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Written by licensed clinicians · 1–10 minutes · Free

Mindfulness Practices & Exercises

Short practices you can use when you're flooded, stuck in a loop, fighting an urge, or mid-argument.

No app, no signup, no download. Start with what's happening right now — then open any practice on its own page.

Start with how you feelGuided Meditations
Person sitting quietly at home practicing mindfulness, without headphones

Start here

What's happening right now

Most people don't arrive looking for a technique. They arrive dysregulated. Pick the closest one.

I'm about to lose itFlooded, panicky, heart racingI feel disconnectedNumb, foggy, not quite hereI can't stop the thoughtsSpiraling, replaying, ruminatingI'm having an urgeCraving, impulse, about to reactI'm in a fight with my partnerEscalating, shut down, stuckI've done this beforeReady for something deeperI'm ready for deeper workThe pattern underneath — not only the spikeI want a daily practiceSomething sustainable, not a crisis tool

When you're flooded

Your nervous system is running the show and reasoning with yourself isn't going to work yet. These bring the body down first.

Regulation60 seconds

Box Breathing

For panic, pre-conflict flooding, or anywhere you can't be seen doing anything unusual.

  1. Breathe in through your nose for a count of four.
  2. Hold for four.
  3. Breathe out through your mouth for four.
  4. Hold empty for four.
  5. Repeat four times. Stop if you feel lightheaded.

Why it works: The extended exhale and the hold engage the parasympathetic system. It's the pattern used in military and emergency-services training precisely because it works under pressure.

Open this practice →
Regulation30 seconds

The Physiological Sigh

The fastest way down. Use it when you have almost no time.

  1. Inhale through your nose until your lungs feel about three-quarters full.
  2. Take a second, shorter sniff on top of that inhale.
  3. Let it all out slowly through your mouth — long and unforced.
  4. Repeat two or three times.

Why it works: The double inhale reinflates collapsed air sacs and offloads carbon dioxide quickly. It's the shape your body already makes when you sob or sleep — you're doing it deliberately.

Open this practice →
Grounding2 minutes

5-4-3-2-1 Grounding

For dissociation, derealization, or feeling like you've left the room.

  1. Name five things you can see. Actually look at them.
  2. Name four things you can feel — chair, floor, fabric, temperature.
  3. Name three things you can hear.
  4. Name two things you can smell.
  5. Name one thing you can taste.

Why it works: It forces attention outward through the senses. You can't scan the room for five specific objects and stay inside a thought spiral at the same time — the two compete for the same attention.

Open this practice →
DBT60 seconds

The STOP Practice

For the moment right before you send the text, say the thing, or slam the door.

  1. Stop. Freeze. Don't move a muscle.
  2. Take a step back — physically leave if you can.
  3. Observe. What's happening in your body? What's the situation actually?
  4. Proceed mindfully. Ask what you want the outcome to be, then act toward that.

Why it works: It inserts a gap between the trigger and the response. The skill isn't calming down — it's not acting during the window where you'd make it worse.

Open this practice →
ACT2 minutes

Dropping Anchor

For when the feeling has already swept you up and you still need to function.

  1. Press your feet into the floor. Notice the contact. If you can, push down a little.
  2. Feel the chair, the clothes on your skin, the temperature of the air.
  3. Look around and silently name five things you can see. Turn your head. Let your eyes actually land.
  4. Then come back to the thing in front of you — the email, the conversation, the next small action — while the feeling is still here.
  5. You are not waiting to feel better first. You are getting your body in the room so you can choose the next move.

Why it works: Flooding makes it feel like you have to win the feeling before you can act. Dropping anchor does the opposite: it brings you into the present so you can act with the feeling still present. From Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

Open this practice →
DBT · TIPP30 seconds

Cold Water Reset

For peak panic, rage, or a shutdown you need to interrupt fast — when breathing isn't landing yet.

  1. Splash cold water on your face, or hold a cold pack / ice cubes against your cheeks or the sides of your eyes.
  2. Stay with the cold for 15–30 seconds. Breathe out slowly.
  3. Take your hands away. Feel the air on your skin. Notice whether the spike dropped even a little.
  4. Then do one slower exhale. If you still need it, repeat once — not over and over.

Why it works: Cold on the face can trigger the dive reflex and a rapid downshift in heart rate. It is a circuit breaker, not a lifestyle. Skip it if you have a heart condition, and don't use ice on bare skin long enough to burn.

Open this practice →

When you can't stop the thoughts

You can't argue your way out of rumination — arguing is more thinking. These change your relationship to the thought instead of its content.

ACT · Defusion2 minutes

Naming the Story

For the thought you've had a thousand times and still believe every time.

  1. Notice the thought. Something like I'm going to be alone forever.
  2. Give the whole pattern a title, like a book: the Nobody-Will-Stay story.
  3. Next time it shows up, say: Ah — the Nobody-Will-Stay story is here again.
  4. Don't argue with it. Don't reassure yourself. Just name it and carry on with what you were doing.

Why it works: Naming turns the thought from something you're inside of into something you're looking at. You're not trying to make it false — you're changing how much it gets to run you.

Longer version: The World Before the Story guided meditation

Open this practice →
Emotion exposure4 minutes

Physicalizing the Emotion

For feelings too big to think about — grief, shame, dread.

  1. Find where the feeling lives in your body. Chest, throat, stomach, jaw.
  2. If it had a colour, what colour? A shape? A size? A texture? Is it moving or still?
  3. Stop trying to shrink it. Instead, make room around it — imagine the space it's in getting bigger.
  4. Breathe into that space. Send it something kind: it makes sense that this is here.
  5. Stay with it for a few breaths. Notice whether it shifts on its own.

Why it works: Describing a feeling's physical qualities moves it from raw affect into observable detail. Making room for it, rather than fighting it, is what lets the intensity fall on its own.

Longer version: Self-Compassion guided video

Open this practice →

When you're fighting an urge

The urge feels like it will keep climbing forever unless you act on it. It won't.

Urge management5 minutes

Urge Surfing

For any urge you don't want to act on — checking their phone, sending the message, the drink, the scroll.

  1. Notice the urge without acting. Say to yourself: an urge is here.
  2. Locate it in your body. Where does wanting actually feel like something?
  3. Rate its intensity 0–100.
  4. Picture it as a wave. It rises, it peaks, it falls. Your job is to stay on the board, not to stop the wave.
  5. Re-rate every minute. Keep breathing. Don't distract yourself — watch it.

Why it works: Urges are self-limiting. Most peak within 20–30 minutes and subside whether or not you act. Acting is what teaches your brain the urge had to be obeyed — riding it out teaches the opposite.

Longer version: The Return Between Shores guided meditation

Open this practice →
Schema therapy3 minutes

Which Schema Just Fired?

For reactions that feel far bigger than the thing that caused them.

  1. Rate the reaction 0–100. If it's above a 60 for something small, an old pattern is involved.
  2. Ask: how old do I feel right now? Note the first number that comes.
  3. Ask: what is this telling me about myself? — I'm being abandoned, I'm defective, I'm being controlled, my needs don't matter.
  4. Name the coping move you're about to make: give in, get out, or go on the attack.
  5. Then choose the response you'd actually stand behind tomorrow.

Why it works: An outsized reaction usually means something older got triggered alongside the present event. Separating the two gives you back the choice about how to respond now.

Open this practice →

When you're in it with your partner

Above about 70 out of 100, neither of you is reasoning — you're both in threat response. Nothing productive happens there.

CouplesIn the moment

The Empathy Guess

For the middle of an argument, when you're certain you're right.

  1. Pause and ask silently: what just got triggered for them?
  2. Guess the feeling underneath the anger — usually hurt, fear, or shame.
  3. Guess the need behind it. Respect, reassurance, autonomy, closeness.
  4. Guess which old pattern fired for them — and which one fired for you.
  5. Say one sentence out loud that names their side, before you say anything about yours.

Why it works: Most escalation is two people each defending against a threat the other can't see. Naming their experience first breaks the loop — and doing it doesn't require you to agree, or to give up your own position.

Longer version: Facing Each Other with Care guided meditation

Open this practice →
Couples20 minutes

Take a Structured Pause

For when either of you is above about 70 and staying in the conversation is making it worse.

  1. Name it out loud: I need a pause. I'm too flooded to do this well.
  2. Say when you will come back — 20 to 30 minutes, not tomorrow, not never.
  3. Physically separate. No last jab. No rehearsing your closing argument.
  4. Use a body-down practice from this page. Cold water, a sigh, feet on the floor.
  5. Return at the time you said. Start with one sentence about the pause, not the original fight.

Why it works: Leaving without a return time is abandonment. Staying while flooded is more damage. The skill is both: step out of the threat response, then come back on purpose.

Open this practice →
Couples2 minutes

One Honest Sentence

For after the spike, when you can tell the truth without trying to win the whole case.

  1. Drop the evidence. You don't need the timeline.
  2. Name your feeling in one word. Hurt. Scared. Ashamed. Lonely.
  3. Name the need underneath it. Reassurance, respect, space, closeness.
  4. Say one sentence: I felt ___ when ___, and I needed ___. Then stop.
  5. Let them have it. Don't stack a second sentence that puts them on trial.

Why it works: Repair is usually a small accurate sentence, not a closing argument. One true line is easier for a flooded partner to take in than a well-built case.

Open this practice →

If you've done this before

These ask more of you. They're still practices — you read them and do them, no audio required — but they take longer, they're harder to stay with, and they work on something deeper than getting through the next ten minutes. Come to these when the basics have stopped being enough.

Advanced · Compassion10 minutes

Tonglen

For when someone you love is suffering and you feel helpless — or when your own pain feels pointless.

  1. Sit still for a minute. Let your mind settle without trying to make it calm.
  2. Bring to mind the suffering — yours, or someone else's. Let yourself actually feel the weight of it.
  3. Breathe in the suffering. Picture it as heat, darkness, heaviness. Take it in rather than pushing it away.
  4. Breathe out relief. Coolness, light, spaciousness. Send it toward whoever is suffering.
  5. After a few rounds, widen it: everyone else feeling this exact thing right now. Breathe theirs in too, send relief out to all of them.

Why it works: It reverses the instinct. Everything in you wants to breathe the pain out and the good in — Tonglen deliberately does the opposite. That reversal breaks the avoidance loop that keeps pain stuck, and it converts helplessness into something you're actively doing. It comes from Tibetan Buddhism, where it's practised for exactly this.

Go carefully. If you're in acute trauma or crisis, start with the grounding practices above instead. Tonglen asks you to move toward pain, which needs a stable footing first.

Open this practice →
Advanced · Self-compassion6 minutes

The Self-Compassion Break

For self-criticism, shame, and the feeling that you're the only one failing at this.

  1. Name it plainly: this is a moment of suffering. Not dramatic — just true.
  2. Place a hand where the feeling lives. Chest, stomach, throat.
  3. Say: suffering is part of being a person. I'm not the only one who feels this.
  4. Ask what you'd say to a close friend in this exact position — then say that to yourself, in those words.
  5. Then widen the circle: may I be at ease with this. May you be at ease with this — picturing someone specific. May everyone struggling with this be at ease with it.

Why it works: Shame's core move is isolation — the belief that your failure is uniquely yours. Kristin Neff's research identifies common humanity as one of the three components that make self-compassion work, and the widening circle at the end is what dismantles the isolation directly.

Open this practice →
Advanced · Emotion8 minutes

RAIN

For a feeling you've been managing around for days without actually facing.

  1. Recognise. Name what's here in one word. Fear. Grief. Rage. Emptiness.
  2. Allow. Let it be there without fixing, arguing, or explaining it. Say this belongs — even if you don't mean it yet.
  3. Investigate. Where is it in the body? What does it believe? What does it most need right now — to be safe, seen, forgiven, held?
  4. Nurture. Offer that thing. A hand on the chest, a sentence said inwardly, an image of someone who'd give it to you.
  5. Sit for a moment afterward in what's left. That residue is the point of the practice, not the four steps.

Why it works: Most of us skip from recognise straight to fix. RAIN forces the two steps in between — allowing and investigating — which is where the feeling actually gets metabolised rather than suppressed. Developed and popularised by Tara Brach.

There's a longer guided version: Self-Compassion video

Open this practice →
Advanced · Interpersonal5 minutes

Just Like Me

For the person you've written off — an ex, a difficult colleague, your partner mid-conflict, a family member.

  1. Picture them clearly. Include the part of them you find hard.
  2. Say, one line at a time, slowly: This person has a body that hurts, just like me.
  3. This person has been disappointed, just like me. Has been afraid of being left, just like me.
  4. This person is doing the best they know how with what they were given, just like me.
  5. Finish with: May you have some peace. May I have some peace.

Why it works: Contempt requires seeing someone as a different kind of creature than you are. This practice makes that position hard to hold. It doesn't require forgiving them, agreeing with them, or staying in the relationship — it only loosens the grip of contempt, which is usually costing you more than it costs them.

Longer version: A Compassionate Companion guided meditation

Open this practice →
Advanced · Attention10 minutes

Noting Practice

For building the muscle that every other practice on this page depends on.

  1. Sit. Eyes open or closed, doesn't matter.
  2. Whenever anything arises, give it a one-word label, said silently and gently: thinking. hearing. planning. aching. remembering. wanting.
  3. Don't follow the thing you labelled. Label it and let it go.
  4. When you notice you've been lost in a thought for a while, label that too: lost. Then continue. Getting lost is not failing — noticing you were lost is the whole repetition.
  5. Ten minutes. Expect to get lost dozens of times.

Why it works: This is the underlying skill. Urge surfing, defusion, and schema-catching all require noticing what's happening while it's happening. Noting trains exactly that, and it's why people who practise it find the other tools suddenly start working.

Open this practice →
Advanced · Somatic8 minutes

Pendulation

For when staying with a feeling all at once is too much — and leaving it entirely doesn't help either.

  1. Find where the activation lives. Heat, tightness, buzzing, a pit.
  2. Stay with it for two or three breaths. Not forever. Just contact.
  3. Then find a place in the body that feels more okay — feet, hands, a patch of warmth, the sense of the room.
  4. Rest there for a few breaths. Let the nervous system register ease.
  5. Briefly return to the activation, then back to the easier place. End in the easier place.

Why it works: The nervous system learns it can move between activation and ease, instead of only flooding or shutting down. You are training a swing, not forcing calm.

Open this practice →
Advanced · Defusion3 minutes

I'm Having the Thought That…

For a sticky sentence that feels like a fact, not a thought.

  1. Catch the sentence. I'm too much. They're going to leave. I always ruin this.
  2. Say it again with a prefix: I'm having the thought that I'm too much.
  3. Then: I notice I'm having the thought that I'm too much.
  4. If it still has you, say the original sentence once in a slightly silly voice — then stop. This is distance, not mockery of yourself.
  5. Return to what you were doing. Don't start a debate with the thought.

Why it works: The content stays the same. The relationship changes. You are no longer inside the sentence — you are a person who is having it. From Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

Open this practice →

When you have longer

Guided meditations

Everything above is for the moment you're in. These are guided sessions for when you can sit down and close your eyes.

10-minute practice

Getting Present

A short guided practice to settle attention, notice the body, and return to this moment with more steadiness.

Watch free video →
12-minute practice

Self-Compassion

Meet difficult feelings with warmth and willingness — a gentle self-compassion practice for hard moments.

Watch free video →
15-minute practice

Connecting with Wise Self

Slow down and listen for the wiser part of you — clarity, care, and guidance beneath the noise.

Watch free video →

All the guided meditations

The full audio library, with free videos. Nothing to sign up for.

Browse guided meditations

Not sure what keeps setting this off?

Practices help in the moment. If the same reaction keeps happening, a free assessment can name the pattern underneath.

Take a free assessment

Prefer to write it down?

Fillable worksheets — trigger logs, values checks, behavioral experiments, and couples tools — are next.

Open the worksheets

From home

Comprehensive, integrative experiences that weave binaural stimulation, EMDR-informed elements, and neuroplasticity-oriented practice into unique sensory exercises you can do anytime.

Attention Focus immersive exercise preview

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$19.99One-time payment

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  • Binaural stimulation + immersive sensory practice
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Mistrust

$29.99One-time payment

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  • Break free from protective walls and suspicion
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Relationship Ambivalence immersive exercise preview

Relationship Ambivalence

$39.99One-time payment

30-minute experience

  • For anyone stuck in relationship doubt or push-pull patterns
  • Transform ambivalence from home
  • Clarify values beneath indecision
  • Engage body, sound, and attention together
  • Evidence-informed immersive therapy structure
  • Binaural stimulation + neuroplasticity-oriented practice
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Ennui immersive exercise preview

Ennui

$39.99One-time payment

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  • Train your brain for awe and vitality
  • Reawaken interest and emotional range
  • Immersive multi-sensory exercise from home
  • Binaural beats + focused attention practice
  • A unique integrative therapy experience
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When practices aren't enough on their own

These tools help you get through the moment. Therapy is where you work on why the moment keeps happening. Individual and couples therapy in San Francisco and online throughout California.

Book a free consult

These practices are educational tools, not treatment, and they are not a substitute for care from a licensed clinician. If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or go to your nearest emergency room.