Stack Your Skills

The Stack Your Skills Worksheet helps people create practical coping plans for difficult days by teaching how to layer distress tolerance skills depending on the level of stress or overwhelm being experienced. Rather than relying on a single coping strategy, this worksheet encourages people to “stack” multiple supportive skills together, especially during rough or emotionally intense periods.

Many people know coping skills in theory but struggle to remember or apply them when emotions are high. This worksheet helps bridge that gap by encouraging users to plan ahead for busy days, rough days, bad days, and terrible days so they already know what strategies they will use before distress escalates.

The worksheet demonstrates how self-care and distress tolerance skills can be layered together in a realistic, achievable way using examples such as:

• Self-soothing
• Grounding
• Journalling
• Relaxation routines
• Distraction strategies
• Sensory calming activities
• Sleep preparation skills

Perfect for:

• Anxiety and overwhelm
• Burnout and emotional exhaustion
• Trauma and PTSD recovery
• Distress tolerance and DBT skills
• Building sustainable coping routines
• Therapy homework and self-reflection

This practical worksheet helps people move away from all-or-nothing coping and build personalised routines that support emotional recovery on both ordinary and difficult days.

Clear, supportive, and easy to use, the Stack Your Skills Worksheet reinforces the idea that hard days need more skills, not less.

Developed by Dr Al Griskaitis and Jessica O'Garr for The Psych Collective