If you’re like me and you get easily stressed and/or fixate on whatever’s causing you trouble, then you know how much of a godsend films and television shows are for your mental health.

Surprisingly enough, I recently learned that my penchant for relying on funny, endearing, or comforting shows and movies was actually not an unhelpful activity to engage in; using something to help turn your mood around or occupy your thoughts can actually allow for you to de-stress from a particularly overwhelming situation. In other words, you’re helping build up your distress-tolerance skills.

It’s absolutely healthy to set aside whatever you’re going through or dealing with temporarily to aid in clearing your mind and giving yourself time to think about how you want to move forward.

However, this listicle does not try to promote the idea that you should just continue to continually push away your issues; this isn’t healthy and often leads to making the situation worse. It’s okay to take a breather, but eventually, you will need to work things through. During that process, it’s also normal and often necessary to decompress, so using this skill of choosing to preoccupy yourself with entertaining interests is very beneficial to keep in your mental toolbox.

Yes, this is rather long, but there are plenty of options to choose from here, which is why I wanted to create a longer list in the first place. Most of these shows and films are also readily available on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and other streaming services, which makes your life much, much easier.

Hopefully, these films soothe you the way they do for me:

1. The Lord of the Rings trilogy

2. The Office