Getting through anxiety

I’ve had some really bad anxiety the past few days. I think it started small but then it got to the point where I couldn’t handle anything. Wasn’t depressed yet but was getting close. I worked really hard to fight against it and I did pretty well. I wanted to avoid taking any Xanax because that is just a temporary fix. I wanted to just deal with the problems instead of just putting it aside for a couple hours until the effects of the medication died down. I want to share what I did.

Halfway through the day today I felt like I had enough of feeling like this. So the first thing I did was sit down and made a list of everything that was making me anxious. This already helped because seeing everything written down it made me realize there weren’t as many things wrong that I felt there were. I looked closely at the list and thought about each one and if it was something I could control now. A lot of it wasn’t something I could fix so I pushed those aside. For the ones I could fix now I wrote next to each one what I could do to make it better. Some of the things I had was:

How messy my house was- Stop thinking about how messy the house is and start to clean it. Don’t do it all at once but start off small. This worked very well because once I got going it was much easier to keep on going.

The amount of school work I have- Again, stop thinking about it and actually do it. Make a schedule and stick to it. When I think I want to do something else like watch TV, stop and think about what my options are and what should be a priority. Making a schedule already helped because it made me see that what I had to do was doable, whereas before I just kept sitting around thinking about all the things I had to do.

Dinner time- This has been a major stress for me. So I thought about what exactly was making it stressful. I figured out that I was deciding what we would have for dinner at the last minute. It would be too late to make anything that took a while. I need to plan, plan, plan. I’m telling myself that by lunch time each day I need to decide exactly what to have for dinner and figure out right away what time I need to start making everything.

This was not everything but I think you get the idea. After I thought through all these I went back to the list of things I could not fix. Instead of focusing on the fact that I couldn’t do anything, I tried figuring out why these things were causing anxiety. Just thinking about the cause helped me see that there is no reason to be anxious over them.

40% of things you worry about will never occur

30% are things from the past that’s can’t be changed

12% are needless worries about one’s health

10% are petty worries

8% are real legitimate worries.

Only 8% of your worries are worth it. Focus on that 8% and what you can do about it.