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.”
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.
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.
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.
Figure out what your brain forgets under pressure
Rather than reflecting on which situations stress you out, try a sharper question: “What do I need to remind myself when I get uncomfortable?” suggests Joanna Hardis, a Cleveland-based therapist and author of Just Do Nothing: A Paradoxical Guide to Getting Out of Your Way.
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.
“Things are usually naturally simple,” she says. “I just add stuff to it.”
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
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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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