Looking After My Mind Reflection Activity – World Mental Health Day 2026 – FREE

FREE Looking After My Mind Activity – World Mental Health Day 2026

Help young people explore and recognise ways to support their mental health. Shade the brain to discover what’s working and where you might want a little more.

A simple reflective activity helping older children and young people recognise the different things that can support mental health and consider what they're already doing.

About This Resource

Looking after our mental health can involve lots of different things, and what works for one person may look completely different for somebody else.

Looking After My Mind gives young people a visual way to reflect on different areas that can support wellbeing, from sleep and rest to friendships, hobbies, exercise, nature and asking for help.

The brain is divided into areas including:

Rest • Family • Healthy Eating • Mindfulness • Learning • Fun • Helping Others • Exercise • Friends • Help & Support • Hobbies • Sleep • Nature • Time to Myself • Gratitude

Young people colour each area to show how much of each one they are currently getting. They might fill the whole section, colour just a little or leave it blank.

Once complete, they can look at the overall picture and consider whether there are areas they'd like to give a little more attention.

Features

• Simple visual self-reflection activity
• Explores a broad range of wellbeing factors
• No scoring system
• Easy to use individually or as part of a lesson
• Encourages reflection rather than prescribing one “right” way to look after mental health

Benefits

Helps young people:

• Recognise things they're already doing that support them
• Discover additional ways of looking after their mental health
• Consider their own individual needs
• Notice areas they may have been overlooking
• Understand that wellbeing is made up of many different factors

How to incorporate it into your setting

Use as a quiet individual reflection, discussion starter, pastoral check-in or follow-up to a lesson about mental health.

You could ask young people to choose one area they'd like to do a little more of, rather than treating the completed brain as something they need to “fill”.

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.