Mental health activities help individuals build resilience, manage stress & improve emotional regulation.
Engaging worksheets & games make mental health education accessible & enjoyable, fostering emotional literacy & coping skills.
Choosing the right activity depends on age, mental health awareness & personal values, ensuring practical & meaningful support for overall wellbeing.
Mental health and wellbeing are often the primary concerns of clients seeking a service from helping professionals.
To establish trust and healthy boundaries for these new clients exploring treatment, psychoeducation is an important preliminary step. It is essential for psychological safety in newfound therapeutic relationships.
Mental health activities, games, and worksheets can be used with different types of clients to explore their mental health and enhance their coping skills and resilience. These exercises offer gentle introductions to what can be an anxiety-provoking topic for some clients. We explore a broad range of such mental health activities below.
Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free. These science-based exercises will explore fundamental aspects of positive psychology, including strengths, values, and self-compassion, and will give you the tools to enhance the wellbeing of your clients, students, or employees.
Mental health activities include practices, exercises, worksheets, interventions, and tools that can be used for psychoeducational purposes to improve mental health awareness, manage stress, and enhance resilience.
They can vary widely depending on individual preferences and needs and include the following:
Physical exercise like running, walking, swimming, dancing, and stretching helps ease tension in the body, generate endorphins and other happy hormones, and promote a calm mind (Mikkelsen et al., 2017).
Expressive arts include drawing, painting, sculpting, crafting, writing, playing music, and singing, among others. Expressing feelings creatively can help unblock emotions and clarify what’s important (Vaartio-Rajalin, 2021).
Mindfulness and relaxation, such as meditation, breathwork, progressive muscle relaxation, yoga, and grounding techniques, can all enhance emotional regulation (Galante et al., 2021).
Seeking social support, such as talking to a trusted friend, joining support groups that focus on mental health challenges, or volunteering to help others, can enhance a sense of belonging and fulfillment (Wickramaratne et al., 2022).
Connecting with nature, including gardening, nature walks, and outdoor swimming, helps boost mood and reduce stress (Coventry et al., 2021).
Self-care activities like taking a warm bath, using aromatherapy, practicing sleep hygiene, and eating healthily nourish the body and brain, which improves mental health (Gartner & Riessman, 1982; Posluns & Gall, 2020).
In short, regularly engaging in mental health activities as shared above can enhance emotional regulation, boost mood, and build resilience to life’s challenges.
5 Fun Mental Health Games and Activities
In this section, we’ll take a look at some mental health games and activities for younger children.
Mental health awareness for elementary school-age children and adolescents includes learning about emotions to develop emotional literacy, receiving and offering peer support, and understanding the connection between physical wellbeing and mental health (Hoover & Bostic, 2021).
These five mental health activities are free to download, fun, and psychoeducational. They can be used in a classroom, group work, or therapeutic setting.
Our Feelings Wheel exercise helps children develop emotional literacy by attending to different aspects of their emotions, like bodily sensations, colors, and lived experience.
This Emotion Masks worksheet delves deeper into emotional literacy by helping children recognize when they are hiding their feelings and why they feel they need to do it. Masking is especially common in neurodivergent children.
Bubbling Over explores children’s experiences of overwhelming emotions like anxiety and anger and identifies healthy coping strategies to stop them from bubbling over.
What Is Empathy? encourages children to develop empathy for others, build positive relationships with their peers, and foster social inclusion.
Finally, Exercise and Mental Health explores the relationship between physical and mental health. It explains how a healthy body is the foundation of mental wellbeing.
In the next section, we’ll explore more complex mental health activities for teenagers. During the course of human development, the teenage years are some of the most challenging as the brain and body begin to undergo the radical changes of puberty and sexual maturation while navigating the difficult transition from childhood to adulthood.
3 Types of Mental Health Activities for Teens (& More)
Many of the most serious mental health problems begin to emerge during the mid-to-late teens and early adulthood, including mood disorders like depression, anxiety, and psychotic disorders like schizophrenia (Burke et al., 1990; McGrath et al., 2023).
Teens are also vulnerable to a range of adjustment disorders as they navigate life transitions like leaving school, attending college, working, dating for the first time, and leaving their family home (Hochgraf et al., 2021).
Psychoeducation about mental health is especially important during this life stage. The following mental health activities have been designed with teenagers in mind.
Worksheets
This first worksheet, Mental Illness: Myths and Reality, explores preconceived ideas about mental health and what mental illness is and is not. It promotes mental health awareness in teens.
Introducing youths to the concept of stigma can be quite tough, but it’s important. This Understanding Mental Health Stigma worksheet can be used to raise awareness of the stigma that often surrounds mental illness. The aim is to undermine stigma by progressively challenging common misconceptions about mental health.
Finally, this Mental Health Management Bingo game is a fun way to fuel further discussion about mental health challenges, mental illness, and coping. It’s a wonderful group exercise for a whole class.
Psychoeducation articles
The following articles are packed with further free resources for teenagers.
The following video by school counselor Mr. B, “10 Cool Ideas for Mental Health Awareness Month,” describes how to organize a month of mental health activities to raise awareness at your school or college while destigmatizing mental health challenges and struggles.
10 Cool ideas for mental health awareness month
Adults
When we use the term “adults,” it refers to a wide range of different life stages and developmental goals. For example, the goals of a 28-year-old will be vastly different from those of a 40-year-old and a 55-year-old, yet all are described as adults.
However, there are basic mental wellness habits that apply across the lifespan to support mental health and the optimal state of functioning known as “flourishing” in positive psychology (Richard-Sephton et al., 2024).
View and share this Psych2Go video with clients who could benefit from building daily habits that provide a solid foundation for psychological flourishing.
8 Things you can do to improve your mental health - Psych2Go
Here are downloadable mental health and wellbeing exercises that also apply across the lifespan.
This Self-Care Checkup is a great tool for performing a holistic checkup on different aspects of mental health. Looking after ourselves prevents temporary problems from becoming long-term sources of stress.
This Coping Skills Inventory explores just what it suggests. It helps your client identify their coping skills, examine their effectiveness, and try out new skills when needed.
Finally, this Coping With Stress worksheet helps clients identify triggers and manage stress. Most of us must consciously choose to change poor coping skills and adopt better methods of coping to manage stress successfully. This worksheet helps us navigate that process.
Awareness activities
Awareness activities are mindfulness-based practices that are used to promote mental wellbeing by shifting attention away from past or future problems to the present, here and now. The following free worksheets work with teens and adults.
This Breath Awareness exercise provides a simple way to relax and ground yourself in any situation by focusing on the breath.
For some clients, breathwork can be challenging. This Five Senses Worksheet provides another awareness-based grounding strategy that focuses on the five senses rather than the breath.
Choosing the Right Ones: 3 Tips
Choosing the right type of mental health activity requires a careful assessment of the client’s needs and goals.
First, ensure mental health activities are age-appropriate, especially with children and younger people. You can customize the worksheets to ensure they use age-appropriate language, as some of the exercises aimed at children might also be useful for teenagers.
Second, be sure the activity aligns with your client’s values and can make a positive contribution to their mental health and wellbeing goals. It is essential that the activity make a practical contribution to your client’s growth so that you can clearly explain the benefits and objectives of the exercise.
Third, ensure that the exercise is pitched to your client’s level of mental health awareness. Some of the activities are aimed at clients with no mental health education and would be unsuitable for a more informed client. It’s important that practitioners meet their clients where they are, without judgment.
Some of your clients are likely to be very well informed and will benefit more from mental health activities like mindfulness skills training than basic psychoeducation.
The following worksheets are aimed at adult clients and outline coping strategies for psychological processes that undermine mental health and wellbeing. These are not inherently pathological but common when experiencing excessive stress.
These exercises explore coping strategies for managing the negative thoughts and emotions that drive self-sabotaging behaviors and undermine mental health.
Dealing with negative thinking
This set of worksheets helps tackle the common problem at the root of many mental health challenges: the ruthless inner critic. Based on decades of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) research demonstrating its effectiveness (Nakao et al., 2021), the following worksheets provide a quick guide on how to question unhelpful thoughts and correct automatic negative thoughts that drive excessive stress.
Finally, our Positive Replacement Thoughts Worksheet guides your clients to take back control of their thoughts and improve their mood by choosing positive replacements to ANTs.
Dealing with low mood
We all experience good days and bad days, and periods of low mood are often adaptive when we need downtime to grieve a loss or recover from illness or stress. I like the way actor Jim Carrey reframed his experience of feeling depressed as a need for “deep rest.” See his bite-size explanation below.
Jim Carrey on depression: "Your body needs deep rest."
The following worksheets are useful aids to emotional regulation that make room for all kinds of emotions without becoming overwhelmed by them. Increasing a client’s window of tolerance for uncomfortable emotions increases their capacity for emotional regulation (Richard-Sephton et al., 2024).
So-called negative emotions are often important sources of information about things that need attention in our lives, such as bad habits, poor communication, a lack of boundaries, or social injustice (Richard-Sephton et al., 2024). However, they need careful regulation.
Our Skills for Regulating Emotions worksheet guides your client through strategies for directing focus away from negative events to more positive experiences.
This Practicing Radical Acceptance worksheet equips clients with distress tolerance skills based on dialectical behavior therapy when difficult circumstances arise that we cannot control (Segal et al., 2023).
Examples could include sudden bereavement, job loss, accident, or natural disaster. Radical acceptance of painful events prevents the struggle that results in long-term suffering. It’s a powerful emotional regulation technique that builds resilience and promotes mental health.
Finally, our Shake It Off worksheet describes an emotional regulation technique commonly used by somatic experiencing therapists to help clients self-soothe (Kuhfuß et al., 2021).
Animals often shake themselves to reset their nervous systems after a shock. Human beings can also benefit from this technique to release the excess energy produced by the stress response. Shaking it off helps regulate emotions and prevent excessive anxiety and agitation.
These worksheets are all derived from evidence-based mental health interventions to help manage cognitive and affective stress responses that drive many types of psychological distress (Hayes & Hofmann, 2021).
2 Useful Apps for Mental Health
Here are two highly rated mental health apps that can help manage mental health, including mindfulness for stress management and productivity, CBT-based mood-tracking tools, and sleep hygiene.
Headspace
Headspace is a popular mindfulness, meditation, and sleep music app used to promote relaxation, focus, and sleep. It provides a range of interventions tailored to specific mental health needs like stress, anxiety, and insomnia.
Moodfit is a popular mood-tracking app for spotting emotional, cognitive, and behavioral patterns, identifying triggers, and building healthier habits. It offers CBT-based tools, journaling tips, and mindfulness exercises.
I’ve picked the two books I would most recommend to clients seeking to understand themselves more and learn essential self-care skills to improve and maintain their mental health.
1. Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? – Julie Smith
In this bestselling book, clinical psychologist Julie Smith shares exercises and tips to help readers navigate the ups and downs of life. This is done by developing new coping skills to build resilience.
It’s an essential self-help guide to optimizing mental health based on the latest clinical research and practice.
2. The Happiness Trap: Stop Struggling and Start Living – Russ Harris
This book is a classic self-help guide to building psychological resilience using acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). ACT is a mindfulness-based coaching intervention focused on values-driven behavioral change regardless of challenges and setbacks.
Fully updated with the latest research evidence, the second edition of this book is an entertaining guide to living a fulfilled rather than “happy” life.
17 Top-Rated Positive Psychology Exercises for Practitioners
Expand your arsenal and impact with these 17 Positive Psychology Exercises [PDF], scientifically designed to promote human flourishing, meaning, and wellbeing.
Everything on offer at PositivePsychology.com relates to mental health, but the following resource-packed articles specifically focus on models of mental health informed by positive psychology.
Mental health activities and games are a stimulating and engaging way to introduce the often anxiety-provoking topic of mental health to children, teenagers, students, and adult clients.
Mental health is inseparable from other aspects of wellbeing, and positive psychology frames mental health holistically on a continuum. Just as we have days when we feel physically well or off, we all have ups and downs in our mental health, especially in response to stressors we cannot control.
Self-care is essential for maintaining our mental wellbeing, and each of us will have preferred activities that bring us peace, contentment, and joy. Understanding our limits and maintaining healthy boundaries is also essential for mental health. Do not hesitate to say no when you need downtime to replenish and recharge.
What activities can you do on a mental health day?
Give yourself a day of self-care that is replenishing and restorative for body and mind. Everyone is nourished by different things. Make a self-care checklist as a reminder on mental health days.
What activities promote positive mental health?
Exercising outdoors, healthy eating, social connection, and sleep are the baseline activities to maintain holistic wellbeing including mental health.
What are five ways to improve mental health?
Set and maintain health boundaries, embrace challenges to foster a growth mindset, invest in positive relationships, practice mindfulness to support emotional regulation, and try your best to act in line with your values.
References
Burke, K. C., Burke, J. D., Regier, D. A., & Rae, D. S. (1990). Age at onset of selected mental disorders in five community populations. Archives of General Psychiatry, 47(6), 511–518. https://doi.org/10.1001/archpsyc.1990.01810180011002
Coventry, P. A., Brown, J. E., Pervin, J., Brabyn, S., Pateman, R., Breedvelt, J., Gilbody, S., Stancliffe, R, McEachan, R. & White, P. L. (2021). Nature-based outdoor activities for mental and physical health: Systematic review and meta-analysis. SSM-Population Health, 16, 100934. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2021.100934
Galante, J., Friedrich, C., Dawson, A. F., Modrego-Alarcón, M., Gebbing, P., Delgado-Suárez, I., Gupta, R., Dean, L., Dalgleish, T., White, I. R. & Jones, P. B. (2021). Mindfulness-based programmes for mental health promotion in adults in nonclinical settings: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. PLoS Medicine, 18(1), e1003481. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003481
Gartner, A. J., & Riessman, F. (1982). Self-help and mental health. Psychiatric Services, 33(8), 631–635. https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.33.8.631
Hayes, S. C., & Hofmann, S. G. (2021). “Third‐wave” cognitive and behavioral therapies and the emergence of a process‐based approach to intervention in psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 20(3), 363–375. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20884
Hochgraf, A. K., Fosco, G. M., Lanza, S. T., & McHale, S. M. (2021). Developmental timing of parent–youth intimacy as a protective factor for adolescent adjustment problems. Journal of Family Psychology, 35(7), 916–926. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000864
Hoover, S., & Bostic, J. (2021). Schools as a vital component of the child and adolescent mental health system. Psychiatric Services, 72(1), 37–48. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.20190057
Kuhfuß, M., Maldei, T., Hetmanek, A., & Baumann, N. (2021). Somatic experiencing–effectiveness and key factors of a body-oriented trauma therapy: A scoping literature review. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 12(1), Article 1929023. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2021.1929023
McGrath, J. J., Al-Hamzawi, A., Alonso, J., Altwaijri, Y., Andrade, L. H., Bromet, E. J., … & Zaslavsky, A. M. (2023). Age of onset and cumulative risk of mental disorders: A cross-national analysis of population surveys from 29 countries. The Lancet Psychiatry, 10(9), 668–681. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2215-0366(23)00193-1
Mikkelsen, K., Stojanovska, L., Polenakovic, M., Bosevski, M., & Apostolopoulos, V. (2017). Exercise and mental health. Maturitas, 106, 48–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.maturitas.2017.09.003
Nakao, M., Shirotsuki, K., & Sugaya, N. (2021). Cognitive–behavioral therapy for management of mental health and stress-related disorders: Recent advances in techniques and technologies. BioPsychoSocial Medicine, 15(1), 16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13030-021-00219-w
Posluns, K., & Gall, T. L. (2020). Dear mental health practitioners, take care of yourselves: A literature review on self-care. International Journal for the Advancement of Counselling, 42, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10447-019-09382-w
Richard-Sephton, P. B., Crisp, D. A., & Burns, R. A. (2024). The emotion regulation strategies of flourishing adults. Current Psychology, 43(14), 12816–12827. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-05332-3
Segal, O., Sher, H., Aderka, I. M., & Weinbach, N. (2023). Does acceptance lead to change? Training in radical acceptance improves implementation of cognitive reappraisal. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 164, 104303. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2023.104303
Vaartio-Rajalin, H., Santamäki-Fischer, R., Jokisalo, P., & Fagerström, L. (2021). Art making and expressive art therapy in adult health and nursing care: A scoping review. International Journal of Nursing Sciences, 8(1), 102–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnss.2020.09.011
Wickramaratne, P. J., Yangchen, T., Lepow, L., Patra, B. G., Glicksburg, B., Talati, A. Adekkanattu, P., Ryu, E., Biernacka, J. M., Charney, A., Mann, J. J., Pathak, J., Olfson, M. & Weissman, M. M. (2022). Social connectedness as a determinant of mental health: A scoping review. PloS One, 17(10), e0275004. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275004
About the author
Jo Nash, Ph.D., began her career in mental health nursing before working as a service user advocate and in mental health policy research. After gaining her Ph.D. in Psychotherapy Studies, Jo was a Lecturer in Mental Health at the University of Sheffield for over a decade. She has trained in two mindfulness-based interventions, ACT and MBCT. Jo currently coaches neurodivergent and highly sensitive adults where she applies positive psychology using a strengths-based, solution-focused approach.
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What our readers think
IFEA
on May 17, 2021 at 12:26
Hi , I am a mental health advocate in south Sudan. Do you have project documents to address PTSD for Military personnel returning from frontline?
Sounds like you’re doing important work. Could you please provide a little more information about what specifically you’re looking for? For instance, are you looking for a scale to assess the presence of PTSD symptoms or resources to aid in the treatment of PTSD among returning military personnel? Let me know, and I’ll see if I can’t point you in the right direction.
There is a new book “Mental Wealth : An Essential Guide for Workplace Mental Health and Wellbeing” written by Emi Golding and Peter Diaz which focuses on developing and maintaining better mental health and wellbeing in the workplaces. You can have a look here https://thementalwealthguide.com/
Hi my name Dharmasena Murage Don and being a Psychological Counsellor I know the importance of creating awareness among the general public on what people can do for the promotion of their own mental health.I appreciate the above information published by you is definitely helpful for the people to improve their knowledge on mental heath.
Hi, my name is Nakoda Clulow, I’m a year 12 student in Australia. I’m currently doing my major project for the hsc in aboriginal studies. I’m creating an education package to improve physical and mental health. Do you have and specific mental health games and activities that address these issues. If so would you be happy to send me some information to include in my project.
Mental health and wellbeing are often the primary concerns of clients seeking a service from helping professionals.
In this section, we’ll take a look at some mental health games and activities for younger children.
Choosing the right type of mental health activity requires a 
What our readers think
Hi , I am a mental health advocate in south Sudan. Do you have project documents to address PTSD for Military personnel returning from frontline?
Hi IFEA,
Sounds like you’re doing important work. Could you please provide a little more information about what specifically you’re looking for? For instance, are you looking for a scale to assess the presence of PTSD symptoms or resources to aid in the treatment of PTSD among returning military personnel? Let me know, and I’ll see if I can’t point you in the right direction.
– Nicole | Community Manager
this was fantastic, it was great reading what people thought and getting new ideas
really love to see such great info dear
There is a new book “Mental Wealth : An Essential Guide for Workplace Mental Health and Wellbeing” written by Emi Golding and Peter Diaz which focuses on developing and maintaining better mental health and wellbeing in the workplaces. You can have a look here https://thementalwealthguide.com/
Thank you so much for this post! I am working on a community presentation and this information was very helpful
I would like to know also. Have you been assisted?
I would like the 5 worksheets, but can’t figure out how to get to them. Can you help me please?
click on the blue words to down load information
Hi my name Dharmasena Murage Don and being a Psychological Counsellor I know the importance of creating awareness among the general public on what people can do for the promotion of their own mental health.I appreciate the above information published by you is definitely helpful for the people to improve their knowledge on mental heath.
Good article
Hi, my name is Nakoda Clulow, I’m a year 12 student in Australia. I’m currently doing my major project for the hsc in aboriginal studies. I’m creating an education package to improve physical and mental health. Do you have and specific mental health games and activities that address these issues. If so would you be happy to send me some information to include in my project.