In these especially challenging times, it’s so important to breathe, stay calm, and focus on the things you can control–rather than obsessing about the things you cannot.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, try making a checklist.

Checklists are like an extra storage tank for your weary, over-stuffed brain.

Research confirms that making a checklist can help you feel calmer and more focused, and can shift your body on a physiological level.

When you check off a completed item, this creates that oh-so-satisfying burst of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that helps you feel more positive, think clearly, and solve problems creatively.

Personally, I know that making a checklist helps me feel more steady, strong, and grounded during turbulent times. Checklists are good medicine.

Here are a few checklist ideas and downloadable templates for you. (All of these templates are free. Enjoy.)

• Working from home? Here’s a checklist with suggestions on how to set yourself up for a calm, focused, and successful workday.
• Got a bunch of unexpected free time? Maybe a project got cancelled, your shop is temporarily closed, or a trip has been postponed. Instead of panicking, try to use your time purposefully. Here’s a checklist of different ways to use your free time productively–and strengthen your business or career.
• Feeling stuck? A checklist to help you finish a project you’ve started.
• Need to find more clients and line up some work? A checklist full of marketing ideas, including lots of ideas that don’t involve social media. Because social media is optional, not mandatory.
• Tired of endlessly scrolling on your phone? A checklist to help you reduce screen-time, create a healthier relationship with your devices, and create more quiet and space in your day.
• Want a fresh approach for planning your day? Here’s my personal method for creating a Daily Checklist, which I do every single night before bed. (I make tomorrow’s checklist *today* and print it out in advance.)
• Lots more checklist templates here: including a Self-Care Checklist, Workout Checklist, and others.

Take good of yourself. One tiny step (and one tiny checkmark) at a time.

Small and unassuming, this notebook focuses on embracing the process, not the product. The tasks are less tasks themselves, and more signposts to help readers along their own journey of navigating the imagination, using creativity as guidance. As the blurb says ‘Every answer is inside you.’

Short and accessible, the exercises include listing five things that always make you smile, reflecting on dreams that have not yet happened, seizing the one thing that motivates you in life and moving towards it, circling your values and looking through a different lens.

Quotes from thinkers, creatives, visionaries are illustrated with vibrant watercolour paintings in Meara’s signature style. Just by presenting those familiar ideas in a new way they are shifted and transformed, made more personally resonant through the reflection. Her early years on the New Jersey shore inspired her illustrations, and you can see the mystery and magic infuse the style, whilst the bold colours of her native India illuminate them. Even when you don’t do the tasks, as in sit and put pen to paper and write something profound, it feels as though you are still working and transforming your consciousness through the visuals.

So many of the illustrations and quotes I want to put up on my wall, and so I was thrilled to learn that Meera sells the prints. Uplifting in all ways, it’s a nice way to both look inside of yourself and expand and grow out into your life.

So sometimes we all need a little reminder to just keep going. And visual tools are a real benefit. Francesca from Motivational Tattoos had her idea back in 2011, laying suicidal in a hospital bed in Charing Cross in London. She had optic neuritis and was losing her sight, but determined to keep going she would write notes to herself. The experience has left her with nerve damage and pain, and whilst it was never a ‘good’ experience, one positive outcome has been the birth of Motivational Tattoos. ‘I started making tattoos for myself, and shared them on my blog, and a few people left comments asking if they could buy some. I started selling them online, and it’s just snowballed from there.’

With a background in both psychology and design Francesca was well informed about her ideas, and she uses psychological studies to inspire the creations. One study found that temporary tattooing may help adolescents alter self-harm behaviours and counter negative body image.

But despite being rooted in research, she’s clear that the products ‘are not medical devices, they are a mindfulness tools. They are not a replacement for seeking medical advice from a trained healthcare professional. They are just little pick me ups to help when you’re having a bad day!’

Response has been amazing from the mainstream media, but it’s the short letters of thanks that really matter. ‘Almost every day I wake up to messages in my inbox about how my tattoos have helped them. It’s really touching, and it keeps me going!’

We just have to keep going.

It’s why the diet industry, entrepreneurial get rich quick schemes and self help happiness field is so saturated with ‘solutions’ – that don’t work. You’d think that we would have figured by now that there’s something that the elusive ‘top 5 steps’ approach can’t be readily taught, or perhaps even achieved.

Derren Brown’s new book Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine is about stepping back from that. Finding a place of ‘good enough.’ Not the catchy title that usually grabs you in the book shop, but one that might help us to find, if not blissful nirvana, a state of contentment.

Because, most stuff is alright. And even when it’s not, those negative events themselves rarely hurt us; it is usually our beliefs, feelings, or judgments concerning those events which do. Instead, it’s the gap between our expectation and reality that is the source of unhappiness. If you lower your expectation, your contentment tends to increase. Does this mean giving up and not striving to be all that we can?

Far from it. He is scathing of books like The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, the 28 million copy bestseller that preaches the premise that the law of attraction is the key, and by thinking positive thoughts we will get all we need. The message that if you work and wish hard enough you’ll get what you want, and if you don’t, it’s your own fault, is one that he says is ‘toxic.’ And I agree.

One danger is the constant goal setting and planning that stops us being present. It’s very difficult to appreciate what you have, when you’re not really there, but ‘consistently orientated toward something that’s always on the horizon.’ Life just passes you by – and so of course you’re not satisfied with it.

But Brown isn’t coming up with anything particularly groundbreaking and radical here. He is heavily influenced by the Stoics, and quotes Seneca –‘ A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is’ – and Epictetus – ‘Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them’ – amongst others. There’s echoes of Stephen Covey’s sphere of influence idea from his classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and I’m reminded of The Serenity Prayer by American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) and it’s plea to God to ‘grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.’

The book is long, and there’s a rather lengthy few chapters on dying that could be trimmed down. But it’s a compelling and important message that deserves being repeated.The words we tell ourselves matter. Stories are powerful and create our worlds. Tell a better story, and accept that ‘The route to real happiness is about realising what you have now, rather than focusing on what could be.’ says Brown. It’s nothing new, but continues to be very true. When will we realise it?

Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine by Derren Brown is published by Random House. Available on Audible, narrated by Jot Davies.