Printable mental health explainers.
Every explainer in the Shrinkopedia Library is also available as a printable one-page PDF. Free to download, share with a family member, hand to a client, or leave on a clinic waiting-room table. Each is psychiatrist-reviewed and sourced from primary literature.
- Cognitive distortions (PDF)
Ten common thinking patterns that make situations feel worse than the evidence supports.
Read the web version - Window of tolerance (PDF)
The zone of arousal where you can think, feel, and respond at the same time.
Read the web version - The stress response (PDF)
What actually happens in your body when the alarm system fires.
Read the web version - Attachment styles (PDF)
The four patterns people carry from early bonds into adult relationships.
Read the web version - Stages of change (PDF)
The six stage cycle people actually move through when changing a behavior.
Read the web version - Behavioral activation (PDF)
Why action comes before motivation when mood is low, and how to use that.
Read the web version - Executive function (PDF)
The eight mental skills that turn intentions into finished things.
Read the web version - Decision fatigue (PDF)
Why choice quality drops as choice quantity rises, and how to protect the decisions that matter.
Read the web version - Burnout (PDF)
The three dimensions of burnout and the six mismatches that drive it.
Read the web version - Flow (PDF)
The state of full absorption where effort feels effortless, and the conditions that invite it.
Read the web version - Rumination (PDF)
The mental loop that feels like problem solving and works like quicksand.
Read the web version - Cognitive load (PDF)
Why your brain feels full, and how to spend its limited bandwidth on purpose.
Read the web version - Working memory (PDF)
The tiny mental workspace everything you think passes through.
Read the web version - Maslow's hierarchy of needs (PDF)
The five levels of human need, and what the famous pyramid gets right and wrong.
Read the web version - Reward prediction error (PDF)
The brain signal behind motivation, habits, and why surprises feel so good.
Read the web version - Metacognition (PDF)
Thinking about thinking, and why it changes what your thinking can do.
Read the web version - Confirmation bias (PDF)
The default habit of noticing evidence that fits your existing view and skimming past what does not.
Read the web version - Availability heuristic (PDF)
Judging how likely something is by how easily an example comes to mind.
Read the web version - Sunk cost fallacy (PDF)
The habit of throwing more resources at something because you have already thrown so many.
Read the web version - Fundamental attribution error (PDF)
Judging others by their character and yourself by your circumstances.
Read the web version - Fight, flight, freeze, fawn (PDF)
The four automatic threat responses, and why they are not choices you make.
Read the web version - Interoception (PDF)
The sense of what is happening inside your body, and why it shapes emotion.
Read the web version - The polyvagal ladder (PDF)
A simple model of three nervous system states, and how you move between them.
Read the web version - Emotion granularity (PDF)
The more precisely you can name a feeling, the more you can do with it.
Read the web version - Alexithymia (PDF)
A muted ability to notice and name feelings, and why it is treatable rather than fixed.
Read the web version - Radical acceptance (PDF)
Stopping the second arrow of fighting reality, so the first one hurts less.
Read the web version - Distress tolerance (PDF)
Getting through a bad moment without making the situation worse.
Read the web version - The Yerkes-Dodson curve (PDF)
Too little pressure and you cannot get moving. Too much and you fall apart. There is a middle.
Read the web version - Self-efficacy (PDF)
The belief that you can do the thing, which turns out to change whether you can.
Read the web version - Locus of control (PDF)
Where you place the source of what happens to you, and why it shapes what you do next.
Read the web version - Learned helplessness (PDF)
When repeated uncontrollable events teach a nervous system to stop trying, even after control is possible.
Read the web version - Growth mindset (PDF)
The belief that ability is buildable, and why it changes what you try.
Read the web version - Psychological flexibility (PDF)
The ability to keep moving toward what matters even when your mind is generating reasons not to.
Read the web version - Theory of mind (PDF)
The everyday ability to model what other people are thinking and feeling.
Read the web version - The habit loop (PDF)
Cue, routine, reward. The three-part shape almost every habit lives in.
Read the web version - How a psychiatric diagnosis is made (PDF)
From what you're going through to the words on the chart, one step at a time.
Read the web version - How a mental illness changes over time (PDF)
Where it comes from, how it starts, how it rises and falls, and what the outlook means.
Read the web version - Levels of psychiatric care, from outpatient to inpatient (PDF)
Weekly visits, day programs, residential care, and the hospital: who each is for and how people move between them.
Read the web version - Mental health shortage areas: why care is hard to reach (PDF)
What a federal mental health shortage designation means, how it's scored, and your options when psychiatrists are scarce.
Read the web version