● The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living: This book will help readers with acceptance and how to live a more personally meaningful life.

● The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety: A Guide to Breaking Free from Anxiety, Phobias, and Worry Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: You can live better, more fully, and more richly regardless of anxiety and fear. This book provides exercises and psycho-education to practice taking more control over your life.

● The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression: Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to Move Through Depression and Create a Life Worth Living: Similar to the anxiety workbook version above, you can learn to live better, more fully, and more richly regardless of depression and sadness. This workbook provides exercises and psycho-education to practice taking more control over your life.

● The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook: Unlike the other resources above, this workbook provides more tailored content directed to addressing panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and phobias.

● Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life: This self-help workbook serves as an introduction to the ideas advanced by Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. It teaches readers to accept their painful experiences or suffering and refocus their energy to activities important to them.

● Wherever You Go, There You Are: An introduction to Mindfulness: It teaches mindfulness practices and skills and how to apply them to your day-to-day life.

● Waking Up: See the nature of your mind in a different way. This book does a good job of conveying insights from psychology, neurology, and mindfulness into a digestible format.

See also my page on Getting Started with Mindfulness.

● ACT with Love (2nd Ed.): Stop Struggling, Reconcile Differences, and Strengthen Your Relationship with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Myths about love and relationships set us up for a struggle with the reality of our relationships. There’s no such thing as a perfect partner, all romantic partners fight, and feelings of love come and go. That does not mean you can’t have an engaged, happy and romantic relationship. You can complete the book alone or with your partner. This book teaches you how to let go of conflict, open up, and live fully in the present and to act on your values to build a rich and meaningful relationship

● Thank You for Arguing (4th Ed.): What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion: Less of a therapy or self-help book and more of a general book on effective communication. At the same time, many problems and disagreements come from how we communicate. While this book might be an appropriate book for an informal logic or rhetoric course, it also provides strategies for de-escalation and speaking to your audience values.

Communication skill basics:

● Fair Fighting: Worksheet & Video

● Assertive communication worksheet

● Passive, aggressive, and assertive communication worksheet

Changing behavior is hard, takes time, and can be tedious. Identifying and monitoring your progress towards goals is fundamental and the first major step.

● Way of Life - Habit Tracker (iOS, Android)*: Identify, track, and change your habits.

● Habitica - Gamify Your Life (iOS, Android)*: Turn your habit / behavior change goals into a game! Level up and earn gold and items.

● Urge Surfing blog post from PortlandPsychotherapy (5-minute read). Learn how to cope and respond differently to your urges.

● Learn about Mindful Drinking and how to practice. Mindful drinking may help you savor and appreciate your drinking experience and drink less through slowing down.

● The Addiction Recovery Skills Workbook: Changing Addictive Behaviors Using CBT, Mindfulness, and Motivational Interviewing Techniques: The workbook condenses down a lot of what we know that is helpful for reducing addictive behaviors (e.g., excessive alcohol or drug use) into a single, short, book. As long as you're willing to invest the time into reading and completing the exercises, then you can get a lot from it.

Applications to monitor alcohol and track your alcohol and tobacco consumption:

● DrinkControl (iOS)*

● Less - Alcohol Tracker (iOS)*

● Simple Alcohol Unit Tracker (Android)*

● Smoke Free - Quit Smoking Now (iOS, Android)*

Like other behavior change efforts, moderating or eliminating your drug and alcohol consumption can be difficult. Monitoring your consumption is the first step and is fundamental for behavior change.

Like any other behavior you might try and change, often the first step is developing awareness around the behavior by monitoring it. Here are two applications to get started with addressing body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs) skin picking and hair pulling behavior:

• TrichStop (iOS, Android)*

• SkinPick (iOS, Android)*: A free tool to help monitor skin picking behavior. Even though it’s not designed for nail-biting alone, it is generalizable to nail-biting. It will ask you to log when you pick, bite, or have the urge, indicate the setting where it occurred, and track progress over time. The premium version for a small, one-time, fee.

• Face Touch Aware (iOS)* pairs with an apple watch and was designed during COVID to assist people in touching their face less. You may often get false positives (i.e., your watch may vibrate when you're not actually touching your face), but it serves its function of bringing awareness to the behavior.

And skin picking management tips from PickingMe.org.