What Are the Tools in Your Emotional First Aid Kit?
When ordinary self-care is not enough, an emotional first aid kit can offer a more personal set of practices for hard moments. This essay invites you to identify supportive tools for your body, mind, heart, and soul, with attention to the specific activities, people, and sensory experiences that help you feel steadier.
What an Emotional First Aid Kit Is
What’s an emotional first aid kit?
It’s a set of practices, behaviors, and creative interventions I’ve cultivated over the years that helps me support my body, mind, heart, and soul when times are particularly tough and I need to ramp up my self-care big time.
If your nervous system learned the safest way to exist was to manage everyone else's world, my self-paced course Enough Without the Effort is the recovery map.
All of the tools in my emotional first aid kit are unique (read: quirky) and super, almost inexplicably effective for me.
It’s taken me time to identify these tools and behaviors, to accept that they look different from what’s usually prescribed in women’s magazines (i.e.: yoga, meditation, green juice), and it’s definitely taken even more time to learn when I need to employ them (the most).
But having this set of strategies that I can now lean on when times are particularly tough is a big part of my own ongoing self-care and something I feel passionate about sharing and helping my clients to develop, too.
So today I want to lead you through some inquiries to help you identify what might make it into your emotional first aid kit for those times when life just feels overwhelming.
Emotional First-Aid Kit 101: What It Is and Isn’t:
Just to recap, an emotional first aid kit is totally proverbial (no actual toolboxes required!).
An emotional first aid kit is a personal collection of practices, behaviors, and supports you can turn to when stress is high and your usual routines are not enough.
In plain terms: It is a plan for the specific things that help you feel more supported when life feels like too much.
It’s a set of unique practices, behaviors, and creative interventions designed to comfort, support, and bring relief to your body, mind, heart, and soul in particularly challenging times.
These are some tools you can pull out when it seems like everything’s going wrong and your standard self-care routines just aren’t cutting it for you anymore.
An emotional first aid kit is an ongoing practice of self-awareness and self-care, supporting you in recognizing what you need, and getting curious and creative about how you can meet your needs through life’s many ups and downs.
For the purposes of today’s exercise, I’m going to walk you through the four areas for which we want to develop tools and invite you to identify 2-3 creative interventions for each area.
This will be the foundation of your own ever-evolving emotional first aid kit.
Body: Feel, Nourish, and Soothe.
Care for Your Body and Mind
When life’s tough times hit, we want to have some tools in our toolbox that we can use to help feel, nourish, and soothe our body.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean things like exercising for 20 minutes or drinking a daily green smoothie (though if that sounds like just what you need in tough times, rock on).
Instead, what I want you to start identifying are activities or practices you know that would help you get into your body and engage your five senses , smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing , in a way that feels appropriate and helpful for you and you alone.
I don’t know what your body-based tools will be, but here are some inquiries to help you brainstorm:
-
What’s the sort of stress you’re experiencing? Do you feel trapped or too uncontained? What’s a physical activity that can support giving you more space (if feeling trapped) or containment (if you’re feeling uncontained)?
-
What did your 8-year old self most love to do with her body?
-
What does your body crave when you’re stressed? Touch? Childhood comfort food? Stretches? Connection with the earth? Space?
-
Can you combine a few activities into one to engage several senses of your body at once? (Eg: Music and movement?)
Mind: Still, Center, Focus.
When stress hits, it’s not unusual for our minds to feel frazzled, chaotic, and near-impossible to shut off.
Grounding refers to practices that help bring attention back to the present moment through the body, senses, or immediate environment.
In plain terms: A simple, familiar action can help when your mind feels scattered and you need something steady to return to.
That’s why it’s important to have one or two practices or behaviors in your back pocket to help still, center, and focus your mind.
Now it’s your turn:
-
What creative, alternative actions and behaviors might help you to still, center, and focus your mind?
-
Is there a task you do with your hands that seems to calm your mind? Does noticing your breath feel helpful to you?
-
Are there certain sounds that soothe your mind? Can you Google or Spotify those sounds up and create a playlist for yourself?
-
If your minds feels frazzled, what action can you take that’s soothing? If your mind (and life) feels untidy or unruly? How can you do something to help bring order to your mind?
Heart: Notice, Express, Feel.
Support Your Heart
When life feels overwhelming and you’re having a hard time, it’s critical to have some tools in your emotional first aid kit to support you in noticing, expressing, and honoring your feelings.
Like I’ve mentioned before, appropriately feeling and expressing our feelings is foundational to good mental health and to living a more enlivened, enriched life.
And so, when I’m having a hard time, my go-to tool to support my heart is relying on my Big Five , my go-to beloved friends, family members, and mentors, people who I feel totally safe and supported in being honest and vulnerable with.
-
Who in your life could you safely share your feelings with? A friend? A family member? Your therapist? (Yes, a therapist can be a tool in your emotional first aid kit!)
-
What helps you get in touch with your feelings? If you need some tips, check out this blog post I wrote.
-
Is there someone you need to express something difficult too? If you need some support around this, check out these tips.
-
What else do you know helps your heart when you’re going through tough times?
Soul: Connect, Ground, Trust.
Connect With Your Soul
Last, but not least, I believe that designing tools that nourish and support our soul is an incredibly important part of any emotional first aid kit.
Define the soul however you want , spirit, essence, psyche, etc. , I personally believe that our soul is the unchangeable, indestructible part of us that breathes and lives us, the part of us that always was and always will be and that we often forget to consciously tend to in the minutiae of our everyday human lives.
So let’s see what might help you.
-
When is it that you feel the stirrings of your soul? What place, activity, sound, or action helps you feel this part of you?
-
Does nature feed you? What places help you connect to your soul the strongest?
-
Do you have a spiritual community or faith group that you can lean on? What people serve as guides and mentors in your life that help nourish your soul?
-
What high-quality inspirational or instructional content can you read or listen to that can guide you in connecting to your soul?
My Invitation To You.
I want you to go back through this blog post and write down 2-3 ideas for body, mind, heart, and soul that might be tools you can use in your own emotional first aid kit.
Q: What is the main idea of this article?
A: When ordinary self-care is not enough, an emotional first aid kit can offer a more personal set of practices for hard moments.
Q: How can I begin with this?
You've been holding everything together. You're allowed to put some down.
A focused self-paced course on overfunctioning, achievement-first self-concept, and the trauma response that masquerades as a personality. Not a productivity problem. Not a boundary problem. A nervous system that learned competence was the only safety.
A: Start by noticing the pattern or need the essay describes, then choose one small practice or question from the article to try with curiosity.
Q: Do I need to do this perfectly?
A: No. The essay emphasizes reflection, practice, and responsiveness rather than getting the process right all at once.
Q: Why might this feel difficult?
A: The patterns described can be connected to old learning and familiar ways of protecting yourself, so change can take time and care.
Q: When might support help?
A: If the material brings up persistent distress or feels hard to work with alone, a skilled therapist or trusted support person can be a helpful part of the process.
EMDR-trained, trauma-informed therapy for driven women healing relational and developmental trauma.
Trauma-informed coaching for driven women navigating leadership, burnout, and identity.
Annie’s signature course for relational trauma recovery. The framework, in your own time.
Annie Wright, LMFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
“Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.”
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist with 15,000+ clinical hours since 2013 and an EMDRIA Certified Therapist. She’s the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she successfully exited. She’s currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). Her expert commentary has appeared in Psychology Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information.
CA LMFT95719 · CO MFT.0003236 (telehealth only) · CT 003806 · DC LMFT200001447 · FL TPMF356 (out-of-state telehealth registration) · IL 166.012270 · ME MF8600 · MD LCM1206 · NH 1030 · NJ 37FI00254800 · NY 002805 · TX 206391 · UT 14300323-3902 · VA 0717002589 · WA MFT.LF.70098096
Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. Trained in EMDR, psychodynamic, and somatic modalities, she is licensed in 14 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
Work With Annie