← Your Anxiety Toolkit - Practical Skills for Anxiety, Panic & Depression
Your Anxiety Toolkit - Practical Skills for Anxiety, Panic & Depression
466 5 Mental Health Priorities for a Calmer, Stronger 2026
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Welcome to youo Anxiety Toolkit. I'm your host, Kimberly Quinlan. This podcast is fueled by three main goals. The first goal is to provide you with some extra tools to help you manage your anxiety. Second goal, to inspire you. Anxiety doesn't get to decide how you live your life. And number three, and I leave the best for last, is to provide you with one big, big fat virtual hug. Because experiencing anxiety ain't easy. If that sounds good to you, let's go.
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Today we're talking about five mental health priorities for a calmer, stronger 2026. Here is my question for you. If you want to get into tip top mental health shape in 2026, I'm going to take you through my five five top priorities for my own mental health and what I would encourage you to do to follow me. And so let's get to it. As we step into the new year, I want you to consider what matters most, what is my purpose and how can I not let anxiety stop me anymore? The new year can bring a lot of pressure. Sort of this pressure to like do better and fix ourselves. But I want to reframe this. Let's get really clear on the skills and priorities I want us to focus on. So, so let's go over the agenda. I'm going to teach you five powerful shifts that can help you prioritize your mental health in 2026. I'm going to help you do it with intention. They are going to be science backed tools and you're going to do it with self respect. So let's get started. Welcome to your anxiety toolkit. This is a podcast where I teach you all of the science backed skills to help you live your biggest, fullest life and manage your anxiety. My name is Kimberly Quindlen. I am an anxiety specialist. I am a therapist and my personal goal is to you suffer less. It's as simple as that. So today we always go through what I call an anxiety toolkit, a specific set of skills that you're going to take and I'm going to give you five of those today. So let's go to number one. It's attention training. As a lot of you know, last year in December, I created a whole course called the Rumination Reset. And I teach you a specific skill called attention training to help you manage rumination and anxiety. And this is going to be the core skill I want teach you from now on. So let's talk about what is attention training. Now attention training is a mental exercise. It's a strength or skill and they use it A lot in metacognitive therapy, which is a type of cognitive behavioral therapy, more on the cognitive side. And now it is designed to help you improve your intentional control so that you can kind of stay, you know, with what matters to you. It helps you to reduce worry and rumination, Right? And it helps you treat emotional disorders or even just general strong emotions by teaching you to focus and control your attention to what matters. So what I want to do is give you an explanation here. So let's say that you are washing the dishes. Now, as you're washing the dishes, follow my little arrow here. So as we're washing the dishes, you're focusing on the suds and the warm water and the hardness of the plate and the softness of the sponge, and you're focusing on that. But then your brain comes out away from that focus, and he's thinking about, oh, my God, bad things might happen. And oh, my gosh, you know what that I said that thing and what if I had that thought and what if I want to do that thought? And attention training is observing all this mess here that we get ourselves into and bringing it back to the focus of washing the dishes and the warmth of the water and the feeling of the suds, right? And we're going to stay here, and we're slowly staying our attention in this line. Then our brain's going to bring us over here and be like, oh, what if you hurt your parents? And what if you, you know, they judged you and you lose your job and you go to jail and these things? And your job is to note that you've gone and your attention is off track, and it brings it back to washing the dishes and the warmth of the suds or the smell of the suds or the feeling of the sponge. Then your brain's going to come over here and do it all over again. Come on back. This is attention training. And my goal this year is to go deeper into teaching you about that. Now, you can also go to the rumination reset at CBT school and learn more skills there. But know that this is going to be a priority of mine, and I hope it's a priority of yours in 2026. Now, number two is compassionate mind training. Now, this is a specific training of compassion. Now, compassionate mind training is under the umbrella of a type of treatment which is a cognitive behavioral therapy treatment called compassion focused therapy. I am a compassion focused therapist. I practice that in addition to cognitive behavioral therapy. Now, what that means is we practice replacing self criticism with kind curious awareness. It kind of, again, Goes under the umbrella of mindfulness. It is a commitment that we make to kindness and respect. That's supposed to say respect and warmth. Right. So it's the commitment to really committing to. I am no longer going to beat myself up under any condition. I am going to hold space for myself and for the fact that it's hard and that I'm doing the best that I can. It's also going to be using warm statements like, this is hard and I'm doing the best I can. There you go. It's going to be saying, wow, this is a difficult moment. What do you need to succeed in this moment? Yeah, it is really hard. This is really hard for you. How can I support you? That is compassionate statements. And it's also going to be used to target difficult emotion like shame, guilt, anxiety and sadness and uncertainty. Right. We really double down on these skills. And I want you to use 2026 to get really good at feeling uncomfortable emotions. It doesn't mean you want those emotions. It just means that you've made a commitment that there is no emotion that you could have that will cause you to abandon yourself. That there is no emotion that you could have where you're going to respond in a brittle, mean way. That's the work we're doing here. Now, number three is digital boundaries. As I end out 2025, I am coming to realize, and I'm reading the research, that short form media, reels, shorts, TikTok, are really not good for our brain. And I was telling my kids and my husband last night that I literally lost 40 minutes the other day I went to bed, I opened on Instagram, and before I knew it, 40 minutes of my life had disappeared and I have no idea where they went. And it made me realize that short form media can really take you away. Now, I love short form media. I make short form media. I'm not against it, but I want to really work at setting digital boundaries this year. And what that might look like is curating your feed with intention. So not following people that don't make you feel good.
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And also being really curious like let me tell you a story. I follow these wonderful couples therapists. The the account is Meet the Freemans. I love them. They have the most amazing relationship advice. I strongly encourage you follow them. And I'm not like sponsored by them or anything. I love their stuff, but I found that they're constantly talking about the sort of the right way to communicate and I even started to notice that if my husband and I aren't communicating that I will get bummed out and be like, oh no, and I should be doing this. And I was like, whoa, this is not healthy. Okay, maybe I need to slow down. In consuming so much of this stuff. Even if it's helpful, we sometimes have to reduce our consumption. It also means setting time limits, which I'm going to do. I've ordered a brick. I'm going to get the brick and put it on again. Not sponsored by brick, but I'm going to put that on my phone because I really think that I want something to alert me that it's time to shut them down, especially before bed. And I really with my kids, I want to create tech free zones or times where we can be more present and play Uno and play Clue and categories and the games we love to play. I've noticed games like actual board games. We've played less of them this year because we're on digital tech more so I want to reduce that. Now number four, our goal together is to face the fears that have been holding us back and we want to recommit to that because I committed to that last year and the year before that and the year before that. We are recommitting now. What does this mean? It means I want you to do an audit of the things you did not do last year due to fear. Be gentle. We're not here to beat ourselves up. I want you to commit to a plan to face those fears and it obviously needs to be done in a hierarchical, step by step way. So we want to do is create a strong strategy for gradually increasing those exposures. Now as you know, we have all types of courses at EBT school that can help you with that. If you have ocd. We have a complete start to finish treatment plan for folks with OCD called your OCD toolkit. We also have your anxiety and panic toolkit if you have generalized anxiety or panic disorder. We have Overcoming Depression. If you want a step by step process on how to manage depression, we have your BDD toolkit that I did with Chris Transden. Again, a start to finish treatment plan and course to show you how to do that work and overcome your bdd. And last of BFRB school, which is for hair pulling and skin picking. Now they are there for you if you want to dive deeper than these sort of shorter educational content that I provide for free. So you can head over to CBT school if you're interested and pick what's, whatever would feel best for you. Whatever is most helpful. Okay. Now number five is the most important. I want you to rest like a machine. This year my goal is to rest like a machine. I have huge goals for 2026, career wise, I have huge goals for me, really doubling down on the mission of CBT school. But in order to do that, I'm going to have to learn to rest like a machine. Literally. And what I mean by that is machines like I think of a machine where like something that can power through and doesn't have an emotions and it can just get things done. But what do you do in a factory at the end of the day you turn the machine off and it actually cruelly rests. It cools down, the electricity stops and they actually rest. So for those of us who want to really succeed in many, many ways, or even in a small way, you're going to have to learn how to rest like an Olympic athlete. And what I mean by that is they train hard, but they rest hard. And that's what I want us to focus on. Actual real rest. Not rest where you just are scrolling on Instagram and you've lost track of 40 minutes. Not rest where you're just staring at the TV or numbing out on alcohol or food. All those things are fine. I'm not saying, not, you know, judging you, I'm not judging you in any way, but truly check in with yourself. What is truly restful. Honor your nervous system with rest. Not with just sleep, but stillness, solitude, gentle movement, creativity, reading, nature, pets, puppies, a cup of tea, whatever actually slows your nervous system down. I want you to schedule restorative rest every single day. Okay? All right. So here's your homework. I want you to pick one of those things and start there. Just one, not all of them. I don't want you to try and tackle all this at once. I will not be tackling all of this at once. We will do this gradually and compassionately. Now here's the points I want you to remember as we move forward for today. Number one, 2025 was rough, right? There were some ups and some downs. We won, had some wins, and we had some losses. I think that's true for everybody. Remind yourself that small changes lead to big changes. So we're going to start baby baby steps. Remind yourself that you are growing and that every step you take matters, right? Be kind to yourself. You are doing brave, hard things that deserve celebration. And remember, today is a beautiful day to do hard things. We're going to keep that going into 2026. Even if you're listening to this in 2027, these all apply. These are going to be major priorities I have for 2026. Okay? As always, thank you so much. I am so honored that you are spending this time with me. I know your time is valuable. I cannot wait to see you next episode. All right, I'll see you then.
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Please note that this podcast or any other resources from CBTSchool.com should not replace place professional mental health care. If you feel you would benefit, please reach out to a provider in your area. Have a wonderful day and thank you for supporting cbtschool.com.