Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it. Gently pick up your favorite cat, bury your nose in its fur, and take a deep, deep breath. You’ll be glad you did. If tranquility had an odor, cat fur would embody it. A couple of caveats: make sure that it is a clean and healthy cat, and that it is your cat.

This little exercise serves as a nexus of two lists of mental-health-preserving practices that I’ve been trying to live by.

The first of these lists is entitled “Five One-Minute Habits for Feeling Better.” To wit:

1. Clean something.
2. Step outside
3. Interact with a living creature. (Such as your cat!)
4. Mark one thing off your to-do list.
5. Do something nice for somebody.

You don’t have to do all five at any given time; just pick one, keep it under one minute, and then go on about your day. Feeling better won’t be instantaneous, but over time and repetition, the clouds will begin to thin out.

The second list is sometimes called “5-4-3-2-1.” It helps one to get one’s sympathetic nervous system to settle down.

Before I give you the details, I must digress into an explanation of “sympathetic nervous system.” This name is something of a misnomer, because sympathetic it is not. It is, in fact, the “fight, flight, or freeze” function of the human endocrine response, and in getting you ready for battle it floods your system with a heady cocktail of cortisol, adrenaline, and God knows what all else. This isn’t necessarily bad, because sometimes one needs to fight, or flee, or freeze. However, when your sympathetic nervous system responds to, say, the sound of a sneeze by funneling a massive dose of the so-called stress hormones directly into your heart, you might be in trouble.

Anyway, when your “fight off a big crowd of hungry leopards with a sharp stick” response kicks in over something stupid, like a leaf blowing across your path, it is time to implement the 5-4-3-2-1 strategy. It goes like this. Take a walk, look around in nature, and name five things you can see. Then, name four things you can hear, three things you can feel, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste. For taste, you might chew a blade of grass. Your long-suffering cat could do double duty, with soft clean fur to feel and smell.

The irony is that when you’re feeling bum, you don’t want to do anything, and the ability to overcome inertia can often be very far away indeed. This leads us to another mental health strategy known to academia as “Behavioral Activation.” To us common folk, this simply means, “it won’t take but a minute, and it won’t make you feel worse, so just do it.”

You’ll be glad you did.