If you are in crisis, this document is not the next step. In the United States, 988 reaches the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by call or text, at any hour. Nothing below applies before that.
I BUILD Building the capacity
- 1Change the meaning before you manage the feeling. Cognitive reappraisal — reframing what an event means in order to alter what it does to you — is the most consistently supported emotion regulation strategy in the literature, with experimental and longitudinal evidence behind it. Habitual reappraisers report greater positive affect, lower negative affect and better interpersonal functioning. It is a skill with a learning curve, not a disposition.
23 more principles
The rest of the Mental & Emotional Health Declaration
23 principles remain — including the Unpretty Truths, the principles that contradict conventional wisdom outright, with the evidence for why. That is the part nobody else prints.
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What this does not claim
Nothing here is treatment, diagnosis, or a substitute for either. No strategy in this document resolves a clinical condition, and no finding licenses delaying care. The honest claim is narrower: reappraisal is the best-supported regulation strategy available and it is learnable; suppression and rumination carry documented costs; support predicts outcomes substantially and has to be built in advance; and the largest single determinant of how a difficult season ends is usually whether anybody else knew it was happening.