Free Self-Help Practice Tools
Why these exist
Most of this material exists today as a worksheet: a PDF laid out for a desktop screen, or a page to print and fill in by hand. That is a good format for a folder and a poor one for the moment someone actually reaches for it, which is usually away from a desk, on a phone.
These are the same exercises, rebuilt for where people already are. The frameworks belong to the people who developed them, and every tool here says whose work it comes from.
Decisional Balance
A four-quadrant sheet for weighing a decision: what you gain and what you give up by changing, and by staying as you are.
OpenExposure Ladder
A place to list situations in your own order of difficulty, and to record what actually happened when you tried one.
OpenGraded Goals
Break a goal into steps small enough to actually start, write down how you expect each one to go, then record how it went.
OpenWellness Tracker
A daily log for sleep, activity, mood, and whatever else you decide is worth watching over time.
OpenSelf-Care Plan
A place to collect the things that reliably help you, written down in advance of needing them.
OpenThought Diary
An ABC record: the situation, the thought that followed it, and what you make of that thought afterwards.
OpenKeeping Steady
A plan for noticing your own early warning signs, and for writing down what helps once you have spotted them.
OpenThese are self-help and educational tools. They do not provide therapy or professional mental or behavioural health care, and they are not a substitute for it. They are not delivered by, or endorsed by, a licensed professional.
They are not for emergencies. If you are in crisis, in the United States call or text 988. Elsewhere, findahelpline.com lists free lines by country.
- Decisional Balance.
- The decisional balance sheet originates with Janis and Mann. The four-quadrant arrangement follows Motivational Groups for Community Substance Abuse Programs (Ingersoll, Wagner and Gharib), published by CSAT/SAMHSA and in the public domain as a United States government work. All wording written fresh for this tool.
- Exposure Ladder.
- Graded exposure descends from Joseph Wolpe's systematic desensitisation and is long-standing standard practice. No published material is reproduced. The tool is a record keeper. It never suggests what to face, or when.
- Graded Goals.
- The step-by-step graded approach has long been used in self-help guides. The prediction and review element draws on the behavioural experiment tradition. All copy original.
- Wellness Tracker.
- All original. It does not assess or diagnose anything. There is no score, no composite, and no interpretation band.
- Self-Care Plan.
- All original.
- Thought Diary.
- The ABC(DE) structure is credited to Albert Ellis. The ten unhelpful thinking styles are the taxonomy published by the Centre for Clinical Interventions, with descriptions written fresh here. Independent, and not endorsed by CCI.
- Keeping Steady.
- All copy original. Independent. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from Wellness Recovery Action Plan® (WRAP®) or Mind’s Wellness Action Plan.
- Everything you write in these tools stays on your device. None of it is stored on a server or transmitted anywhere. That is true of every tool on this page.
- Nothing is scored, diagnosed, or interpreted. No tool produces a number that is meant to stand for the person using it.
- Every tool carries crisis line information and a plain statement that it is not a substitute for care.
- Frameworks are credited by name. Some of what I have built is not on this page, because it follows published material too closely to publish without asking first.
- No tool here asks for an account. You can open any of them and start straight away.
- Envelope counts that a tool was opened, so I can tell whether a link I sent was used. That count is of the page, never of anything you write in the tool.
I’m Miranda. I build at Envelope, and I made these to see how far the format goes.
If you publish or steward one of the frameworks above, I would like to hear from you, whether that is about permission, a correction, or something you would rather I did not do. If you work with clients and something here is useful as a companion to work done with a therapist, I would like to hear that too.
miranda@envelope.build