved ones
As well as individual use, the Helpguide toolkit can also be used in teaching, therapeutic, and various office and home settings to help others acquire social and emotional skills. While it’s imperative to always teach both core skills of the toolkit (quick stress relief and emotional awareness), medical or teaching professionals may in some cases need to omit or reformat other aspects of the material according to the age and background of the audience.
- Parents can be taught these skills—in groups or individually—so that they can model and teach appropriate behavior to their children. Social/emotional awareness is important for successfully parenting any child, and critical for successfully parenting a child with developmental challenges.
- Children of all ages can learn age-appropriate aspects of the toolkit. Infants with primary caretakers who model these skills will learn them effortlessly, while preteens and teens are often especially interested in gaining social/emotional skills in order to improve their relationships with others.
- Mental health professionals can recommend some or all of the Helpguide toolkit, depending on patient need, for use in individual or group settings. The toolkit can encourage clients with emotional issues such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia to learn more about reducing stress and better managing their moods.
- Physicians can refer the Helpguide toolkit to patients who need to reduce sources of both internal and external stress.
- Family members can encourage friends and loved ones to use the toolkit to regain their emotional balance.
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