stage.
Many successful changers bounce back and forth in these stages a number of times before finally achieving their goals. So, don’t get discouraged if that happens to you. Keep your goal in mind, and restart your efforts if you slip. Yep. Try, try, and try again.
Watching Worries Come and Go
Sometimes anxiety feels like it will never go away. Believing that you have no control over it and that stress invades your every waking moment is easy. This section helps you to realize that anxiety actually has an ebb and flow. We show you how taking a few minutes to write down your feelings each day may discharge a little of your anxiety and possibly improve your health. We also help you understand that progress, like anxiety, ebbs and flows.
Following your fears
One of the best early steps that you can take to manage anxiety is to simply follow it every day in a couple of different ways. Why would you want to do that? After all, you already know full well that you’re anxious. Watching your worries is a good idea because it starts the process of change. You discover important patterns, triggers, and insights into your anxiety.
Observing anxiety fulfills several useful functions. First, monitoring forces you to be aware of your emotions. Avoiding and running away from troubling emotions only causes them to escalate. Second, you’ll see that your anxiety goes up and down throughout the day — which isn’t quite as upsetting as thinking it rules every moment of your life. And, you’re likely to discover that recording your ratings can help you take charge and feel more in control of what’s going on inside of you. Finally, keeping track helps you see how you’re progressing in your efforts to quell your distress.
Virginia complains to her friends that she’s the most nervous person on the planet and that she’s close to a nervous breakdown. Recently, her father had heart surgery, and her husband lost his job. Virginia feels completely out of control and says that her anxiety never stops. When her counselor suggests that she start tracking her anxiety, she tells him, “You’ve got to be kidding. I don’t need to do that. I can tell you right now that I’m anxious all the time. There’s no letup.” He urges her to go ahead and try anyway. Table 4-4 shows what Virginia comes up with in her first week of tracking.TABLE 4-4 Virginia’s Day-by-Day Anxiety LevelsDayMorningAfternoonEveningDaily AverageSunday4686Monday6797.3Tuesday5665.7Wednesday4575.3Thursday3886.3Friday5997.7Saturday3554.3Average4.36.67.46.1
Virginia discovers a few things. First, she notices that her anxiety is routinely less intense in the morning. It escalates in the afternoon and peaks in the evenings. With only one week’s record, she can’t discern whether her anxiety level is decreasing, increasing, or remaining stable. However, she notices feeling a little better simply because she feels like she’s starting to take charge of her problem. She also realizes that some days are better than others and that her anxiety varies rather than constantly overwhelming her.
THE POWER OF POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
The field of psychology focused on negative emotions for most of the 20th century. Psychologists studied depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, behavior disorders, and a slew of other maladies. Only recently has the field looked at the pluses of positive emotions, the characteristics of happy people, and the components of well-being. People who feel grateful usually say they feel happier as well.
One study assigned people to three groups. The first group wrote only about the hassles of everyday life. The researchers asked the second group to write about emotionally neutral events. The third group journaled about experiences that they were grateful for. All the groups performed this task merely once a week for ten weeks. At the end of the experiment, the group that wrote about gratitude exercised more, had fewer physical complaints, and felt more optimistic than those in the other two groups. That such an easy, simple task could be so beneficial is surprising.
Later studies have found that journaling helps decrease anxiety associated with multiple sclerosis, as well as other health conditions. Furthermore, it decreases stress related to school pressures and everyday anxiety.
Writing about your worries
Millions of people keep a diary at some point in their lives. Some develop daily writing as a lifelong habit. Keeping a journal of life’s emotionally significant events has surprising benefits:
Journal writing appears to decrease the number of visits people make to the doctor for physical complaints.
Writing increases the production of T cells that are beneficial to the immune system.
Keeping a journal about emotional events improved the grades of a group of college students compared to those who wrote about trivial matters.
Recently, unemployed workers who wrote about the trauma of losing their jobs found new employment more quickly than those who did not.
Throwing out the rule book
Journal writing doesn’t have rules. You can write about anything, anywhere, anytime. However, if you want the full benefits of writing in a journal, we encourage you to write about feelings and the emotionally important events of your life. Write about anything that troubles you during the day and/or past difficulties. Spend a little time on it.
Counting your blessings: An antidote for anxiety
Writing about your distressing feelings makes a great start. However, if you’d like more bang for your buck, take a few extra minutes and write about what you feel grateful for each day. Why? Because positive emotions help counteract negative emotions. Writing about your boons and blessings improves mood, increases optimism, and may benefit your health.
At first blush, you may think that you have little to be grateful for. Anxiety can so easily cloud vision. Did your mother ever urge you to clean your plate because of the “starving kids in China”? As much as we think that pushing kids to eat is a bad idea, her notion to consider those less fortunate has value. Take some time to ponder the positive events and people in your life.
Kindnesses: Think about those
