Live in possibility

Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) is a simple and powerful process for creating the life and wellness you want. With WRAP, you can:

• Discover simple, safe, and effective tools to create and maintain wellness
• Develop a daily plan to stay on track with your life and wellness goals
• Identify what throws you off track and develop a plan to keep moving forward
• Gain support and stay in control even in a crisis

The WRAP process supports you to identify the tools that keep you well and create action plans to put them into practice in your everyday life. All along the way, WRAP helps you incorporate key recovery concepts and wellness tools into your plans and your life.

Discover the Key Concepts of WRAP

The five key concepts are at the core of WRAP and, along with the WRAP values and ethics, help bring WRAP to life in your life.

• Hope. The belief that we can get well, stay well, and go on to fulfill our dreams and goals. When we consider what hope means to us, we can also consider ways to increase hope in our own lives.
• Personal responsibility. It’s up to each of us to take action and do what needs to be done to stay well. We get to decide what personal responsibility means to us and the steps we want to take to be responsible for ourselves and our wellness.
• Education. Learning all we can about what we are experiencing helps us make good decisions about all parts of our lives. We can each define education for ourselves and explore steps we want to take to learn more in any area.
• Self-advocacy. Reaching out to others and expressing our needs helps us get what we need, want, and deserve to support our wellness and recovery. We can determine for ourselves how we want to self-advocate in different areas of our lives, including how we want to communicate our needs and preferences to others.
• Support. Receiving support from others, and giving support, will help us feel better and enhance our quality of life. We get to decide what support means to us, what we look for in supporters, and how we want to provide support as well as how we want to receive it.

Learn more about the key concepts on the WRAP Blog. Read our Writers’ Guidelines to learn how to share your own story of how the key concepts support your wellness.

Explore the Parts of WRAP

The foundation of WRAP’s six parts is the wellness toolbox. Using the tools in our wellness toolbox, we build our WRAP.

• Wellness Toolbox.A list of skills and strategies for keeping ourselves well and for feeling better if we don’t feel well. Wellness tools are simple, safe, accessible, and often free things we can do to recover or maintain our wellness. They give us hope and help us feel connected to others and to ourselves.
• Part 1: Daily Plan. The daily plan is a simple structure for putting wellness tools into action for daily living. This includes a description of how we look and feel when we’re well, things we need to do every day to stay well, and things we may want to do on a particular day to maintain wellness and make our life how we want it to be.
• Part 2: Stressors. These are events, circumstances, or situations that may lead to uncomfortable feelings or behaviors. Some people prefer the words “triggers” or “red flags.” Whatever you call these occurrences, when they happen they cause a normal reaction to the events in our lives—but if we don’t respond to them and deal with them, they can make us feel worse and disrupt our wellness. In this part of WRAP, we identify our stressors and the wellness tools we will use to respond if they occur.
• Part 3: Early Warning Signs. These are subtle signs of change that indicate we may need to take some action to keep our situation from worsening. Whereas stressors are things that happen around us, early warning signs are things we notice about ourselves or our environment that tell us we need to be proactive to protect or restore wellness. In this section, we identify our early warning signs and the wellness tools we will use to respond if we notice them.
• Part 4: Signs That Things Are Breaking Down or Getting Much Worse. When things are breaking down, we’re feeling worse and worse despite our best efforts. This is the time to take immediate action to prevent a crisis. In this section, we make a list of our signs that things are breaking down and the specific, concrete plan we will follow to use our wellness tools to help prevent a crisis.
• Part 5: Crisis Plan.If a crisis happens, it’s not your fault. The crisis plan helps you stay in control even when things feel out of control by making advance plans for yourself and for your supporters for what you need during this time. In this section, we define what a crisis looks like for our personal situation, who supports us, what supports we want and do not want, and how we want to be supported by others, including medical professionals if appropriate.
• Part 6: Post-Crisis Plan. The post-crisis plan helps us navigate the period after a crisis so we can return to our daily plan on the timetable and in the way that makes sense for us. It also helps us evaluate our WRAP to identify new tools or strategies we want to use based on what we learned about ourselves through the crisis we experienced.

Each part of WRAP listed above links to blog articles on this site that touch on that element of WRAP in some way.

Our Sample WRAPs & Tools can help you see WRAP in action and give you ideas for tools and strategies you want to include in your own WRAP.

Want to learn more? Check out the WRAP materials in our bookstore and learn how to find a certified WRAP Facilitator near you.

Want to share your WRAP story or a sample WRAP? Read our Writers’ Guidelines to learn how to submit an article or plan for our blog.

Whatever your goals or challenges, WRAP can help you make a plan that really works, with results you can really see. For more than 20 years, people around the world have used WRAP to support their goals and transform their lives. However you define “ wellness ” for your situation, WRAP can help you achieve it, step by step, your way, and on your terms. WRAP can help you:

• Shape every aspect of your life the way you want it to be
• Gain freedom from troubling thoughts, behaviors, or patterns that repeat in your life
• Feel empowered in making decisions about your life
• Build a strong support network of people and resources to help you reach your goals

WRAP Values and Ethics

The core values and ethics of WRAP represent the heart of WRAP ​training and implementation.​ They’re what bring the materials to life. Read on to learn about WRAP values and ethics and see how they can support your personal wellness. Read More

The Global WRAP Community

WRAP was founded in Vermont, USA, in 1997. Since then, it has truly WRAPped around the world, with groups, certified WRAP Facilitators, and individual WRAP users in 10+ countries. The WRAP process spans all ages, cultures, and life experiences. Read More

The WRAP Story

WRAP was developed by people who were living with a variety of mental health challenges and were working hard to feel better and get on with their lives. In the last 20+ years, WRAP has been recognized as an evidence-based practice and adapted for use with all kinds of life issues. Read More

The Way WRAP Works

Your personal WRAP is all your own. The process of facilitating the evidence-based practice of WRAP peer groups uses consistent guidelines, approaches, and materials to make sure individuals using WRAP get the very best we have to offer. Read More