How to Build a Self-Care Safety Plan Before You Start

A self-care safety plan is a short written plan you make before starting self-guided bilateral stimulation or EMDR-style practice: your warning signs of rising distress, your grounding tools, who to contact for support, and the point where you stop and bring in a professional instead. Write it while you’re calm — deciding in advance beats deciding mid-session.

You’re about to start practicing bilateral stimulation on your own: the butterfly hug, eye movements, maybe guided sessions in an app. You don’t want to wing it. You’d rather decide now, while you’re steady, exactly what you’ll do if a session brings up more than you expected.

What exactly is a self-care safety plan?

In one sentence: a personal, written reference covering your warning signs, your coping tools, your support contacts, and your stop point, so a hard moment has a clear next step instead of a guess.

One thing to clear up first. If you’re searching for a safety plan because you’re having thoughts of suicide or hurting yourself, this page isn’t the right resource. Please call or text 988 (US) or visit our crisis resources page. What you need is a structured, clinician-built plan like the Stanley-Brown Safety Planning Intervention, a widely used suicide-prevention tool, or SAMHSA’s own version of it, free through 988.

This guide borrows the same underlying logic for something lower-stakes: preparing for self-guided bilateral stimulation, the same left-right rhythmic technique used in EMDR therapy, for everyday stress and ordinary hard days. The logic is identical. The stakes are not.

It’s worth building even if you’ve already started practicing without one. There’s no rule that says a safety plan only counts if it comes first. Twenty minutes now still buys you the same clear head for next time.

Why decide this before you start, not during a hard moment?

Even inside full clinical EMDR, guided by a trained therapist, memory work doesn’t start on day one. EMDRIA’s overview of the eight phases of EMDR therapy places an entire phase, called Preparation, before anything difficult gets touched. It includes building a calm or safe place, agreeing on a stop signal, and confirming the person can actually handle activation. That groundwork alone can take several sessions.

Working alone, nobody runs that check for you. You have to run it yourself. A 2020 commentary in BJPsych Open called self-administered EMDR a genuine way to widen access to care. But it warned the practice becomes an “unregulated recipe for disaster” when people skip the groundwork and go straight for heavy material.

The point wasn’t to avoid self-guided practice. It was to prepare the way a therapist would, just on your own.

A safety plan is that preparation, written down. Not because a session is likely to go badly. Because deciding your steps now, while you’re regulated, is a different task than inventing them mid-spike. The difference shows up exactly when you need it most.

Once the plan exists, a hard moment stops being an open question. It becomes a short, familiar routine: notice the sign, reach for the tool, check the number, decide whether to continue. That’s a much smaller ask at a 9 out of 10 than “figure out what to do” is.

Step 1: Know your own warning signs

Distress usually climbs in stages instead of arriving all at once, and catching it early is easier than catching it late. Give each stage a description that’s actually yours.

Level	What it might feel like
Mild	Tight jaw, checking the time, a flicker of irritation
Moderate	Racing heart, an urge to leave, a lump in your throat
Severe	Feeling frozen, disconnected from the room, can’t find words

Use this table as a starting point, then rewrite it in your own words. Everyone’s list looks different.

If it helps, jot your number down on ordinary days too, not just practice sessions. You’ll start noticing which situations reliably push you toward a 6 or higher, which is useful information on its own.

A number helps too. Rate your distress 0 to 10 before you start and again after, using the SUDS scale common across EMDR practice. Once you know roughly what a 3, a 6, and a 9 feel like in your own body, you can catch a rise while it’s still small enough to work with.

Step 2: Choose your coping tools before you need them

Decide your grounding and calming tools now, while you’re not using them. This is the resourcing step, and it matters more than people expect.

At minimum, have one calm-place resource ready: a real or imagined spot, pictured in enough detail that you can drop into it quickly. Our guide to building a calm, safe place walks through the full exercise if you don’t have one yet. Add one or two grounding techniques you’ve actually practiced before, not just read about. A technique you’re trying for the first time mid-distress rarely works as well as one you’ve rehearsed.

Decide whether you’ll tap it out manually or use EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, as the guided version of this technique, available in the web app. Write down which method you’ll default to, and what you’ll switch to if it isn’t helping. If a tool depends on something physical, like ice water, a scent, or a weighted object, note where you keep it. A tool buried in a closet isn’t really available.

Step 3: List exactly who you’d contact

When distress spikes, hunting for a phone number is the last thing you want to be doing. Decide now, not then.

List a professional if you have one (therapist, doctor, counselor) and how to reach them. List one or two personal supports too: people you’d genuinely feel comfortable texting, plus a rough sense of when they’re around. If you don’t have either yet, write down a concrete next step instead of leaving it blank. That could be a specific way to start looking for a therapist, or a friend you’d feel safe naming honestly.

Borrow one more structural idea from that clinical model: tier your contacts. One or two people for an ordinary hard day. A therapist or crisis line for anything bigger. Deciding the tiers now means you’re not stuck, mid-distress, weighing whether what you’re feeling counts as “big enough” to reach out.

Include a crisis option no matter what else is on the list. In the US, that’s 988, or our crisis resources page. You’ll likely never need it. Have it written down anyway.

Step 4: Decide your stop point in advance

This is the part people skip, and it’s the part that matters most.

Before you start, decide: if my distress rises above a number I choose now, commonly 7 out of 10, and doesn’t settle after a minute or two, I stop. Some people set that number lower, some higher; the number matters less than having chosen one before you needed it. Write down what stopping actually looks like for you: pause, ground, close the app, step outside. Our guide to what to do if you feel overwhelmed mid-session walks through that exact moment.

Separately, decide what would tell you this needs a professional rather than another solo attempt: distress that won’t come down over several days, new or worsening symptoms, or material that turns out bigger than expected. Our guide on when to stop self-guided EMDR and talk to a professional goes deeper on exactly where that line sits. Deciding this now means you’re not negotiating with yourself about it later.

Step 5: Write it down somewhere you’ll actually see it

A safety plan you can’t find isn’t a safety plan. Put it somewhere real: a note on your phone, an index card by where you practice, a page in a journal you keep open.

Here’s a template you can copy as-is:

• My mild, moderate, and severe signs:
• My calm-place cue:
• My grounding tools:
• My support contacts (professional, personal, crisis):
• My stop number, and what stopping looks like:
• When I’ll bring in a professional instead:

Fill in each line based on yourself, not a stranger’s example. Revisit it every few weeks, or right after any session that surprised you. A plan that reflects last month’s version of you helps less than one you actually keep updated.

The bottom line

None of this takes long: maybe twenty minutes, once, before you start, and a few minutes to update it afterward. What it buys you is real: a next step instead of a guess, right when guessing is hardest.

If you haven’t run your first session yet, our guide to preparing for your first self-guided BLS session picks up right where this leaves off. If you already have a plan like this one, use it. That’s the whole point.