What to eat, what to listen to, how to move.
Not just a list of tips. Everything here comes with reasoning attached.
Your needs always come first. That means allergies, medication, hearing, injury, pregnancy, a heart or blood-pressure condition, and anything else a clinician or professional may address. None of these ideas override that.
Joy and Love have the widest range and point outward. There is nothing to fix, so the question becomes who to share it with — its own kind of practice and the easiest to overlook.
What each feeling asks for.
The whole page in one linked table. Each row has a page of its own with the reasoning behind it.
Anything below opens — a whole feeling from the left or just the one column you need.
Remember — where food is concerned, your own dietary needs come first: allergies, medication, a condition, anything a clinician has told you. None of this overrides that.
Joy
Rich and plenty of it.
Taste is working and appetite is back. Make extra helpings.
Richness registers well when the palate is working. Most of this page is about eating when you cannot. This is the other case: you can, so do, and make enough that someone else can sit down too.
Enough that somebody else can sit down
Start with
- A roast chicken and whatever is in the bottom of the fridge around it.
- A tray of pasta — anything baked, anything that makes leftovers.
- Bread and cheese, nothing fussy.
- Whatever you would be pleased to be handed.
Remember — where music is concerned, your own limits come first: volume, hearing, and songs tied to something you are not ready for yet. If one is making it worse rather than moving it, turn it off.
Joy
Anything at all. There is no wrong answer here.
This is the one row where the advice is: put on whatever you want. Loud, silly, sentimental, embarrassing.
Every other card here is about steering a state that has gotten away from you. This one is not. Nothing needs correcting, so the only question is whether anyone else is in the house — music is one of the few things that gets better with a second person in the room.
Start with
- Disco, funk, Motown — anything with a bassline.
- Afrobeats, salsa, highlife.
- The pop of whatever decade was yours.
- Brass bands, gospel choirs, anything with many people in it.
- Whatever you used to dance to.
Remember — where movement is concerned, your own body comes first: injury, pregnancy, a heart or blood-pressure condition, anything a clinician has told you. Cold water and hard effort are not for everyone.
Joy
Dance. Or walk somewhere with somebody.
Not exercise. Movement with no purpose beyond itself, ideally with another person in it.
Moving in time with someone else — walking in step, dancing in a kitchen — does something moving alone does not. It is the easiest thing here to skip: nothing is wrong; there is no problem to solve. Which is precisely why it gets skipped.
Start with
- Social dancing — salsa, line dancing, or dancing at home.
- A walk with someone, at conversation pace.
- Roller skating, table tennis, throwing a ball around.
- Anything with a second person and no scoreboard.
Remember — where food is concerned, your own dietary needs come first: allergies, medication, a condition, anything a clinician has told you. None of this overrides that.
Love
Cook for someone you love.
Not for yourself and not in a hurry. Make something that takes a while — for or with them — and sit down to it together.
Feeding someone is one of the oldest ways of saying you matter to me without having to find the words. The effort is the message: the hours spent making something are hours spent on them.
And a shared table asks almost nothing of either of you — no conversation, no processing. Just the same meal, at the same time.
Enough for two, eaten slowly
Start with
- A stew — meat or beans, browned, then liquid, then left alone.
- A dal: lentils, water, salt, and whatever spice is in the pantry.
- A ragù.
- Anything that mostly cooks itself while you are with them.
Remember — where music is concerned, your own limits come first: volume, hearing, and songs tied to something you are not ready for yet. If one is making it worse rather than moving it, turn it off.
Love
Theirs, not yours.
Whatever they would have chosen. Whatever was playing then. Put it on for or with them.
Playing someone else’s music is a small act of attention — time spent inside their preferences rather than your own.
Start with
- The records they owned rather than the ones you would have picked.
- Whatever was on the radio the year you met.
- The song from the wedding or the funeral.
- Their favorite — even if you never liked it.
Remember — where movement is concerned, your own body comes first: injury, pregnancy, a heart or blood-pressure condition, anything a clinician has told you. Cold water and hard effort are not for everyone.
Love
Be near them. That is the whole practice.
Sit in the same room. Walk at their pace. No conversation required.
Being near someone you trust can settle the nervous system and it asks nothing of either person. No talking, no processing, no explaining. Just the same room.
Start with
- Sitting in the same room, doing nothing in particular.
- Walking at their pace, however slow that is.
- Chair-based stretching, side by side.
- A hand on a shoulder — even that can count as movement.
Remember — where food is concerned, your own dietary needs come first: allergies, medication, a condition, anything a clinician has told you. None of this overrides that.
Surprise
Warm and sweet and hold the cup.
Sweet tea. Hot chocolate. Toast and jam. Something a child would be given.
Shock is a fast, physical event; the body afterwards is cold, shaky, running on very little. Warmth in the hands and something sweet is the oldest response there is — and it is not just sentimental. A cup to hold gives unsteady hands a job and the sweetness reaches a system that may not be up to digesting much else yet.
Something a child would be given
Start with
- Hot sweet tea.
- Hot chocolate.
- Toast and jam.
- Canned peaches, rice pudding cups, anything already sweet and open.
Remember — where music is concerned, your own limits come first: volume, hearing, and songs tied to something you are not ready for yet. If one is making it worse rather than moving it, turn it off.
Surprise
Something with a pulse, from before all this started.
After a long illness, a long marriage, a long job. Not new music — music from the version of you that existed before the thing that just ended.
When something long and heavy finishes, the person waiting on the other side isn’t quite the person who went in. Old music is a bridge back — the fastest way to remember what your own rhythm sounded like before you spent a year holding your breath.
Start with
- The albums you wore out in your youth.
- Whatever was on the radio before things changed.
- Britpop, grunge, garage, hip-hop — whichever was yours.
- Anything you used to walk to.
Remember — where movement is concerned, your own body comes first: injury, pregnancy, a heart or blood-pressure condition, anything a clinician has told you. Cold water and hard effort are not for everyone.
Surprise
Put your feet flat on the floor. Both of them.
Sit down. Put both feet flat. Press them into the ground and notice the pressure. Sixty seconds.
Shock lifts you out of your body and out of the present. Pressure through the feet is the fastest route back to both — specific, physical, one small definite thing for a scattered mind to attend to.
Start with
- Sitting with both feet flat, pressing down for a minute or so.
- Standing with your back against a wall.
- Slow calf raises — ten or so.
- Barefoot on grass, floorboards, tile — anything with texture.
Remember — where food is concerned, your own dietary needs come first: allergies, medication, a condition, anything a clinician has told you. None of this overrides that.
Sadness
Warm, soft, salty, and no decisions.
Grief, shock, and acute anxiety all do the same thing to eating: they remove the appetite and the executive function needed to do anything about it. Standing in a kitchen deciding what to make is, right now, genuinely hard.
Warmth and softness ask nothing of a body that’s clenched — chewing is effort and a tight throat rejects anything that requires work. Salt makes food taste of something when stress has flattened everything else.
And there’s the other thing: warm soft food is what you were given as a child when you were ill. That association is doing real work.
Warm, soft, salty, no decisions
Start with
- Canned chicken soup, standing at the counter. Eat half. Half is fine.
- Scrambled eggs, buttered.
- Congee, or any rice cooked to collapse in stock.
- Mashed potatoes. Buttered toast. Cheese on toast.
- Anything that needs no chewing and no choosing.
A recipe you can make easily
Congee — one pot, thirty to ninety minutes, mostly unattended
- One mug of rice, any rice. Eight mugs of water, or stock if you have it
- Bring it to a boil, then drop it to the lowest heat it will hold
- Come back when you remember. Thirty minutes, or ninety. It does not spoil and it does not need watching
- Stir it if you pass it. It will be fine if you don’t
- Salt at the end
- An egg cracked in at the end if there is one. The heat will cook it
Remember — where music is concerned, your own limits come first: volume, hearing, and songs tied to something you are not ready for yet. If one is making it worse rather than moving it, turn it off.
Sadness
Something already sad. Let it go first, so you don’t have to.
Slow. Minor key. A human voice in it. Sit down and let it run — you are not trying to feel better yet; you are trying to give the feeling somewhere to go.
It does two things. It gives the grief an external shape — someone else has felt this and made something out of it, so it is not unbearable and you are not the first. And it gives you permission to cry on purpose, which is far less frightening than being ambushed by it in a public place like a supermarket.
Cheerful music, meanwhile, does the opposite of what it intends: it widens the gap between how you feel and how the world seems to expect you to feel and that gap is the loneliest place there is.
Start with
- Torch songs and jazz ballads.
- Sad country.
- Choral and requiem settings, if you can take the scale of them.
- Fado, blues, sean-nós — grief with a form already built for it.
- A singer-songwriter and one guitar.
Remember — where movement is concerned, your own body comes first: injury, pregnancy, a heart or blood-pressure condition, anything a clinician has told you. Cold water and hard effort are not for everyone.
Sadness
Walk. Not for exercise — for the rhythm.
Twenty minutes, no destination, no podcast. Just the left-right of it.
Steady, rhythmic, alternating movement seems to settle a mind that’s stuck in a loop — walking, swimming, cycling all do it. There’s a reason every language has an idiom for walking something off and why people have gone for a walk to think for as long as there have been people.
The honest version: the mechanism isn’t fully settled and anyone who tells you exactly why it works is overselling. But the effect is real and it is free.
Start with
- A walk with no destination.
- Swimming lengths — the same stroke, over and over.
- Cycling on flat ground.
- Rowing machine, slow, for the left-right of it.
When you cannot get up at all
Small, outward, and now. This is the one where rest is the wrong answer.
One thing. Get dressed. Put one plate in the sink. Stand outside the front door for sixty seconds.
Every other card on this page says listen to your body. This one says the opposite and it’s important.
In a depressive state the impulse to withdraw is not restorative — it deepens the state. Waiting to feel like doing something is the trap because the feeling arrives after the action, not before it. Doing the tiny thing while feeling nothing at all is not a failure. It is the entire technique.
This is also the state where a day plan telling you to sleep in and go back to bed is actively harmful. If this is where you are, please tell someone — this responds well to help and badly to time. Numbers and what to say are on one page here.
Remember — where food is concerned, your own dietary needs come first: allergies, medication, a condition, anything a clinician has told you. None of this overrides that.
Fear
Warm and only a little. Eat it standing if you must.
Fear is physical before it is anything else. The acute stress response pulls the body away from digestion — appetite drops, the stomach turns unreliable, and a big or rich meal is more than it can take, so keep it warm, small, and simple. It scrambles decisions too, which is why the move is to stop planning meals and keep a shelf instead.
The failure isn’t cooking, it’s the decision. A shelf removes the decision entirely — and a decision you don’t have to make is the only kind you’ll reliably make.
A week of real food and no decisions to make
Start with
- Rice, a fried egg, frozen peas. Ten minutes.
- Red lentils, a bouillon cube, a can of tomatoes. Simmer until soft.
- Canned beans, canned tomatoes, whatever is acidic. Hot, on toast or on rice.
- Tuna, chickpeas, frozen spinach wilted in the pan. Warm or cold, either is fine.
These are not recipes and none of them can be made wrong.
Remember — where music is concerned, your own limits come first: volume, hearing, and songs tied to something you are not ready for yet. If one is making it worse rather than moving it, turn it off.
Fear
Not calm music. Something with a steady pulse.
Everyone reaches for ambient and it fails, because an anxious body cannot sit still inside formless music.
A steady beat gives the nervous system something external to organize itself around. Anxiety is disorganized, accelerating energy; a pulse is organized energy. It’s easier for a racing body to fall in behind a rhythm than to be told to stop.
And once you’re in step with it, you can gradually slow the tempo and it will slow you down. Which is exactly what you couldn’t do by force.
Start with
- House and techno at a walking tempo.
- Dub reggae, where the bass does the slowing for you.
- Minimalism: Reich, Glass, Pärt. Repetition without escalation.
- Krautrock and motorik — a beat that simply continues.
- Anything drum-led where nothing surprising happens.
Remember — where movement is concerned, your own body comes first: injury, pregnancy, a heart or blood-pressure condition, anything a clinician has told you. Cold water and hard effort are not for everyone.
Fear
Breathe out for longer than you breathe in. Then cold water on your face.
Two short breaths in through the nose. One long, slow breath out through the mouth — twice as long as the in-breath. Three or four rounds. That’s it. Cold water on the face, especially around the eyes and forehead. Or hold something cold against your face. Thirty seconds.
Breathing in gently tends to speed the heart; breathing out tends to slow it. So a long out-breath is one of the few direct, voluntary levers you have on a system that is otherwise running without you.
Everyone knows “take a deep breath” — but a big inhale with a short exhale is closer to a panic breath and can make it worse. The instruction is not breathe deeply. It’s breathe out for longer.
Cold on the face can trigger a reflex — the same one that fires when a mammal’s face goes underwater — and one of its effects can be to slow the heart. It’s abrupt, involuntary, and it interrupts a spike faster than anything you can think your way to.
A caution: if you have a heart condition, ask a doctor first. And splash rather than plunge. This is a nudge to the system, not a cold-water challenge.
Start with
- The physiological sigh — two in through the nose, one long out.
- 4–7–8 breathing, a few rounds.
- Cold water on the face, briefly, if that suits you.
- Then walking, not fast, just steadily.
Remember — where food is concerned, your own dietary needs come first: allergies, medication, a condition, anything a clinician has told you. None of this overrides that.
Anger
Crunchy, chewy, solid. Something that fights back.
An apple. Crusty bread. Raw carrot, chips, anything with resistance in it.
Anger arrives in the jaw and the hands before anywhere else — clenched, braced, ready. Food that has to be worked at gives that a legitimate outlet — a small thing but a real one. Soft food asks nothing of a body that is demanding something to do.
Something that fights back
Start with
- An apple.
- Crusty bread.
- Raw carrot, celery, anything cold and hard.
- Chips. Nuts. Well-browned toast.
- Nothing soft, nothing warm, nothing that slips down.
Remember — where music is concerned, your own limits come first: volume, hearing, and songs tied to something you are not ready for yet. If one is making it worse rather than moving it, turn it off.
Anger
Loud first. Then slower.
Do not put on something soothing. Anger met with gentleness escalates — it feels like being managed and being managed can make people angrier.
The fear is that loud music will make it worse. In practice, music that matches your state first tends to move you through it — starting calm when you are not calm just asks you to fight the music on top of everything else.
You are not indulging it. You are meeting it where it actually is, so the music can bring you down gradually instead of arguing with you.
Start with
- Metal, hardcore, punk — loud and fast.
- Drill, grime, rap.
- Riot grrrl, industrial, anything with a shout in it.
- Then something slower, when you are ready — soul, dub.
Remember — where movement is concerned, your own body comes first: injury, pregnancy, a heart or blood-pressure condition, anything a clinician has told you. Cold water and hard effort are not for everyone.
Anger
Spend it. Don’t talk it down.
Carry something heavy. Walk up a hill, fast. Scrub a floor. Dig. Short, hard, and physical.
Anger is mobilized energy — the body has already prepared to act. Sitting still and reasoning with it leaves all that preparation with nowhere to go, which is why “calm down” is the least effective sentence in the language.
If you are able, spend the energy on something physical and the reasoning becomes possible afterwards. Do not try to do it in the wrong order.
Start with
- Carrying something heavy from one end of the house to the other.
- Walking up a hill, fast.
- Scrubbing a floor, digging, chopping wood.
- A heavy bag or a rowing machine.
- Ten minutes is plenty for a high-energy activity.
Remember — where food is concerned, your own dietary needs come first: allergies, medication, a condition, anything a clinician has told you. None of this overrides that.
Disgust
Sharp and cold, not rich and comforting — richness has nothing left to grip.
Illness, depression, and heavy medication all blunt taste and the instinct is to go bigger — richer, saltier, sweeter — chasing a flavor that never arrives. It doesn’t work and it leaves you feeling worse and slightly sick.
When taste is dulled, richness has nothing to grip — fat and sugar need working taste buds to register as pleasure. Without them you just get texture and a heavy stomach.
Acid and cold don’t rely on taste in the same way. They register as sensation. You may not be able to taste the lemon but you will feel it — and feeling something is the whole point.
Sensation, when taste has gone
Start with
- Lemon — on anything, in water, straight.
- Vinegar on fries, pickles from the jar.
- Cold yogurt, cold fruit, a tomato from the fridge.
- Popsicles, which need no taste to register.
- Mustard, hot sauce, anything sharp enough to be felt.
Remember — where music is concerned, your own limits come first: volume, hearing, and songs tied to something you are not ready for yet. If one is making it worse rather than moving it, turn it off.
Disgust
You’re not after beauty. You’re after friction.
Numbness is the hardest state to shift with music because pleasant things slide straight off it. Don’t reach for pretty.
Numbness is a shutdown and beautiful music doesn’t knock on the door hard enough to be noticed. A sound with an edge to it does. If you find yourself thinking I don’t like this — good. That’s a preference. A preference is a feeling. You’ve got one.
Start with
- Noise rock, industrial, distorted guitar — texture over melody.
- Delta blues and early electric blues. Grit, not polish.
- Anything lo-fi or tape-hissed.
- Ambient tends to slide off, if you have found that too.
Remember — where movement is concerned, your own body comes first: injury, pregnancy, a heart or blood-pressure condition, anything a clinician has told you. Cold water and hard effort are not for everyone.
Disgust
Find pressure and contact.
Back against a wall. Lie on the floor. Something heavy across your lap. Hold something cold in both hands.
Dissociation is a loss of the sense of where you stop and the world starts. Deep pressure is one of the loudest signals a body can send about its own boundary. It doesn’t need language, which is useful, because in that state, language is the first thing to go.
Start with
- Back flat against a wall, feet planted.
- Lying on the floor rather than the sofa.
- Something heavy across your lap.
- Holding something cold until you notice it.