The Anxiety Toolkit Quotes

“Imagery exposure is a technique in which you vividly recall a situation you’ve been ruminating about, such as a colleague pointing out an embarrassing error you made. You can also use imagery exposure for a worry thought (something that hasn’t happened yet).
To start, recall all the sights and sounds of the past situation (or feared situation) in as much detail as you can. For example, if you’re recalling a situation that has happened, you might recall turning bright red with embarrassment and the other people looking at you strangely or laughing. You would also recall details like what the room looked like, what the temperature was, whether the sun was streaming in through the window, and so on. Bring the image of the embarrassing or worry situation vividly to mind.
The following is based on the principle that anxiety symptoms will naturally subside if you don’t use escape or avoidance strategies: Deliberately keep the image in mind until your anxiety falls to half of where it started (or less). For example, if vividly recalling the situation triggers 8 out of 10 anxiety initially, hold the image in mind until your anxiety drops to about a level 4. Repeat the imagery exposure exercise at least once a day until you can bring the image to mind without it triggering more than about half of the peak anxiety you experienced the first time you tried imagery exposure.
Exposure techniques like this are some of the most powerful ways to solve problems with intrusive thoughts when an event is still bothering you long after it happened. Only use the technique if you feel like you can handle it. You can use imagery exposure for recent memories or more distant ones.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Define Your Options

When people are spinning their rumination wheels about a particular problem, they often don’t concretely define what their options are for moving forward. To shift out of rumination and into problem-solving mode, concretely and realistically define what your best three to six options are. For example, imagine you’ve recently hired a new employee but that person is not working out. Instead of mentally slapping yourself around about why you made the hire, it would be more useful to define what your options are at this point:

--Giving the employee more time
--Shifting the employee’s responsibilities to simpler jobs
--Giving the employee checklists of the steps needed to complete each task
--Having another employee work with the individual
--Firing the employee

Defining your options relieves some of the stress of rumination and helps you shift to effective problem solving. Keeping your list of options short will prevent you from running into choice-overload problems. Research shows that if you consider more than three to six choices, you’re less likely to end up making a choice.
Experiment: Practice concretely defining your best three to six options for moving forward with a problem you’re currently ruminating or worrying about. Write brief bullet points, like in the example just given. You can use this method for all sorts of problems. For example, a friend just used it to come up with ideas for how to have more social contact in her life.
Note: If the word best is causing you to jump into perfectionism/frozen mode, write any three to six options.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Try Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness meditation is like Tylenol, in that the same treatment is capable of helping with multiple issues: decreasing anxiety-induced overarousal, boosting your focus, and improving your ability to detect rumination. Mindfulness-based therapies have been shown to be effective for helping people reduce anxiety.
Mindfulness meditation does not need to be intimidating. Research by the makers of the Lift goal-tracking app found that beginner meditators start with an average of three to five minutes. They also found that once people had meditated 12 times, there was around a 90% chance they’d do more mediation.
Experiment: Explore and find a version of meditation that works for you. Start with three minutes of one of the following practices, and increase the time you spend meditating by 30 seconds each day:

--Pay attention to the physical sensations of your breathing. Lie down and put your hand on your abdomen to feel the sensations of it rising as you breathe in and falling as you breathe out.
--Sit or lie down and listen to any sounds and the silence between sounds. Let sounds just come in and out of your awareness regardless of whether they’re relaxing sounds or not.
--Walk for three minutes and pay attention to what you see.
--Walk and pay attention to the feelings of air on your skin.
--Walk and pay attention to the physical sensations of your body moving.
--Do three minutes of open awareness, in which you pay attention to any sensations that show up. Pay attention to anything in the here and now, which could be sounds, your breathing, the sensations of your body making contact with your chair, or the sensations of your feet on the floor.
--Spend three minutes paying attention to any sensations of pain, tension, comfort, or relaxation in your body. You don’t need to try to change the sensations; just allow them to be what they are, and ebb and flow as they do.

When your thoughts drift away from what you’re supposed to be paying attention to, gently (and without self-criticism) bring them back. Expect to need to do this a lot. It’s a normal part of doing mindfulness meditation and doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong.
You’re likely to get more benefits from meditation if you do it on a regular basis and for longer amounts of time per session.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Accept That You Often Won’t Know Why Other People Have Acted in a Particular Way

Humans like to have explanations for why things happen. When we don’t have one, we tend to invent something. Sometimes the explanations involve personalizing. Personalizing is when you take something more personally than it was meant in reality. If a work colleague is rude and abrupt, you might think it’s because she’s annoyed at you, and not consider that it might be because she’s feeling flustered by something unrelated. Anxiety-prone people who don’t like uncertainty can be especially likely to ruminate about why something has happened and come up with explanations involving excessive personalizing. To overcome this, you need to learn to tolerate that you’re not always going to know why people behave the way they do.
Recognize that if someone acts strangely, there’s a very high likelihood that the behavior has something to do with what’s happening for that person, rather than being about you, and you’re probably never going to know what the reason was. You can save yourself hours or days of rumination and upset if you can tolerate the idea of not knowing. While there might be some cases in which you try to find out what the issue was, in many cases your only real choice is to let it go. Try to arrive at this insight before you’ve done hours of ruminating!
Experiment: Was there a time recently when in retrospect it would’ve been better to accept not knowing the reason for someone’s ambiguous behavior rather than trying to figure it out?”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Spot Rumination Triggered by Emails

Email is a common trigger for rumination. Text messages, Facebook comments, and tweets can be too. All the nonverbal cues, and many of the context cues, are stripped out of this type of communication. The asynchronized nature of email often adds to the issue.
For example, does a slow reply to an email mean the person is disinterested? Or might it mean something else? Is the person busy? A habitual slow replier? Waiting on some information before coming back to you with a reply? Still thinking about what you’ve said? Is the person disorganized and got distracted? Not checking messages? Did your message go to spam?
If you get caught in email-induced rumination, recognize if you’re jumping to any negative conclusions about why the person hasn’t responded and try coming up with alternative explanations that are plausible. Use the next experiment as a guide. Remember that slowing your breathing will always help you think more clearly and flexibly, so do this too.
Experiment: Can you recall a time when a nontimely response to an email set off rumination for you? What was (1) your worst-case scenario prediction for the person’s lack of response, (2) the best-case scenario, and (3) the most likely scenario? If you struggle to think of an answer for “most likely,” pick something that falls in the middle, between your answers for the best- and worst-case scenarios.
In the email incident you just recalled, did you ever find out what the reason for the slow response was? Often you won’t find out the reasons for other people’s actions, which is part of why this type of rumination tends to be so futile.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Recognize When You’re Criticizing Yourself Just for Feeling Anxious

Should/shouldn’t thinking traps are a common problem for anxiety-prone people. These can come in several varieties, virtually all of which can prolong and intensify rumination—for example, “I shouldn’t ever let anyone down,” which is an example of excessive responsibility taking and rigid thinking.
Try to notice when you get caught in should/shouldn’t thinking traps, in which you criticize yourself just for feeling anxious. For example, “I should be able to handle life much better” or “I shouldn’t get anxious about such little issues.” If this happens, give yourself compassion for the fact that you feel anxious, regardless of whether the anxiety is logical or not. Think of it this way: If a kid was scared of monsters, you wouldn’t withhold compassion and empathy just because the monsters aren’t real. Treat yourself with the same caring. A common mistake people make is to think they need to give themselves excessive encouragement, praise, or pep talks while they’re feeling anxious—you don’t. Taking a patient and compassionate attitude about the fact that you’re experiencing anxiety is an overlooked strategy that helps anxious feelings pass quickly.
Experiment: When you’re ruminating, do you ever further dump on yourself by criticizing yourself for feeling anxious? Try this: Switch out any shoulds hidden in your self-talk and replace them with prefer. For example, instead of saying “I should have achieved more by now” try “I would prefer to have achieved more by now.”
This is a simple, specific, repeatable example of how you can talk to yourself in a kinder, more patient way. These tiny self-interventions may seem ridiculously simple, but they work. They may not seem like they shift your anxiety to a huge degree; however, they can help you disrupt your rumination just enough to give you a small window of clear mental space. This allows you to start doing something useful rather than keep ruminating. Doing something useful then further helps lift you out of rumination. You get a positive feedback loop (positive thoughts --> positive behavior --> positive thoughts) rather than a negative loop.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Reduce Self-Criticism

Reducing self-criticism is a critical part of reducing rumination. Self-criticism is a fuel source for your rumination fire. People use self-criticism to try to encourage themselves to do better in the future. For example, someone might ruminate after overeating or if she perceives she has mucked up a social situation, and then mentally beat herself up about her mistakes. However, harsh self-criticism doesn’t help you move forward because it isn’t a very effective motivational tool, especially if you’re already ruminating.
People who are in a pattern of trying to use self-criticism as motivation often fear that reducing it will make them lazy. It won’t. In fact, giving yourself a compassionate rather than a critical message will often lead to working harder. For example, one study showed that people who took a hard test and got a compassionate message afterward were willing to study longer for a future similar test, compared to a group of people who took the same test but didn’t get a compassionate message.
Giving yourself a simple “don’t be too hard on yourself” message will propel you toward taking useful problem-solving steps. Acknowledging the emotions you’re feeling (such as embarrassed, disappointed, upset) and then giving yourself compassion will lead to your making better choices than criticizing yourself will. Self-compassion will give you the clear mental space you need to make good decisions.
Experiment: To practice using self-compassion as an alternative to self-criticism, try the following three-minute writing exercise.
There are two versions of this exercise—one that involves thinking about a past mistake and another that involves thinking about something you perceive as a major weakness. Identify a mistake or weakness that you want to focus on, and then write for three minutes using the following instructions: “Imagine that you are talking to yourself about this weakness (or mistake) from a compassionate and understanding perspective. What would you say?”
Try this experiment now, or store it away for a future situation in which you find yourself ruminating about a mistake or weakness. This experiment comes from the same series of research studies as the one involving the hard test mentioned earlier. Note that the study participants didn’t receive training in how to write compassionate messages. What they naturally came up with in response to the prompt worked.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Distinguish Between Worry/Rumination and Helpful Problem Solving

If you’re smart and you’ve experienced a lifetime of being rewarded for your thinking skills, it makes sense that you’ll default to trying to think your way out of emotional pain. However, because anxiety tends to make thinking negative, narrow, and rigid, it’s difficult to do creative problem solving when you’re feeling highly anxious. People who are heavy worriers tend to believe that worrying helps them make good decisions. However, rather than helping you problem-solve, rumination and worry usually just make it difficult to see the forest for the trees.
Do you think people who worry a lot about getting cancer are more likely to do self-exams, have their moles mapped, or eat a healthy diet? According to research, the opposite is probably true. Worriers and ruminators wait longer before taking action. For example, one study showed that women who were prone to rumination took an average of 39 days longer to seek help after noticing a breast lump. That’s a scary thought.
If you think about it, worry often comes from lack of confidence in being able to handle situations. Here’s an example: Technophobes who worry a lot about their hard drives crashing are the same people who are scared of accidentally wiping all their files if they attempt to do a backup. Therefore, worry is often associated with not doing effective problem solving. My experience of dealing with technophobic ruminators is that they don’t usually back up their computers!
Experiment: To check for yourself whether ruminating and worrying lead to useful actions, try tracking the time you spend ruminating or worrying for a week. If a week is too much of a commitment, you could try two days—one weekday and one weekend day. When you notice yourself ruminating or worrying, write down the approximate number of minutes you spend doing it. The following day, note any times when ruminating/worrying led to useful solutions. Calculate your ratio: How many minutes did you spend overthinking for each useful solution it generated?”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Become Aware of Memory Bias

When people are anxious, they often have biased recall for events. For example, Brian talks himself into believing he screwed up an interview for a promotion because he thinks over and over about things he could’ve said. However, he doesn’t as easily recall the good answers he gave. He endlessly mentally rehashes ambiguous cues the interviewers gave off, such as appearing to rush through questions, but doesn’t as easily recall when the interviewers responded positively.
Another example: A friend of mine used to talk herself into believing she’d failed every exam she ever took. She’d ruminate over all the answers she hadn’t known and wouldn’t recall questions she’d been able to answer correctly. The take-home message when you’re ruminating: Don’t trust your memory. You might be ruminating about something fictional or at least magnified. This also applies to ruminating about how you think others perceive you; you may just be mind reading based on a biased memory of interactions.
Experiment: Do you have any current rumination topics where memory bias might be playing a role? If you can’t think of anything now, come back to this experiment when you have an issue that fits. Answer the following questions:

1. What’s your ruminating mind telling you?
2. What are the objective data telling you about whether your ruminative thoughts are likely to be correct? For example, my friend who always convinced herself she’d failed exams had never failed anything.
3. Are you recalling feedback as harsher than it was or recalling blips in your performance as worse than they were?”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Believe it or not, psychologists have a term to describe people who like to think a lot. The trait is called need for cognition. It refers to people who enjoy effortful thinking and feel motivated to attempt to understand and make sense of things. Because you’re reading a book about understanding yourself and your thoughts, chances are you fall into this category.
For the most part, being high in need for cognition is associated with positive traits, like openness, higher self-esteem, and lower social anxiety. On the flipside, some other types of intensive thinking—notably rumination and worry—tend to be associated with being closed to new ideas and poor mental health.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Practice Hesitating Less

Look for small ways to practice hesitating a little less than you usually would. Over time, this will help increase your psychological flexibility: You’ll get better at choosing when you want to let a decision marinate vs. when you want to make a decision swiftly, take action, and move on. You’ll start to learn from experience that you can move out of thinking mode more quickly without disastrous consequences. For example, if you tend to put off buying things that, in reality, would be a good investment, give yourself some criteria for making quicker decisions. You might commit to making decisions about purchases that are under $50 in less than 48 hours. Choose the level that suits your situation and preferences.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Practice Tolerating Uncertainty

Look for opportunities to try taking action when you’re not 100% certain of success. Gradually experiment with this over the coming months as opportunities come up. The more you learn from experience that you’re capable of doing this, the easier it will become. Taking action swiftly will start to feel more natural. When an opportunity to act with uncertainty comes up, articulate the potential upsides of taking action:

--It could work out well.
--If it doesn’t work out well, I’ll move my thinking forward by seeing that the idea didn’t work.
--I won’t have to think about the decision anymore.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Surround Yourself with Others Who Are Already Doing What You Want to Do

My all-time favorite success tip for people who tend to hesitate excessively is to regularly interact with people who are already successfully doing what you want to do. Why will this help you moderate your tortoise tendencies? Emotions, thoughts, and behaviors all tend to be socially contagious. Therefore, if you surround yourself with people who are already acting in the ways you need to act, this will likely rub off on you. You’ll be more likely to take action.
Another key reason for interacting with others who are already succeeding in your field is that many of the key pieces of information that will help you succeed won’t be shared in books or other public forums. They’re likely passed from person to person. You’ll get to know these insider secrets only by befriending successful people.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“The take-home message: Even if you achieve only intermittent reinforcement—that is, you experience success only sometimes—having some successes will make your behavior much more resilient, and you’ll be less likely to give up. Therefore, whenever you start something, focus on getting your first few successes.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Deciding when and where you’re going to do something will dramatically increase the likelihood you’ll follow through. Let’s look at the results from a specific study. Because most psychology research uses students as guinea pigs, this example relates to essay writing. Students who had an essay to complete were divided into two groups. One group was asked to state when and where they would complete their essay. Of this group, 71% completed the essay before the due date. The other group was given the due date but were not asked to state when and where they’d write their essay. Only 32% of this group finished on time. This extremely simple, two-minute intervention transformed the task from one in which most people failed to one in which most people succeeded.
To implement this change in your own life whenever you’re planning to take action, identify when and where you’ll act. Make this a habit you do every time.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Decrease Anxiety in an Instant

The best way to instantly feel less anxious is to slow your breathing. Try this whenever you feel physically overaroused due to anxiety, or when your thoughts are either racing or frozen. Slowing your breathing will automatically slow down your heart rate. You’ll feel calmer. Since this is a physiological fact, it’s about the only anxiety strategy that has a 100% guarantee of working. The effect is nearly instant.
Here are some tips for slowing your breathing

1. Before you try to slow your breathing, drop your shoulders. It’ll make it easier. Also, focus on breathing slowly rather than breathing deeply.

2. If you have an area of tension in your body, like your neck and shoulders are tight, imagine you’re breathing fresh new air into those areas. There’s nothing sciencey about this, but lots of people like this method.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Behavioral Shifts to Overcome Excessive Hesitancy

Important: So far we’ve been focusing on how tweaking your thinking can help shift your behavior. This is important, but it’s only half the story. People are usually quite good at identifying how changes in thoughts or feelings may lead to changes in behavior, such as “When I have more energy, I’ll do more exercise” or “When I have more ideas, I’ll take more action.” However, people tend to underestimate the impact of changing their behavior on their thoughts and feelings, such as “When I exercise more, l'll have more energy” or “When I take more actions, I’ll have more ideas.” Don’t make the mistake of thinking you need to wait for your thoughts to change before you try behavioral shifts. Mental and behavioral shifts go hand in hand. When you start making changes in your behavior (even subtle ones), you’ll notice that all kinds of thoughts, including your view of yourself, start to shift. Changing your behavior, without waiting for you thoughts to always shift first, is one of the best and fastest ways you can reduce your anxiety. That’s why a cognitive behavioral approach focuses on both thoughts and behaviors.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Question the Thought “Failure is Just for Losers”

A failure-related thinking error that anxious perfectionists sometimes make is thinking that failure is just for losers. If you have this thinking bias, try this thought experiment:
Experiment: Think of a highly successful person you admire. It can be anyone, from Oprah to someone you actually know.
What failures has this person experienced in areas where he or she is generally successful? Has a businessperson you admire made some bad investments? Has your favorite actor made a movie that lost money? Has your favorite musician had an album flop?
You may be able to think of examples and failures off the top of your head, or you may need to do some online research or read a biography of that person. Make sure the examples are relevant to the person’s core domain of success. A superstar chef opening a restaurant and failing is more relevant than an actor opening a restaurant and failing.
After you’ve done the thought experiment, ask yourself, “What’s an alternative thought that’s more realistic and less harsh than ‘Failure is just for losers’?”
Alternate option: Ask mentors (people you actually know) about examples of their failures. Ask them what they learned from the experiences. You could also ask your mentors for examples of failures that have happened to prominent people in your field. They might be more willing to volunteer this information than to talk about their own failures.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“On a positive note, if you can clearly see that you could cope with trying something and it not working out as you’d hoped, that’s very empowering for making the decision to try it.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Recognize the Harm of Not Acting

People who are intolerant of uncertainty tend to work very hard to avoid harm. In other words, they’ll jump through more hoops to avoid losing a dollar than to gain a dollar. You can work with your natural motivation if you begin to more carefully consider the harm of not acting. Naturally you may think of all the potential losses, costs, and risks of acting, but what about the costs, risks, and potential losses of not acting?”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Recognize the Value of Acting with Uncertainty

Anxiety and uncertainty don’t always mean you should stay stuck on pause. If you’re currently stuck in pause mode, and have been for a while, taking some action is usually better than taking no action. When you can recognize the value of acting with uncertainty, you’ll help your brain start to interpret uncertainty as a positive or not-so-terrible state, rather than it causing your alarm bells to ring loudly. The following is a thought experiment that’s aimed at helping you recognize the value of acting even when you don’t feel 100% sure of what the outcome will be or the exact best way to proceed.
Experiment: What are some circumstances in which acting with less than 100% certainty of success might be the best option? For example, submitting an application for a grant that will take four hours to prepare. You estimate the likelihood of obtaining the grant is only 10%, but it will be worth $5,000 if you’re successful. Or trying a $50-a-month service that multiple people you trust have recommended. Or spending $100 on paint and painting supplies to see if you like a new room color. You’ve been thinking for years that you want to break out of off-white. Try to come up with three examples of your own. If coming up with three examples is intimidating, come up with just one example. Remember: You can adapt these instructions to suit yourself.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Important: When you’re attempting to shift your thoughts, picking a new thought that you want to strengthen is essential. Think of changing a thought as like attempting to change a habit: When you change a habit, you don’t so much break a bad habit as build up and strengthen a new one. When you practice entertaining new thoughts, eventually those new thoughts will start to become more automatic. In situations that used to trigger your old thoughts, now the new thought will also be triggered.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“The tendency to predict that your actions will have negative outcomes is incredibly central to anxiety problems. If you can catch yourself when you’re making a negative prediction and entertain alternatives, you’ll likely ease a great deal of your anxiety. While there is a lot of information in this book, mastering this one simple principle will take you a very long way toward solving your anxiety issues. Pay close attention to this concept.
Whenever you’re feeling anxious, use this feeling as your cue to practice articulating your negative prediction and an alternative. Try prompting yourself to think of the best possible outcome, instead of just the worst. You don’t need to completely eliminate your fear; you just need to consider the different possibilities side by side, in an evenhanded way.
Experiment: For an action you’d like to take, try articulating both your feared negative outcome and an alternative possible outcome, just like the painting-the-walls example. If you practice this skill a lot, it will start to become a habit.

Feared outcome = __________________.
Alternative outcome = _______________.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Diversify Your Sources of Self-Esteem

Another way to increase your resiliency is to diversify your sources of self-esteem. Just like putting all your money in a single stock is risky, putting all your self-esteem eggs in one basket is psychologically risky. If your self-esteem is almost entirely based on your career achievements, having a flat stomach, or how hot your boyfriend or girlfriend is, you’ll be at more risk of coming unstuck psychologically if your career stalls, you gain weight, or your hot boyfriend or girlfriend dumps you. You’ll feel less anxious if your self-esteem isn’t too closely tied to just one or two domains.
Experiment: Self-esteem is composed of (1) a sense of self-worth and (2) a sense of being competent at things. For example, sources of self-worth might involve loving and being loved by others; an ability to make other people feel comfortable and at ease, or positive contributions you make to society, your field, or your community. In contrast, a sense of competency might come from being good at computer tasks, being able to prepare a dinner party for 10, or paying your bills on time. Try coming up with three sources of self-worth and three things you’re competent at. Aim to recognize areas you’ve tended to underappreciate.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Pursue Meaning, Not Happiness

Feeling happy is like feeling warm. It’s a state of being that feels good. It might sound counterintuitive but focusing directly on pursuing happiness isn’t always the best approach to increasing it. This parallels the idea that focusing on reducing anxiety isn’t always the best way to decrease it.
What’s an alternative to focusing on increasing your happiness? A better idea is focusing on pursuing things that feel meaningful. I’m not necessarily suggesting Mother Teresa-type activities. What gives you a sense of meaning could be anything from cooking for your friends to puttering away on projects in your garage.
Pursuing meaning rather than happiness helps you feel calmer when you’re not feeling happy in a particular moment. It smooths out the emotional bumps that come with mistakes, failures, and disappointments. There’s research showing that stress tends to be harmful only if you believe that it’s harmful and that you can’t cope with it. It’s easier to believe in your capacity to cope with stress if the stress is part of the bigger picture of building a meaningful life.
Experiment: What makes for a meaningful life from your perspective? Skip over what you think you should answer and identify what’s actually true for you.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Embrace Your Nature

As we discussed in the last chapter, how sensation seeking you are is biological and wired into your personality. If you have only a few goals, it could be that your preferences for novelty and intense experiences are on the lower end of the spectrum, not that you lack goals. If you’re constantly thinking of new goals, there’s nothing wrong with that either. It suggests you’re hardwired with a high need for novelty and excitement.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Experiment: Have you ever had the experience of achieving a goal or dream by putting yourself in the right place at the right time? Have you noticed that you expose yourself to less of these opportunities when you’re focused on your anxiety?”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Expose Yourself to Opportunity

Achieving personal dreams doesn’t always rise out of relentless pursuit of goals. Sometimes you achieve dreams simply by exposing yourself to life. If you’re restricting how much you’re living your life due to feelings of anxiety, you’ll miss out on unexpected opportunities to achieve your goals.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“Sometimes we set lower goals because we “fear success.” When people talk about fear of success, they’re talking about anticipatory anxiety related to what they predict success would bring. You can confront and problem-solve this fear, but first you need to identify what you’re actually anxious about.
Experiment: Are there goals that interest you, but anxiety is causing you to choose smaller targets than you might otherwise? Can you identify specifically what it is you’re worried about? For example, you might fear that success will mean drowning in your inbox and other increased social demands. Your worry might be that you won’t get the alone time you need to feel balanced. How could you problem-solve this fear? For example, what might you do to cope if greater success meant receiving a lot more email?
What larger targets would you set if you didn’t fear success?”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

“If you’ve got severe anxiety, it may have created a goals vacuum in your life. It may seem like your anxiety problems have been so all-consuming that you haven’t focused much on anything else. This is understandable. Since overcoming anxiety involves moving toward something, not just moving away from anxiety, it’ll involve rediscovering what your goals are. You need to uncover the goals that genuinely light your fire, where pursuing them is worth tolerating the anxiety that they create.”
― Alice Boyes, The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points