New Years Resolutions That Help My Anxiety
How Goal Setting Helps My Anxiety
Goal setting is my absolute favorite. Now before you call me a nerd, hear me out. As someone with anxiety, productivity and personal growth make me feel in control, which ultimately keeps me calm. My anxiety is majorly focused on control—or a lack thereof— and at the end of the day, I can’t control everything. It’s incredibly irritating.
Over the years, I’ve found that goal-setting is a way to feel in control as life moves around me. My goals help me stay focused on the positive and hold gratitude for everything that I am accomplishing, rather than obsessing about something I don’t have. Le grass is not always greener, my friends. If my therapist is reading this, virtual high five for progress!
Goals that Have Helped my Anxiety
In the spirit of the New Year, below are a list of goals that have helped with my anxiety and served as positive wellness accomplishments:
Learning How to Say “No” (without guilt)
This is a big one and was very challenging for me. I want to be everything to everyone. Because of this, it’s hard for me to turn down social, personal, or professional requests out of fear of letting people down. Now, I’m not saying I’ve turned into an asshole. But I’ve learned to politely tell people “no” when something isn’t the right fit for me. And I have ultimately learned to feel confident in that decision. If an explanation is required (don’t feel like you have to give one!), honesty is the best policy in my book.
Self Care is #1
I’ve learned to listen to my body and give it what it needs, instead of pushing it or ignoring signs of anxiety. If I am feeling run down, I pump the breaks in every way so that I can fully recover. Rather than running myself into the ground. I’ve also come up with a pretty rad self care regimen that includes working out, baths, massages, and an ample amount of sleep. If I don’t take care of myself, my anxiety shows up in a big way. And I cannot show up fully for others.
Be Gentle on Myself
I can be a perfectionist. It’s a strength, but it can also be quite the weakness. There are a lot of aspects of anxiety that are out of my control and when it gets bad, I tend to analyze every single thing I did wrong to get to that point. But guess what? That shit doesn’t help. Shocking! What does help is being gentle with myself and acknowledging what is happening, but not casting any judgement on it while I move through it.
Practice Gratitude
This one has become so important to me that a full blog post will be coming on this later. Every night before I go to bed, I review my day and write down ten things that happened that I’m grateful for. Since I do this every day, I have to get really granular -- and on the days where I don’t do shit, I’m thankful for the pizza I ordered and the roof over my head. This level of positivity helps my anxiety greatly, and if I fall out of practice (which definitely happens), boy do I know it. Here is a journal that I like to use.
Proactive Practice
This one is hard, because being reactive to your body is just so much easier. Life gets busy, and sometimes I forget. But, I try my hardest to proactively practice all things that keep my anxiety at rest: schedule regular therapy appointments, consistently workout, and meditate for five minutes every night, to name a few. I’d rather be ahead of the game than behind!
Easy Guide to Goal Setting
Sometimes it’s hard for me to get motivated and get the ideas flowing, so I’ve created a template that helps me jumpstart this activity. The first page is where I put my goals, the second is how I’m going to achieve them, and the third is a mid-year check in on my progress to hold myself accountable. I’ve included it below, in case you want to use it too!
365 days later, I pull out my trusty notes and review everything that I accomplished that year. Frankly, it makes me feel kind of like a badass. Resolutions = 1, Anxiety = 0.