Create Your Own Comfort Kit: A DBT Skill for Difficult Moments

Create Your Own Comfort Kit: A DBT Skill for Difficult Moments

Create Your Own DBT Comfort Kit

As a healing ritual, I ask my clients to complete a homework assignment called Create Your Own Comfort Kit. The Comfort Kit is based on the DBT Skill of self-soothing.

The Comfort Kit consists of a small token that speaks to all your six senses. It should be something you can carry around with you during the day. All of these things should be pleasant or comforting to you. Use these things to bring you mindfully to the moment multiple times a day, to create a new neuronal network in your brain and help sooth you over time, like the research says. Use your Comfort Kit when you are idle or when you are starting to feel anxious, angry or sad, before emotion mind hijacks you. The idea is to bring yourself back to your body with scent, touch, sight, sound, taste and motion so you are feeling ok, not jazzed up.

Your Comfort Kit can help you get into Wise Mind.

Using self-soothing tools during times of ease helps build an inner reserve of calm and makes it more natural to reach for supportive comfort when stress arises. When emotions start to shift into high gear, these same tools can help you mindfully return to the present moment. Sensory awareness grounds you by gently anchoring the body in the here and now.

Regularly using your Comfort Kit helps your nervous system learn what safety and ease feel like. Research suggests that brief, repeated mindfulness practices—just 30 seconds to 2 minutes, practiced several times a day over a number of weeks—can meaningfully support anxiety and mood regulation.

Each repetition of a positive coping skill gently interrupts the brain’s tendency to become stuck in negative or ruminative thought patterns. With time and practice, these skills support Wise Mind and help create new neural pathways, making supportive, compassionate responses easier to access.

Be Gentle With Yourself

Your DBT Comfort Kit is one way to practice Mindfulness Everyday

Be patient with yourself, it takes time to acquire new skills. The process to acquire a skill is: first to learn about it, then practice it often, then be able to use it under stress. So it’s a process!

There’s no shame in feeling strong emotions, we all do.

It’s normal to feel varying levels of emotional pain in response to the experiences of everyday life. Most of us develop the life skills to tolerate the emotional pain until it passes. It’s ok to feel your feelings and then move on.

It’s normal to feel despair when you lose someone important to you, to feel sad when you lose something important to you, to feel anger when something is taken away from you and to feel afraid when you face the unknown.

The pain, fear, anger, and anxiety can be extreme, sometimes chronic. Grief is usually long-term, feelings you revisit over a lifetime. Sometimes, the feelings can feel as if they are unendurable.

Add your DBT Comfort Kit to your coping skills!

DBT Comfort Kit

A Comfort Kit can be as simple as a small swatch of soothing fabric you keep in your pocket, or it could be a bit more involved. You can get creative and make a small pouch or a painted jar or nice fabric box in which to put your essential comfort kit items. Whatever you decide, try to keep at least one comforting item with you at all times, and reach for it if you need to give yourself a little TLC.

Something to touch (soft cloth, smooth stone, stress ball)

Something to hear (music, meditation guides)

Something to see (pictures, snow globe)

Something to taste (Tic Tacs, herbal tea)

Something to smell (essential oil, lotion, candle)

Some movement that helps you feel good (walk around the block if possible, yogic alternate nostril breathing, Warrior Poses for strength, simple Qi Gong movements for relaxation)

How to Use Your DBT Comfort Kit

When your emotions are intense, utilize your Comfort Kit by concentrating on one aspect of it at a time until you can manage your stress levels.

For example, you might opt for a visual aid to calm yourself. Take out your focus picture, breathe deeply, and evoke positive feelings to counterbalance the negative ones. It's crucial to recognize and then release the negative emotions, allowing your stress levels to decrease.

Concentrate on one method at a time when you require significant self-soothing.

Journaling and Expanding on the Comfort Kit

Writing in a journal about your Comfort Kit helps you feel grounded and strengthens your sense of identity.

Building on the concept of the Comfort Kit, make an effort to surround yourself with beauty that delights your senses. These are items you can concentrate on when you're feeling emotionally overwhelmed, helping you to breathe and navigate through the moment. Here are some suggestions, but you'll need to determine what suits you best.

Flowers are so visually beautiful!

Visual Beauty in Your Life

Bring visual beauty into your life: buy or pick flowers to put on your dressing table, have an art book to browse through paintings, look at a book of scenic places in nature and drink in the beauty, put out a beautiful vase you haven’t looked at in a long time on your night-table….whatever you find soothing to look upon.

Write in your journal what you are doing for visual beauty

Sound - Music! Laughter!

Bring beautiful sounds beauty into your life: download some soothing music player, create a nice list for you to easily pick up and listen to when needed. Some people like the sounds of nature.

Write in your journal what you are doing to enhance your workd with beautiful sounds!

Soothing Touch

Bring touch beauty into your life: buy a nice smooth wear fleece to wear to bed, or satin or silk pajamas, whatever you feel comforted in. Or have feathers or soft fabric to handle, or a small stress ball or smooth, tumbled pebbles or a special crystal. Or you just might like the feel of an herbal stuffed pillow

Write in your journal what you are doing for your feeling of touch

Enchanting Scents

Bring scented beauty into your life.

Essential oils are pleasant to use. Be cautious of allergies. Never consume essential oils.

Avoid applying essential oils directly to your skin without dilution, as they are highly concentrated and can cause reactions. Use essential oils sparingly. They are chemically potent and interact with human neurotransmitters and other structures at a cellular level.

For an easy way to enjoy essential oils, carry have a tissue with some lightly scented essential oil near your bedside and sniff when needing a relaxing breath. You can carry a scented tissue with you in your pocket.

Some effective scents for relaxation include a combination of lavender, petit-grain, clary sage, and rose.

A diffuser is a nice way to enjoy scent, just run the diffuser an hour before bed and then turn it off. Carry a scented sachet with you to sniff when you need a mood lift. Drink a scented herbal tea and enjoy sniffing! Buy yourself a pleasant lotion, use it on uyour hands during the day. You can also create your own.

Create Your Own Calming Oil

• Mix 1 ounce of jojoba oil (or any other pure oil or cream) with no more than a 2% blend of oil which is about 8 - 10 drops per 1 ounce

• use less that 2% ..use a 1% blend m which is 5 or 6 drops per ounce if you are pregnant, nursing, elderly, or near children under 3
  

Create Your Own Infused Oil

• Mix fresh lavendar in 3 ounces of jojonba oil and let this infuse for a week, Then, drain, Voila! Your own lavendar oil!

Write in your journal about what you are creating!

Kinesthetic Sense - Movement

Bring movement beauty into your life. Some people like to walk, others hike, others, bike ride. Dancing is relaxing and fun. Horseback riding is very healing for others. Others love yoga or tai chi and yet some people really take to the martial arts. Movement and exercise has been healing for many people in many ways.

Write in your journal what you are doing for your empowering kinesthetic touch.

Comfort Kit - Visual Journaling Exercise

Here’s a fun way to acknowledge all the ways you can self-soothe.

Create a personal collage of the ways you enjoy self care and self-soothing.

Draw and/or cut pictures from magazines of the following. Hang this collage where you can see it, to help you remember your personal self-soothing ritual.

List of visual experiences that soothe

List of sounds that soothe

List of aromas that soothe

List of tastes that soothe

List of touch that soothes

List of movement exercises that soothe

A comfort kit is not about fixing emotions or making distress disappear—it’s about offering support during difficult moments. Over time, returning to familiar, soothing tools helps your nervous system recognize safety and ease more quickly. The goal is not to use every item perfectly, but to practice reaching for care instead of self-criticism when emotions feel hard. Small, repeated acts of comfort build resilience and make supportive coping feel more accessible over time.

This DBT comfort kit is one supportive tool within an integrative mental health approach that brings together skills-based therapy, trauma-informed care, and nervous system regulation.