Free anxiety tools
20 short exercises on anxiety, 2 to 8 minutes each, free and with no account needed. Open one and it runs right in the page.
The 20 tools
Where anxiety shows up in your body
Choose the physical sensations you notice when you feel anxious. Most people are surprised how many of them they had stopped counting.
What unsettles you, and how much
Sort everyday situations by how often they leave you on edge. The point is the pattern across them, not any single one.
How anxiety tends to operate in you
Rate how often a set of common anxious habits has been true for you lately. You will see which show up most and which barely feature.
Avoid or approach
Place things you have been avoiding on a grid of how much you avoid them against how much they matter to you.
The anatomy of one anxious moment
Walk back through a recent spike of anxiety step by step: what led up to it, what you felt, what you did, and what happened next.
Box breathing
Four seconds in, four held, four out, four held. A steady square of breath many people use to settle a keyed-up body.
Build your steadying kit
Assemble a personal list of things that help you feel more grounded: senses, people, places, phrases, and small actions.
When anxiety peaks across your week
Mark the times of day and days of the week when anxiety tends to be loudest. A shape usually appears.
Anxiety on seven dials
Set a dial for each way anxiety can take up room: how loud it is in your body, how much it steers your choices, how long it lingers. The spread across the dials says more than any single one.
The little things you do to feel safe
Tick the small precautions you have picked up to keep anxiety at bay. They are so ordinary that most people never think of them as anxiety at all.
Dread in the morning, the day as it was
Each morning, rate how much you are dreading the day. Each evening, rate how hard it actually turned out to be. After a week, the gap between the two lines is the point.
Which kind of anxious
Anxious is a wide word. Narrow it to the flavor you are actually feeling, find where it sits in your body, and hear what it might be asking for.
The smoke alarm check
Treat a wave of anxiety like a smoke alarm going off: check for actual smoke, thank the alarm, and give it two minutes to quiet down. A short exercise for the moment it hits.
What anxiety asks for, and what else you could give it
Turn over cards that show a demand anxiety makes on one side and a smaller, kinder alternative on the other. Keep the ones you could imagine trying.
What you reach for first
Rank the things you reach for when anxiety rises, from the one you grab first to the one you get to last. The order shows your reflexes, which is different from what you would choose.
What an anxious hour is made of
Think of a typical stretch of feeling anxious and divide 100 points across what your mind was actually doing in it. Anxious time is a mix, and the mix is the useful part.
The rules anxiety wrote for you
Choose the unspoken rules you find yourself living by to keep anxiety quiet, then put them in order of how tightly you keep them. Seeing them written down is often the first time they look like rules.
A time it went better than you feared
Write about one thing you dreaded that turned out fine, or at least survivable. Anxiety keeps careful records of disasters and almost none of the near misses; this evens the books a little.
When anxiety is on your side
Sort things anxiety makes you do into the ones that genuinely serve you, the ones that get in your way, and the ones that do both. Not every anxious habit needs to go.
How likely, and how bad
Place the outcomes you fear on a grid of how likely they really are against how bad they would be if they happened. Anxiety tends to put everything in one corner.
What these tools are, and are not
Every tool here is free and works without an account: choose cards, move dials, sort a list, follow a paced breath, or keep a seven-day log, and read back what you noticed at the end. They are built to make a vague feeling more specific, which is often the first useful step.
None of them diagnoses, screens for or treats anything, and nothing you see at the end is a score or a label. If something you notice worries you, a licensed therapist is the right next conversation, and the directory is free to browse.