Taylor Swift already told us she can do it with a broken heart. That might be due to grit, stamina—or a little psychological trick called a coping mantra.
When she feels stressed by her circumstances, “I go through several processes and coping mechanisms,” Swift revealed in August during the Icon Sessions, a conversation presented by the Recording Academy’s Songwriters & Composers Wing. “And one of them is saying, ‘You chose this. You chose this every day. You could have opted out of this any day before it got unmanageably big.’ And I decided not to because I love it that much.”
Even if you don’t have plans to perform in stadiums worldwide, you might recognize the peculiar frustration of being trapped by something you chose—whether that’s the job you once desperately wanted, the committee you volunteered to lead, or the dinner party you insisted on hosting. “Where people tend to get really distressed is when they feel powerless, or like something’s being put upon you—you’re just sort of stuck in an achy feeling,” says Jill Stoddard, a clinical psychologist in Newburyport, Mass. “But if you remind yourself, ‘Wait a minute, this is actually a choice I made, and choices do come with difficult consequences, but I’m in charge here’—that empowers you to move forward.”
Enter the coping mantra: a short, deliberate phrase you can reach for when your brain starts sprinting toward the worst-case scenario. Stress leaves little room for nuance, says Dr. Jasmine Sawhne, a psychiatrist in Los Angeles. When your body is in fight-or-flight mode, you’re not going to reason your way out of it. A mantra gives your overloaded brain something simple to grab onto—and buys you a beat to choose what to do next. Here’s how to find one that actually helps.
Make your brain an offer it can believe
“Everything will be OK” is a lovely thought. It’s also a promise about a future you can’t see—which means your anxious brain might reject it before you finish the sentence.
From a cognitive behavioral therapy perspective, predicting that everything will work out is a form of fortune-telling, says Alison McKleroy, a San Francisco therapist and author of The Self-Compassion Journal. The same goes for affirmations like “I am confident.” If you feel unsure, your brain isn’t going to buy it. You can say it 1,000 times, McKleroy says, and still not believe a word of it.
Instead of predicting a rosy outcome or forcing a new personality, a useful mantra can state a choice that’s within your control. Swift’s is essentially: I’m choosing to keep doing this, difficult parts and all. “It’s a decision you’re making out loud,” McKleroy says.
Stoddard takes a slightly different—but equally reality-based—approach. When she’s crushed by too much to do and too little time, she tells herself, “I’ll get it done. I always do.” It works because in her case, it’s true. “I wouldn’t have a PhD in psychology if I didn’t always get it done,” she says.
If you’re someone who does not, in fact, always get it done, that phrase may not be for you. This isn’t an exercise in “blowing sunshine” at yourself, Stoddard says. The best mantra is simple, specific, memorable—and true.
Figure out what your brain forgets under pressure
In other words, don’t choose a generic mantra for “stress.” Identify your brain’s favorite way of making stress worse, then find a phrase that interrupts it. If you tend to predict disaster, McKleroy suggests: “I can’t know that yet” or “I don’t have a crystal ball.”
Sawhne’s stress takes a different form: She tries to solve everything at once. She runs a bicoastal psychiatry practice and has two children under 5, and she often catches herself mentally juggling five problems at the same time. Her mantra—“I don’t have to solve everything right now”—reminds her that urgency and importance aren’t the same thing. She doesn’t need the entire day, week, or situation figured out; she needs to identify what requires her attention first.
McKleroy, meanwhile, likes to over-research, add more information, and complicate projects past the point of usefulness. So she tells herself: “Let it be simple.”
“Things are usually naturally simple,” she says. “I just add stuff to it.”
Keep it short enough to say in one breath
Cap a coping mantra at about four words. When stress hits, “we just don’t have a lot of cognitive bandwidth,” Sawhne says, so you need a few words you can pull “out of your back pocket” as soon as your nervous system fires.
Shorter also means fewer words to obsess over. “Perfectionists are going to overthink it,” Hardis says. “You just want something that’s short enough that you can remember that’s going to orient you.” Her own mantra—“Discomfort, not danger”—passes the one-breath test with room to spare.
Use it to keep going while the feeling is still there
Nearly two decades ago, Hardis underwent exposure therapy for an intense fear of flying. When the plane hit turbulence, she would tell herself: “This may suck, but I can handle it.”
She still uses that mantra. During rough turbulence on a recent flight home from visiting her daughter, “I found myself saying it,” she recalls. In the past, she would have stared out the window, listened for every ominous noise, and asked a flight attendant if the plane was OK. This time, she calmly repeated her mantra and kept reading. “It helped me get through the flight and do what I knew I needed to do,” she says.
The fear was still there; it simply didn’t dictate her next move. “The goal in anxiety treatment isn’t to make the feeling go away,” Hardis says. It’s to help you decide what to do while the feeling is still there.
Borrow one—and make it sound like you
There are no bonus points for originality here. Anna Elton, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Palm Beach, Fla., and author of The Formula of Desire, uses “just keep swimming.” She borrowed it from Finding Nemo, which she watched with her kids. “That’s why it’s easy to remember,” she says. She also turns to “If it were easy, everyone would do it” when a project proves harder than expected. Her most exuberant mantra is a call-and-response: “Who is awesome? I’m awesome.” “I do it all the time,” she says.
Once you settle on a potential mantra, say it out loud. Does it sound like something you’d actually tell yourself—or something embroidered on a throw pillow you’d try to hide? McKleroy recommends trying slightly different versions until one lands. “Brave” and “courageous” might look interchangeable on paper, for example, but one could feel much more natural coming out of your mouth.
You’ll know you’re getting close when the words produce even a small shift. The right phrase might bring “a little hit of relief,” McKleroy says, or make a spiral lose some of its momentum. If your brain instantly rejects it, change a word or scale it down. “Let it be simple,” for example, might become “Let it be simpler.”
Once you find one that works, practice it before you need it. Stoddard encourages clients to try new coping tools during low-stakes moments, when their emotions are relatively mellow. Call your mantra to mind when you’re running five minutes late, opening a mildly stressful email, or sitting down to a task you’ve been avoiding. Otherwise, summoning an unfamiliar phrase in the middle of a crisis will be “an uphill battle,” she says.
Put it where the problem lives
Years ago, when McKleroy was trying to stop procrastinating, she hung “Do it now” in big letters above her kitchen sink. “That was my command,” she says. “Just do the dishes.” After enough repetition, “do it now” stopped being a mantra and became a habit, and now she rarely procrastinates.
These days, “Let it be simple” hangs above her desk—prime territory for over-researching and adding just one more thing. McKleroy calls this “keeping it in existence,” or displaying the reminder exactly where you’ll need it.
That might mean taping your mantra to your computer monitor, writing it on the bathroom mirror, turning it into your phone lock screen, or putting it on the front of your journal. “If you’re really anxious, your mind’s not going to remember—it’s going to go blank,” Hardis says. A visual cue ensures the words are waiting for you when you need them.
Your reminder doesn’t even have to be made of words: McKleroy suggests drawing a circle on a stone and carrying it in your pocket or leaving it on the bathroom counter. To her, the circle represents simplicity. “A circle on a rock would be enough,” she says, to remind her to “let it be simple.” You could similarly choose a meaningful color, shape, or object. And—since this entire exercise began with Swift—you could even spell yours out on a friendship bracelet.
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