Anxiety Relief Toolkit

What this is

About the workbook

Anxiety is easier to manage when you are not trying to remember what helps in the middle of it. This toolkit puts the core cognitive-behavioural skills somewhere you can reach them on a bad day.

It covers the loop between anxious thought, body sensation, and avoidance, and gives you a structured way to test what your anxiety predicts against what actually happens.

What is inside the pack

The pack runs to twenty pages. After the cover and a page called How to Use This Toolkit, it opens with two education pages under the heading Understanding Anxiety. The first covers the fight, flight or freeze response and lists how anxiety can show up in the body, in the mind, and in behaviour. The second lays out the anxiety cycle as five steps, from trigger to anxious thought to body alarm to avoidance to short-term relief.

Three exercises follow — 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding, Box Breathing, and Tense and Release. Then the written work: a 7-Day Worry Log, a Challenge the Thought worksheet, and an Anxiety Trigger Tracker. The last stretch is a Coping Strategies Menu of 24 options, My Panic Moment Plan, Pocket Affirmation Cards, and a Weekly Reflection page. Page twenty carries important information and crisis numbers.

The order it suggests

The How to Use page sets out six steps. Read the Understanding Anxiety pages first. Practise the grounding and breathing skills while you are calm — the pack suggests once a day for a week, including on good days, its reasoning being that the steps are easier to use when your brain already knows them. Use the worry log and trigger tracker to look for patterns. Cut out the panic plan and the affirmation cards and keep them somewhere you will find them. Check in once a week.

It also tells you to ignore all of that if it does not suit. Its own words are that there is no right order and no deadline: use what helps, skip what does not. You can print the whole pack or only the pages you want.

Pages you fill in more than once

Some of this is read-once material and some is meant to be printed again and again. The Understanding Anxiety pages, the exercise instructions, and the affirmation cards you read or cut out once. The worksheets are the reusable half, and the pack says so directly — Challenge the Thought asks you to print a fresh copy each time, and the Weekly Reflection page is built for a new copy each week.

The worry log gives you seven day-numbered rows across two pages, with columns for the worry, what you are afraid will happen, what actually happened, and what that teaches you, then four end-of-week review questions. The trigger tracker is an open table you add a row to whenever anxiety spikes. Box Breathing carries a small practice tracker: date, time of day, rounds completed, and a calm rating before and after.

What it is built on

The cover describes it as a printable self-help pack based on cognitive behavioural principles, and the pages bear that out. Challenge the Thought is described in the pack as a core CBT skill: write down the situation, the automatic thought, the evidence for it, the evidence against it, then a balanced thought, then re-rate how much you believe the original. Tense and Release is described as based on progressive muscle relaxation, working through seven muscle groups with five seconds of tension and ten of release.

The organising idea is the cycle on page four — body, thoughts, and behaviour feeding each other — and the pack maps its own tools onto it: breathing and grounding for the body, the worry log and thought sheet for the thoughts, the trigger tracker and coping menu for the behaviour.

What the pack says about itself

The final page calls it an educational self-help resource and states that it is not psychotherapy, counselling, medical care, or treatment, that it is not intended to diagnose anything, and that using it creates no professional relationship with anyone. The 0-10 lines through the exercises are there for your own before-and-after notes. They are not a score, and nothing in the pack adds them up or tells you what a number means.

There are a few specific cautions printed alongside the exercises. Tense and Release says to skip any muscle group that is injured or painful. Box Breathing says that if you feel lightheaded, breathe normally for a minute before trying again more gently. The panic plan page says to see a medical professional about chest pain you are unsure of, or if panic attacks are frequent.

Who this is for, and who should wait

The toolkit is for someone whose anxiety has started shrinking their life — avoided places, over-preparing, reassurance-seeking, lost sleep — and who wants the skills on paper rather than in memory. It suits a reader who can practise grounding on a calm day and keep a log for a week, and it works alongside therapy as between-session practice.

A few readers should bring it to a clinician first. The toolkit's own cautions matter: skip any muscle group that is injured, stop box breathing if you feel lightheaded, and see a medical professional about chest pain you are unsure of or about panic attacks that keep returning. If anxiety comes with thoughts of self-harm, with losing time or feeling unreal, or with a recent trauma that the worry log keeps circling back to, work through it with a clinician rather than alone. The same goes if you are in a crisis or inside a fresh loss. It is educational material: the 0–10 ratings are your own notes, nothing in the pack screens for an anxiety disorder, and it is not treatment.

How it fits with therapy at TEO

Everything in the toolkit is cognitive behavioural: the cycle on page four, the thought-challenging sheet, the return to what has been avoided. It is the paper version of the early sessions of CBT for anxiety. At TEO, Mohamad Shabib and Alison Shaji (British Columbia) both work in CBT; the anxiety and stress therapy page describes how that runs by video, and the panic attacks page covers the panic-plan side specifically.

Therapy adds what a pack cannot do alone: designing the experiments that test what anxiety predicts, staying in the room while you approach the thing you have been avoiding, and telling when anxiety is riding on something else — a trauma, a health worry, a life stage. Sessions are by video across British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland & Labrador, evenings and weekends included. A free 15-minute consultation comes first; individual sessions are $150 per 60-minute session. A week of the worry log is a useful thing to bring.

Related pages: Anxiety and stress therapy · Panic attacks therapy.

Common questions

About using this workbook

This workbook is educational. It is not therapy, not an assessment, and nothing in it is a diagnosis. If you are in crisis, call or text 9-8-8 (Canada, 24/7); 911 in an emergency. Kids Help Phone (for young people): 1-800-668-6868, or text CONNECT to 686868.

Download the PDF

If you want to go further

Working on this with someone

A workbook can take you a surprising distance on its own. If you would rather not do it alone, TEO offers virtual therapy in British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland & Labrador — evenings and weekends, with a free 15-minute consultation first and no obligation afterward.

Related: Anxiety & stress therapy.

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