The Anxiety Toolkit Quotes

“If you’ve been working on your thinking errors for only a few months so far, then you’re probably still at the stage where you mostly notice the errors after the fact. Going forward, you’ll find some situations in which you’re able to spot a thinking error at or close to the time it occurs. For example, you might notice yourself feeling upset about something that has happened during the day and later that evening realize you’ve been mind reading: guessing what someone else thinks without knowing if it’s actually the case.
Expect to have a mixture of these situations and those when you notice your thinking error only after you’ve been walking around buying into that sucker for months or even years. You might get some new information or evidence and only then realize you’ve been holding on to a distorted thought.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“When the routines and circumstances of your life are set up so that your lifestyle is a good fit for your natural preferences, it can give you a feeling of being in equilibrium. This will help prevent you from getting overwhelmed by anxiety on a regular basis. And by arranging your life to suit your temperament, you’ll have the time to process and calm down from life events that make you feel anxious. Some areas in which you can set up your life to fit your temperament are:

--Have the right level of busyness in your life. For example, have enough after-work or weekend activities to keep you feeling calmly stimulated but not overstimulated and scattered. Note that being understimulated (for example, having too few enjoyable activities to look forward to) can be as much of a problem as being overstimulated.
--Pick the physical activity level that’s right for you. Fine-tuning your physical activity level could be as simple as getting up from your desk and taking a walk periodically to keep yourself feeling calm and alert. Lifting things (such as carrying shopping bags up stairs) can also increase feelings of alertness and energy. Having pleasurable activities to look forward to and enough physical activity will help protect you against depression.
--Have the right level of social contact in your life, and have routines that put this on autopilot. For example, a routine of having drinks after work on a Friday with friends, or attending a weekly class with your sister. Achieving the right level of social contact might also include putting mechanisms in place to avoid too much social interruption, like having office hours rather than an open-door policy.
--Keep a balance of change and routine in your life. For example, alternate going somewhere new for your vacation vs. returning to somewhere you know you like. What the right balance of change and routine is for you will depend on your natural temperament and how much change vs. stability feels good to you.
--Allow yourself the right amount of mental space to work up to doing something—enough time that you can do some mulling over the prospect of getting started but not so much time that it starts to feel like avoidance of getting started.
--If coping with change sucks up a lot of energy for you, be patient with yourself, especially if you’re feeling stirred up by change or a disruption to your routines or plans. As mentioned in Chapter 2, keep some habits and relationships consistent when you’re exploring change in other areas.
--Have self-knowledge of what types of stress you find most difficult to process. Don’t voluntarily expose yourself to those types without considering alternatives. For example, if you want a new house and you know you get stressed out by making lots of decisions, then you might choose to buy a house that’s already built, rather than building your own home. If you know making home-improvement decisions is anxiety provoking for you, you might choose to move to a house that’s new or recently renovated, rather than doing any major work on your current home or buying a fixer-upper. There’s always a balance with avoidance coping, where some avoidance of the types of stress that you find most taxing can be very helpful.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Weekly Check-Ins

Instead of focusing on your anxiety all the time, try scheduling a weekly check-in session with yourself. Clients who have been coming to sessions weekly often just put that same day and time aside. Instead of meeting with me, they meet with themselves. You can do the same.
Pick a time and place that will work for you to do your weekly check-in. Start a notebook (or use the note-taking app on your phone) in which you can record things you might want to address during your weekly check-in. When it comes time for your check-in, use the list as your agenda. If you have lots of issues that come up during the week and end up with a long agenda, just pick the one or two that seem most important to work through.
This process will allow you to take some time to focus on any anxiety-driven issues that occurred during the week that you didn’t get a chance to deal with as they happened or where you tried something but it didn’t seem to do the trick. Remember to include behavioral traps, like overworking or avoidance coping, if these have occurred during the week.
For each issue, go back to what seems like the most relevant chapter and try a solution from that chapter. For example, if you noticed yourself ruminating about a problem but didn’t take problem-solving action (meaning you didn’t move from thinking about the problem to taking a behavioral action), you might try defining your problem, generating a list of your best three to six options for moving forward with that problem, picking one option, and planning when and where you’re going to implement that solution.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Next Action

When you’re avoiding something, try identifying the next action you need to take to move forward. Do that action. For example, if you have a legal situation and you feel overwhelmed about it, the next action you need to take might be something like emailing a lawyer friend and asking for a referral. If your garden has become overgrown with weeds, the next action you need to take might be locating your gardening tools. If your smartphone is acting up, the next action you need to take might be to run a backup. If you need to buy a new laptop, your next action might be to decide on your budget. Keep in mind that the next action you pick shouldn’t be too big. Generally, try to think of something you can do in 15 minutes or less. If you still feel overwhelmed, try picking an even smaller next action. To give credit where credit is due, the concept of defining your next action was first popularized in a productivity book called Getting Things Done. It’s a concept many of my clients have found useful.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Try a 30-Day Project for Overcoming Avoidance Coping

Avoidance coping habits aren’t something you can snap your fingers and change. A 30-day project focused on gradually turning around avoidance coping can help. You can use this approach as an alternative to the exposure hierarchy if doing a 30-day project seems more appealing or relevant to you.
During the 30 days, take as many opportunities as you can to be less avoidant than you usually would be. This will help you overcome any problems you might have with not knowing where to start in reducing your avoidance. As situations come up, focus on taking some action, even if you’re not certain what the absolute right action is. For example, if you’re confused by all the options for backing up your digital photos in the cloud, you might ask your most tech-savvy friend what she does, and just go with that. You can always switch later.
Don’t be too all-or-nothing about overcoming avoidance coping. We all have only so much willpower available for dealing with things we’d prefer not to do. The goal is to start unraveling your avoidance coping habits bit by bit. If you sometimes fall back into the avoidance coping trap, that’s to be expected.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Know Yourself: Are You a Freezer, Flyer, or Fighter?

How avoidance coping manifests for you will depend on what your dominant response type is when you’re facing something you’d rather avoid. There are three possible responses: freezing, fleeing, or fighting. We’ve evolved these reactions because they’re useful for encounters with predators. Like other animals, when we encounter a predator, we’re wired to freeze to avoid provoking attention, run away, or fight.
Most people are prone to one of the three responses more so than the other two. Therefore, you can think of yourself as having a “type,” like a personality type. Identify your type using the descriptions in the paragraphs that follow. Bear in mind that your type is just your most dominant pattern. Sometimes you’ll respond in one of the other two ways.
Freezers virtually freeze when they don’t want to do something. They don’t move forward or backward; they just stop in their tracks. If a coworker or loved one nags a freezer to do something the freezer doesn’t want to do, the freezer will tend not to answer. Freezers may be prone to stonewalling in relationships, which is a term used to describe when people flat-out refuse to discuss certain topics that their partner wants to talk about, such as a decision to have another baby or move to a new home.
Flyers are people who are prone to fleeing when they don’t want to do something. They might physically leave the house if a relationship argument gets too tense and they’d rather not continue the discussion. Flyers can be prone to serial relationships because they’d rather escape than work through tricky issues. When flyers want to avoid doing something, they tend to busy themselves with too much activity as a way to justify their avoidance. For example, instead of dealing with their own issues, flyers may overfill their children’s schedules so that they’re always on the run, taking their kids from activity to activity.
Fighters tend to respond to anxiety by working harder. Fighters are the anxiety type that is least prone to avoidance coping: however, they still do it in their own way. When fighters have something that they’d rather not deal with, they will often work themselves into the ground but avoid dealing with the crux of the problem. When a strategy isn’t working, fighters don’t like to admit it and will keep hammering away. They tend to avoid getting the outside input they need to move forward. They may avoid acting on others’ advice if doing so is anxiety provoking, even when deep down they know that taking the advice is necessary. Instead, they will keep trying things their own way.
A person’s dominant anxiety type—freezer, flyer, or fighter—will often be consistent for both work and personal relationships, but not always.
Experiment: Once you’ve identified your type, think about a situation you’re facing currently in which you’re acting to type. What’s an alternative coping strategy you could try? For example, your spouse is nagging you to do a task involving the computer. You feel anxious about it due to your general lack of confidence with all things computer related. If you’re a freezer, you’d normally just avoid answering when asked when you’re going to do the task. How could you change your reaction?”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Avoidance is one of the main factors that fuels anxiety. Avoidance can be behavioral—you avoid situations or doing things that make you feel anxious. Or it can be cognitive—you try to avoid thinking about topics that trigger your anxiety.
Avoidance will eat you alive psychologically if you don’t work on it. Avoidance coping generates additional stress in your life. Further, the more you avoid, the more your anxiety will tend to spread to other tasks and situations. And when you avoid, you miss out on opportunities to learn that you can cope with situations, and you miss out on gaining skills through experience.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Act As If You Feel Relaxed About Feedback

People sometimes feel a spike of defensiveness when they receive negative feedback. You might feel annoyed at the feedback or feel upset. In these situations, try acting as if you feel relaxed. In other words, fake it till you make it. Acting as if you feel relaxed is one of the fastest ways to actually feel more calm. If you get an anxiety spike when you receive feedback or tend to feel defensive, try making your body language more open. Send nonverbal signals that you’re open, even if inside you’re not feeling it. Drop your shoulders, lift your head, make gentle eye contact, and relax your hands. When you do this, your thoughts and feelings will start to catch up with your nonverbal cues almost instantly. You won’t feel completely relaxed, but it will help.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“There are two thinking shifts you need to make to overcome personalizing. The first is mindfulness: You need to train yourself to consider the possibility that whatever has happened might not be personal. The second is recognizing that negative feedback does not necessarily mean the person doesn’t like you, doesn’t respect your capabilities, or doesn’t recognize your potential.
Experiment: Do you ever underestimate how capable and talented others perceive you to be? Think of an example when you’ve possibly underestimated how positively you are perceived by someone.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Catch When You’re Interpreting Negative Feedback as Worse Than It Is

There’s also another way anxiety can cause people to misinterpret feedback they receive. If someone who is feeling anxious gets mildly negative feedback, that person often panics and sees it as much worse than it is. For example, you receive some comments on your work, and the first time you read them, the highlighted problems seem much more extensive than they will when you reread the feedback the next day.
Experiment: Can you think of a time when you’ve panicked upon receiving negative feedback and seen it as worse than it really was?”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Catch When You’re Panicking About Ambiguous Feedback

Anxiety can cause people to sometimes misinterpret feedback once they’ve received it. When people feel anxious, they tend to interpret ambiguous information (and lack of feedback) as negative. For example, your boss promises to get back to you in a couple of days about a request you’ve made. You assume this means the answer is going to be no. Another example: You might interpret lack of effusiveness in feedback as evidence the person wasn’t impressed with your work. If the person just says “Thanks” when they’d usually say “Thanks, you did a great job,” you interpret that as negative.
Experiment: Can you think of an example where you have jumped to a negative conclusion about ambiguous feedback or where you might be likely to do so?”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Believe in Your Ability to Cope with Negative Feedback

Just like everyone has a vision blind spot, everyone has cognitive blond spots that can lead to making less than stellar choices. For example, you think an outfit looks good on you, and in reality it doesn’t. Or you thought you understood what your boss wanted but later realize you took the instructions in an unintended direction. Since we all have blind spots, making some mistakes and getting some negative feedback is unavoidable. Therefore, unless you plan to go live in a cave, you’re going to need a game plan for how you’ll cognitively and emotionally cope when negative feedback happens. We’ll cover behavioral strategies later in the chapter, but let’s work on the thinking and emotional aspects for now.
Experiment: Think about a specific scenario in which you fear negative feedback. If your fears came true:

--How would you go about making the required changes?
--How could you be self-accepting of your sensitivity to criticism? How could you talk to yourself gently about the emotions you’re feeling instead of criticizing yourself for feeling upset? How could you be patient with yourself while you’re having those feelings?
--What self-care would you do while you wait for your heart and upset feelings to pass? (Yes, rewatching episodes of ‘90s TV is a totally acceptable answer.)
--What personal support would you access to cope with your emotions? For example, you’d talk to a friend.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Correct Overestimated Feedback Fears

One of the reasons anxious people fear feedback is that they tend to judge their performance more harshly than others judge them. If you’re feeling anxious, you’ll probably overestimate the likelihood that any feedback you’ll get will be negative—the negative predictions thinking error.
Let’s say you need to get feedback on your delivery of an upcoming presentation. You fear that you’ll get crucified, that people will say your presentation style is horrible and won’t say anything nice. How likely does this feared outcome feel? You might say, “It feels 99% likely.” How likely is it in reality? You think, “Objectively, maybe 50%?” Your answer of 50% may still be an overestimate, but at least it jump-starts the shift in your thinking. It alters you that your anxious feelings are, to some extent, clouding your perceptions.
Although it seems strange that people can shift their thinking just based on whether they are asked to think with their anxious mind or their objective mind, this isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. There’s lots of research evidence that people’s thinking changes based on how they’re asked to think about something. For example, my own doctoral research asked people in relationships how their judgments of their romantic partner compared to reality. People recognized that they tended to view their partners more positively than warranted by reality.
Experiment: Think of a current area in your life where feedback would be useful to you, but you’re avoiding it. Ask yourself two questions (answer using a percentage, as shown in the example):

--How likely does it feel that I’m going to get very negative feedback?
--How likely is it in reality?”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Recognize the Costs of Avoiding Feedback

When people avoid feedback, they miss out on benefits (covered earlier) and incur costs. For example, you might worry for longer than you need to about how your work will be perceived. Do you tend to think about the potential pain of getting feedback more than you think about the costs of avoiding it? If yes, you can consciously correct for this thinking bias. You might notice that this bias is another example of a principle we discussed earlier, in the chapter on hesitation: Anxious people tend to think about the potential harm of acting more than the potential harm of not acting.
Experiment: To get some big-picture perspective on what avoiding feedback has cost you, try answering the following questions. Write down one specific example of each. If you can’t think of answers, let the questions marinate for a day or two.

--Have you avoided seeking feedback early on only to later realize that earlier feedback would’ve saved you from continuing down the wrong track for so long? When?
--Have you avoided feedback only to later realize your fears of negative feedback were unjustified? How long did you worry unnecessarily? What was that like for you?
--Have you had times when your predictions of negative feedback came true, but it was a much milder experience than you’d anticipated? Have you had an experience where you realized that making the required changes was much easier than you thought, and you had endured extra worry for no reason?
--What cool opportunities have you opted out of because you didn’t want to expose yourself to even the possibility of negative feedback?”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Fine-Tune Your Mind to the Benefits of Feedback

When you’re in anxiety mode, it’s easy to think of feedback as something wholly torturous and psychologically painful. Can you nudge this thinking by attuning to some of the benefits?

--You may find out you’ve done something well.
--You may discover that things you perceive as minor aspects of your work are seen by other people as major strengths.
--You may achieve more success because what you produce after feedback is better. For example, someone gives you a tip or suggests a change that improves your work. You realize you like the new version, but it wasn’t something you would’ve attempted without a push in that direction.
--Through feedback, you may get new insights that help you solve problems you’ve been stuck with. The feedback giver may offer useful information about how he or she previously solved the problem you’re currently having.
--Lastly, the process of receiving feedback can strengthen your relationship with the person giving the feedback. It can be a bonding experience.

Experiment: Try one (or both) of these options:

Option 1: Think of one specific instance in the past when negative feedback has actually been useful to you.
Option 2: Go through each of the listed benefits of feedback, and write one example of a specific situation in which you received that benefit.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Streamline Your Focus Instead of Jumping From Unfinished Project to Unfinished Project

Although it seems contradictory, anxiety-related perfectionism can cause people to persist too long on some tasks and leave other projects unfinished. Perfectionists who are intolerant of uncertainty often jump from project to project. They might start multiple business plans, grant proposals, job applications, movie scripts, stand-up routines, craft projects, or novels, and not finish any of them. They may sour quickly on an idea when their self-doubt starts to creep in rather than stay with the idea long enough to realistically judge it’s potential.
If you bounce from idea to idea, it could very well be because it’s hard for you to tolerate your uncertainty about whether the idea you’re working on is going to pan out. If you have a habit of not finishing things, you’re likely to be better off sticking with a project and finishing it, instead of jumping to another project when you start to feel unsure.
To help you be less tempted to jump around, reduce your exposure to excessive information and alternatives.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“If handing over tasks to others activates your difficulties in tolerating uncertainty, talk to yourself kindly about your feelings. Acknowledge that keeping a tight grip on the reins in every aspect of your life helps you feel secure but also acknowledge when that’s wearing you out. Notice if being very controlling is one of those behavioral patterns that helps you feel less anxious in the short term but makes you feel more anxious in the long term. Being excessively controlling is one of those “the more you do it, the more you need to do it” anxiety patterns.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Hand Over Control

If anyone has ever called you a control freak, recognize that your controlling ways and hesitancy about letting other people do things their way is likely to be anxiety related. Your thinking patterns may be related to fears that other people won’t do tasks to a standard that’s acceptable to you, which may or may not be true in any given instance. Or your controllingness might be related to “should” thinking errors, along the lines of “I should be able to do everything myself,” or fears that needing help is a sign of being a weak person.
A behavioral experiment you can try is delegating or outsourcing tasks you feel overwhelmed by.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Stop Midflow, Rather Than When You’re Completely Exhausted or Stuck

As mentioned earlier, anxious perfectionists often run their willpower tanks to absolute empty. One way this manifests is by ceasing work only at the point when you’re completely exhausted or stuck. This can make getting restarted on a task very unappealing, because your most recent memory of the task will be of it not going well or feeling exhausted while doing it. We all have recency bias, meaning recent memories tend to be the most salient. You don’t want your most recent memory of a task to be of feeling stuck or wiped out from it.
Experiment with what it’s like to stop working while you’re in the zone and still enjoying a task rather than when you’re exhausted and frustrated. Notice whether doing this leads to you making better subsequent choices. For example, better eating choices at night after a hard day.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Know Your Warning Signs That You’ve Persisted Too Long

Because anxiety causes thinking to get narrow and rigid, it can sometimes cause you to persist too long on certain tasks. Since anxious perfectionists tend to be particular and don’t like unfinished tasks hanging over their heads, they can be especially vulnerable to this trap. Know the signs that you need to stop persisting. For example, if you work online, one of your personal signs of overpersistence might be that you’ve searched a forum for over 30 minutes looking for a solution to a problem and haven’t found it. This would be a cue that taking a break from trying to solve your problem is likely to be more effective than banging away at it. Another example might be if you’ve been trying to convince your partner of something for over 10 minutes. You’ve explained your point of view several different ways, and you’re still at loggerheads.
Define your overpersistence warning signs in objective and specific ways. This will make it harder to ignore them than if your definitions were fuzzy.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“You need to make sure you always have a reserve of willpower available for the on-the-fly decision making and controlling your reactions. If you run your willpower tank too low, you’ll end up making poor choices or exploding at people. The following are some ways of making more willpower available to you:

--Reduce the number of tasks you attempt to get done each day to a very small number. Always identify what your most important task is, and make sure you get that single task done. You can group together your trivial tasks, like replying to emails or paying bills online, and count those as just one item.
--Refresh your available willpower by doing tasks slowly. My friend Toni Bernhard, author of How to Wake Up: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide to Navigating Joy and Sorrow, recommends doing a task 25% slower than your usual speed. I’m not saying you need to do this all the time, just when you feel scattered or overwhelmed. Slowing down in this way is considered a form of mindfulness practice.
--Another way to refresh your willpower is by taking some slow breaths or doing any of the mindfulness practices from Chapter 5. Think of using mindfulness as running a cleanup on background processes that haven’t shut down correctly. By using mindfulness to do a cognitive cleanup, you’re not leaking mental energy to background worries and rumination.
--Reduce decision making. For many people, especially those in management positions or raising kids, life involves constant decision making. Decision making leeches willpower. Find whatever ways you can to reduce decision making without it feeling like a sacrifice. Set up routines (like which meals you cook on particular nights of the week) that prevent you from needing to remake the same decisions over and over. Alternatively, outsource decision making to someone else whenever possible. Let other people make decisions to take them off your plate.
--Reduce excess sensory stimulation. For example, close the door or put on some dorky giant headphones to block out noise. This will mean your mental processing power isn’t getting used up by having to filter out excess stimulation. This tip is especially important if you are a highly sensitive person.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Navigate “This Is Too Hard for Me” Thinking

Anxious perfectionists like to feel very on top of things. When they think, “This is too hard for me,” they often treat it as fact, instead of recognizing it as potentially just another anxiety-induced false alarm. Remember, if you’re anxiety-prone, then by definition your anxiety system is predisposed to false alarms—that is, registering dangers that aren’t there.
Thoughts are just thoughts; the problem is that we accept thoughts as true, and confuse feelings with facts. Part of the reason this happens is memory bias: Your brain will tend to remember events from the past that match your current mood. Because current mood has such a powerful effect on thoughts, consciously trying to recall evidence that you’re skilled and talented probably won’t feel very authentic or convincing when you’re feeling down. If you know this is how your brain works, then you can discount some of the negative thoughts you have when you’re in a deflated mood. Your thoughts will naturally improve when your mood improves. Therefore, regaining confidence is often just a matter of being patient and waiting for a negative or anxious mood to pass.
Experiment: Have there been any times in the past when you’ve had “this is too hard for me” thoughts, those thoughts have been a false alarm, and you’ve managed to do the thing you feared was too hard for you? Identify one example. Your example doesn’t need to be something huge. A small example will do.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“To help ease any anxiety you may be feeling about the pace of your success, practice accepting that productivity and results can take time to come, and often come in cycles.
Experiment: Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Are there any areas of your life where you’d benefit from accepting the pace at which results and progress are occurring?

2. Is there objective evidence that suggests you are on the right track, and seeing positive results is merely a matter of patience and continuing to work methodically?

3. How would you talk to yourself differently if you had more acceptance of this? What would you say to yourself? Remember back to the self-compassion material from the last chapter.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Switch from a Performance Focus to a Mastery Focus

There’s a way to keep your standards high but avoid the problems that come from perfectionism. If you can shift your thinking from a performance focus to a mastery focus, you’ll become less fearful, more resilient, and more open to good, new ideas. Performance focus is when your highest priority is to show you can do something well now. Mastery focus is when you’re mostly concerned with advancing your skills. Someone with a mastery focus will think, “My goal is to master this skill set” rather than “I need to perform well to prove myself.”
A mastery focus can help you persist after setbacks. To illustrate this, imagine the following scenario: Adam is trying to master the art of public speaking. Due to his mastery goal, he’s likely to take as many opportunities as he can to practice giving speeches. When he has setbacks, he’ll be motivated to try to understand these and get back on track. His mastery focus will make him more likely to work steadily toward his goal. Compare this with performance-focused Rob, who is concerned just with proving his competence each time he gives a talk. Rob will probably take fewer risks in his style of presentation and be less willing to step outside his comfort zone. If he has an incident in which a talk doesn’t go as well as he’d hoped, he’s likely to start avoiding public speaking opportunities.
Mastery goals will help you become less upset about individual instances of failure. They’ll increase your willingness to identify where you’ve made errors, and they’ll help you avoid becoming so excessively critical of yourself that you lose confidence in your ability to rectify your mistakes.
A mastery focus can also help you prioritize—you can say yes to things that move you toward your mastery goal and no to things that don’t. This is great if you’re intolerant of uncertainty, because it gives you a clear direction and rule of thumb for making decisions about which opportunities to pursue.
Experiment: What’s your most important mastery goal right now? Complete this sentence: “My goal is to master the skills involved in ___.” Examples include parenting, turning more website visitors into buyers, property investment, or self-compassion. Based on the mastery goal you picked, answer the following questions. Make your answers as specific as possible.
How would people with your mastery goal:

1. React to mistakes, setbacks, disappointments, and negative moods?

2. Prioritize which tasks they work on? What types of tasks would they deprioritize?

3. React when they’d sunk a lot of time into something and then realized a particular strategy or idea didn’t have the potential they’d hoped it would?

4. Ensure they were optimizing their learning and skill acquisition?

5. React when they felt anxious?”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Experiment: Ask yourself if the either/or perfectionism trap is a problem for you. If it is, consider the following:

1. Maybe the flaws you see yourself as having aren’t as big in reality as they are in your mind. Maybe other people will care less about them than you think. Can you think of any flaws you perceive yourself as having where this might be true?

2. Achieving excellent performance at all times isn’t a realistic option, nor is always performing at the top, especially if you’re mixing in a pool of other smart people. Sometimes anxious perfectionists will avoid mixing with other very talented people because it triggers social comparison and self-doubt. This has a self-sabotaging effect because smart people spark each other’s ideas (the iron sharpens iron principle). Do you avoid situations that trigger social comparison?

3. Give other people some credit. Why would they forget about all the other stellar work you’ve done if you occasionally produce something that is not quite at your usual high standard?”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Catch Either/Or Thinking

Anxious perfectionists will typically think “I need to perform flawlessly at all times,” with their underlying assumption being “or else it will result in disaster.” This is a common type of thinking trap termed either/or thinking. In this case, the either/or is this: Either there is flawless performance or complete and utter failure, and nothing in between.
Not only can this style of thinking make you feel crushed when you don’t meet your own ideal standards, but it also often leads to perfectionism paralysis. Take, for example, an artist who sees his future career prospects as becoming either the next Picasso or a penniless flop; this person doesn’t see other possible outcomes in between. You can see how this would give the artist a creative block.
For other folks, their hidden assumption may be slightly different: “Either I need to perform flawlessly at all times, or other people will reject me.” When I look back at my clinical psychology training, I realize I had this belief at that time. At a semiconscious level, I thought that the only way to prevent getting booted out of the program was to score at the top of the class for every test or assignment.
Ultra-high standards often arise because a person is trying to hide imagined catastrophic flaws. In this scenario, people often think that if their flaws get revealed they’ll be shunned, and so the only way to conceal their defects is by always excelling. When people who have this belief do excel, their brain jumps to the conclusion that excelling was the only reason they managed to avoid catastrophe. This then perpetuates their belief that excelling is necessary for preventing future disasters.
Researchers have used the term clinical perfectionism to describe the most problematic kind of perfectionism. When clinical perfectionists manage to meet their ultra-high standards, they often conclude that those standards must not have been high enough and revise them upward, meaning they can never feel any sense of peace.
All this being said, I’m not suggesting you shoot for “acceptable” performance standards if you’re capable of excellence. Most of the anxious perfectionists I’ve worked with would hate that. It’s not in their nature to feel comfortable with mediocre performance.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“When you’re working hard on achieving your goals, the ideal scenario is that you enjoy the successes you experience along the way and take setbacks in stride.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Move Ruminative Thinking Forward by Asking Questions

Have you ever had the experience of asking someone for advice and then realizing you could’ve figured out a solution yourself? You can use this effect to your advantage. Ask questions as a way of unclogging stuck thinking. When you ask questions, you may get useful new information, or just the process of asking the questions may stimulate your own thinking.
Sometimes even getting unhelpful responses can help you move forward, because they prompt you to define your problem differently. This often happens when someone misunderstands your question and gives an unhelpful, irrelevant response, but this makes you reformulate your questions in a clearer form.
Ways you can ask questions include making phone calls, scheduling an appointment with an adviser, posting your questions on Facebook or an online forum, or hiring someone you can direct questions to.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Replace Behaviors That Make Your Rumination and Worry Worse

There’s not much point in using strategies to decrease rumination and worry if you’re concurrently adding fuel to those fires. Self-criticism is one kind of fuel. Other types of fuel include things like excessive reassurance seeking, spending hours looking up health information online, or compulsively looking at your ex’s Facebook page.
Look out for behaviors that seem to provide a temporary reprieve from anxiety but, in fact, make you feel like you need to go back and repeat them. Look into seeing a cognitive behavioral therapist if you can’t stop those behaviors on your own.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Take Action If You’re Ruminating Because of Avoidance Coping

If you’re ruminating because you’ve been putting off dealing with an issue, taking any level of action to address what you’ve been avoiding will usually help alleviate your rumination. Most of the time, you won’t need to completely resolve the issue to lift your rumination—for example, you might just send an email or make a phone call to get the ball rolling.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points