Inside My Mind – World Mental Health Day 2025 – FREE

FREE Inside My Mind Activity – World Mental Health Day 2026

A creative brain activity helping children explore the many different thoughts, feelings, memories, interests and ideas that can fill their minds.

No two minds are exactly the same! Inside My Mind gives children a huge blank brain to fill with all the things going on inside their own mind.

From the people they love and things they’re excited about to thoughts, questions, memories, worries, dreams and big feelings, children can use words, colours, doodles, pictures or patterns to make their brain completely their own.

About this resource

Around the brain, children will find ideas to get them thinking, including:

People • Ideas • Hopes • Memories • Dreams • Things I Enjoy • Things To Do • Thoughts • Places • Things I’m Learning • Things I’m Proud Of • Questions • Big Feelings • Worries • Things I’m Excited About

Children don't have to include every prompt. The aim is to create a snapshot of their mind.

Features

• Large open-ended brain template
• Child-friendly visual prompts
• Can be completed using writing, drawing, doodles or colour
• Suitable for a wide range of abilities
• No right or wrong way to complete it
• Ideal standalone activity or lesson starter

Benefits

Helps children:

• Explore the idea that everyone has a unique inner world
• Build emotional vocabulary
• Recognise the variety of things our minds hold at once
• Express themselves creatively
• Notice thoughts, feelings and experiences
• Develop greater self-awareness

How to incorporate it into your setting

Use as a World Mental Health Day activity, PSHE task, morning activity, wellbeing session or display piece.

What is the World Mental Health Day 2026 theme?

The World Federation for Mental Health has announced the official theme for World Mental Health Day 2026 as:

“Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change.”

The theme puts the focus on listening to people with lived experience. Real experiences can give us important insight into what people need, what is working and what could be better.

For children and young people, we can explore this in an age-appropriate way: we all experience the world differently, our experiences matter, our voices matter and listening to other people's experiences can help us understand one another better.

Importantly, exploring lived experience in school doesn't mean asking children or young people to disclose personal or difficult experiences. Activities can focus on everyday experiences, preferences, ideas, needs and perspectives while always allowing pupils to choose what they share.

Bringing World Mental Health Day into your school or setting

You don't need to dedicate an entire school day to make World Mental Health Day meaningful.

Use one of these activities during registration or form time, build a full PSHE lesson around one of the presentations, create a pupil-voice display, run small-group discussions, incorporate an activity into pastoral support, or choose different resources for different year groups.

Our free World Mental Health Day resources have deliberately been designed to be mixed, matched and adapted. You can run a complete lesson using one of the presentations, pair a presentation with its accompanying activity, or simply download a free standalone worksheet for a quick World Mental Health Day activity.

The key message running throughout the collection is simple:

We don't all experience the world in the same way. When we make space for different voices and genuinely listen to them, we can understand each other better and use what we learn to make things better.