Slaying the Beast of Anxiety — Part Three
Anxiety! Oh, my goodness! Who needs this mess? No one, right? Yeah! Anxiety can be a monster. But today, we’re gonna talk about yet another way to slay this beast.
So, hey! My name is Dr. K, and if you are new to me, I’m a psychiatrist based in the Southeast, and I’m all about posting content to increase awareness of mental illness and help overcome common mental health struggles. And today, we’re going to lay out yet another strategy for conquering that monster — anxiety.
Okay, so far in our discussions about ways to slay the beast of anxiety we have highlighted two strategies:
managing your biology
clearly and authentically communicating your situation to those who have the power to help change the situation
We’re going to hit a couple of other strategies here today. The first is breaking larger tasks into smaller more manageable ones.
Ever have to complete a project, plan an event, write a paper, or even just do a chore at home that you find yourself avoiding and avoiding? It’s probably because the task makes you feel anxious. Avoidance is a very natural response to anxiety. And you’re likely feeling anxious because the task seems overwhelming and you just don’t know how to get started. So, the key to handling anxiety provoking situations like this is to sit down with yourself (or your mental health provider if you have one) and figure out how to break the task down into smaller and more manageable components. Have yourself a mini-planning party before you start on a task. Sit down with your favorite snack and favorite warm beverage, turn on a song that you find energizing and that may facilitate focus and burn you a nice, scented candle with essential oils that will get your brain powered up. Then you’ll want to do something like make a huge list of all the things that must be done in order to complete the task. Be as detailed and as inclusive as possible. Oftentimes, just after doing this step, people experience a great deal of relief. There’s something about getting things out of your head and onto paper. When you’ve got thoughts about a potentially burdensome task swimming around in your head, they end up worrying you to death. When you write these tasks out on paper, they become much more manageable. Now you can work with them in a physical sense instead of wrestling with them in the abstract. Now that you’ve come up with an all-inclusive list of things that must be done, you can devise a plan or strategy. And that brings us to our next tip for managing anxiety:
Devising a plan or strategy for tackling the task at hand. Okay, the two strategies I’ve mentioned today actually go hand-in-hand. When you feel anxious about a task, you’ll want to figure out why, and oftentimes, it’s because it just seems overwhelming. Then you’ll need to decide that you’ll have yourself a little planning party to sit down and break the task down into smaller components and devise a realistic timeline for the completion of each component.
Let’s take some common examples that I’ve seen with my patients:
I have a lot of patients who have collected and collected and collected all kinds of things over the years. Okay, so they’ve hoarded for all kinds of reasons, and now they’ve got a house full of clutter that has gotten to the point that it’s stressing them out or impairing their daily functioning in all kinds of ways. So, what we’ll do in session is figure out how to break the task down of cleaning the house. We’ll start with focusing on one room, and then one part of the room — like the dresser— and set a goal of cleaning off the top of the dresser by the next session. And then, we’ll talk about a way that they can reward themselves — if you get that dresser top cleaned off by the next session, then you can — fill in the blank. And we discuss that the reward cannot be going out shopping to buy more things to cover up the dresser again. No, no, no. But, hopefully, you get my point, right. Sometimes, we feel anxious because we have a task that must be done and we avoid doing it. But a way to overcome this is to sit down and devise a strategy for breaking the larger task into smaller parts so that the work won’t feel so overwhelming.
Another situation where this can be applied is with school work. A lot of my adolescent patients experience high levels of anxiety around getting projects or papers done or preparing for tests. However, the key to lowering levels of anxiety is to break the task down into smaller tasks and devising a plan and realistic timeline by which to do so. So, as soon as the teacher announces that a paper is due, it would be wise to first write out all the necessary steps needed to complete the paper — from going to do research at the library all the way to completing the paper’s final draft and all the steps in between. After this, it’s necessary to set time goals for when each component needs to be completed and write this all out. Then, all you have to do is work the plan.
Okay, so as one final recap — two strategies — that actually work hand-in-hand— for reducing levels of anxiety is to break overwhelming and anxiety-provoking tasks into smaller parts and devising a plan and timeline for completing each of the component parts. And as I mentioned earlier, it helps to build healthy and helpful personal rewards and incentives into your plan to make the journey to completion as enjoyable as possible.
Alright, that’s the end of the session for today. I hope this content has helped you recognize some ways that you can lower your own levels of anxiety. Now please do remember that the suggestions I offer here are not meant to be a substitute for advice from your own provider. So, talk to your provider before implementing any of these tips. And if you don’t have someone helping you with your mental health needs, consider reaching out to a professional.
Folks, let’s make it our business to understand mental illness and those who struggle against mental illness. I’m Dr. K, and this has been Mental Health | Plain Speak. And remember, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
