Staying Still is the New Working Out
Caring for your mental health is as important as your physical. A new card game turns keeping calm into a workout for your mind, helping you find playful ways to deal with anxiety and toxic emotions.
Emotional Health
Every day we’re bombarded with messages and opinions that are, if left unaddressed, detrimental to our mental health. We are increasingly understanding that caring for our emotional health is as important as caring for our physical health. We make time to ensure our bodies are in shape, but we rarely do the same for our minds.
Designed to help you deal with the stresses of life, Cards for Calm is a workout for your emotions. Combining mindfulness, visualization techniques and creative thinking, Cards for Calm helps you create new ways to deal with stressful situations and find more opportunities for happiness in your day.
Cards for Calm can be played alone, turning over a card when you have a minute spare during your day. Question cards make you think of one particular aspect of your life or behavior. How do you deal with other people’s negativity? Does change make you anxious? Do you have a bad habit you’d like to break? Each has a corresponding Answer card to help you further explore this and develop creative ways to reframe your thinking on the topic.
Self Care with Friends
It’s important we talk about our emotions so, with that in mind, Cards for Calm can also be played with friends. Sit down, deal the cards and have your friends suggest awesome visualizations for you to picture when anxious. The more creative you can be in helping your friends, the more points you’ll score.
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.
The game is currently taking pre-orders via Kickstarter and will be available from Amazon and selected retailers soon.
How This Came to Be
I created Cards for Calm from a combination of techniques and thought exercises I’ve used to restrict negative behavior and help stay focused on my 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?
(Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
