If your kid is feeling anxious about something — perhaps a test or a sick relative or an upcoming shot — guided imagery can help. It’s a technique that uses mental visualisations to give one more control and a greater sense of peace.

When you just want to turn your brain off and sleep, meditation apps are perfect. A guiding voice, or the sounds of something peaceful such as rain, helps to fill the silence so your thoughts can’t creep in. The best ones strategically bore you into drowsiness. (You can look for sleep-focused meditation tracks, but I’m guilty of misusing the Headspace intro lessons for this purpose.)

Even before you download an app to help you meditate, or to manage your depression, it's speaking to you. Apps' marketing often implies that everyday stresses should be seen as mental health issues, and that you're on your own (with the help of the app, of course) to fix whatever is wrong with you.

Mindfulness can be as powerful for children as it is for adults - it can help them regulate their emotions and respond more calmly when life gets stressful. But simply telling your kids to "clear your thoughts!" or "be present!" will probably just make them more confused (and therefore more stressed).

I am, and have always been, very easily annoyed. When I was little, I used to beg my mum to make my sister to stop singing in the car. "But it's a happy noise," she'd say. (She was right. I was being a jerk.) Annoyances are small, not serious problems, and it would make all of us and the people around us happier if we could learn to stop being bothered by them.

Inspired by games from the 2016 Self-Care Jam (which Kotaku mined for favourites), MetaFilter users recently named their favourite calming video games. Some will be familiar, but others are deep cuts by independent developers. Most aren't for winning or losing, just exploring, interacting and existing. None of them force you to battle other players in a tense show-down. Try these out if you're too stressed out for Overwatch or Plague Inc.