Cards Against Anxiety

A new card game combines mindfulness, visualization techniques and creative thinking to make a game out of being happy.

We all deal with anxiety, but a new card game can turn dealing with it into a game. Combining mindfulness, visualization techniques and creative thinking, Cards for Calm is designed to help you create new ways to deal with stressful situations, as well as finding more opportunities for happiness in your day.

The game aims to help you create spaces in your day to focus on what really matters to you. To find new ways to deal with anxiety. To visualize your goals and the steps to achieve them. The deck contains ‘behavior’ and ‘action’ cards that help you identify positive and negative behaviors in your life and help you create new ways of managing them.

You start by shuffling the deck before you go to sleep, then placing the deck on your phone. Most of us reach for our phones as soon as we wake, but instead you can choose to pick up the deck and create a moment of calm. Each turn takes between 1–3 minutes to play, so finding just a few spots throughout your day to play isn’t time consuming.

Cards for Calm is currently taking pre-orders via Kickstarter and will be available from Amazon and selected retailers soon. A free version of the deck is also available to download and print out yourself.

The game, which can be played alone or with friends, was created from a combination of techniques and thought exercises I’ve used to restrict negative behavior and help stay focused on his goals. After being treated for depression two years ago, they have been a way for me to ensure small acts of negative behavior don’t accumulate and risk a relapse.

By combining these into a card game, I’m hoping to give players the incentive to keep working on their own mental health, and an important component of Cards for Calm is that it can be played alone or with others. The multi player option is designed to give people the opportunity to resolve their problems, significant or trivial, with help from their friends.

Because talking about our feelings with friends can be an important factor in not letting negative behavior drive our lives.

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the psychological process of bringing one’s attention to the internal and external experiences occurring in the present moment, which can be developed through the practice of meditation and other training.

Studies have also shown that rumination and worry contribute to mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety, and that mindfulness-based interventions are effective in the reduction of both rumination and worry

Clinical psychology and psychiatry since the 1970s have developed a number of therapeutic applications based on mindfulness for helping people who are experiencing a variety of psychological conditions. Mindfulness practice is being employed in psychology to alleviate a variety of mental and physical conditions, such as bringing about reductions in depression symptoms, reducing stress, anxiety, and in the treatment of drug addiction. It has gained worldwide popularity as a distinctive method to handle emotions.

Clinical studies have documented the physical and mental health benefits of mindfulness in general, and mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) in particular. Programs based on MBSR and similar models have been widely adapted in schools, prisons, hospitals, veterans centers, and other environments.

(This summary taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness)