CHAPTER 2: Your Foundation

“I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence, but it comes from within. It is there all the time.” — Anna Freud

I am excited to teach you how to manage and shrink your anxiety. I know how hard it is to have to deal with worry and how much it can cause distress and interfere with your life. Facing your worry takes courage and building your own 3A Toolkit to manage it takes a lot of energy. Like any strong and stable building, you really need a solid foundation to be able to do this. In this chapter, we will go over some important pieces that will form your foundation that will keep you steady as you face your anxiety and learn a new way of managing it.

Think of your foundation as your overall mental health and wellbeing. Mental health and wellbeing is something we all have in varying amounts all the time, in the same way we have physical health to varying degrees. Mental health and wellbeing can fluctuate over time and is separate from dealing with the anxiety. If you have a strong foundation, or flourishing mental health and wellbeing, you are better able to manage your anxiety. These components of your foundation may not directly address your anxiety, but they are related. In other words, the stronger your mental health foundation is, the better equipped you will be to address your anxiety.

Supportive People

I really want you to have people to help you and support you as you continue to work on managing your worry. When you are struggling with worry, I encourage you to ask for help from a supportive adult in your life or a helping professional such as a counsellor or psychologist. Think about the important people in your life, family members and friends, who are there to help you. Worry can be really isolating, sometimes leaving you feeling like you are on your own. It really helps to have support, to know that there are people in your corner. Perhaps even invite the important people in your life to help you work through this workbook and join you in reading this workbook and working on some of the strategies with you.

Consider who are the supportive people in your life. Perhaps write their names in the space below, consider what you appreciate about them, and how you want them to support you. For example, you may want to just tell them about this workbook that you’re reading, you may want to spend more time with them, or you may tell them about some of your goals regarding practicing some of the strategies in the workbook to help you be accountable. Who you look to for support and how you want them to support you is your choice, just know that these connections with the important people in our lives are really important.

Supportive People What Do You Appreciate About Them? How Would You Like them to Support You?

Character Strengths

A strength is more than something you’re good at, it is a quality about you that you consistently demonstrate and shapes what you do well and how you interact with the world. It is a bit like a ‘truth’ for you, kind of like an anchor. Below are the most commonly named character strengths from research in this area (see www.viacharacter.org for more information). You can choose other strengths if you don’t think these are the best fit for you, but these 24 character strengths give you a good place to start.

wisdom

Creativity Curiosity Judgment

Love of Learning

Perspective

courage

Bravery Perseverance Honesty Zest

humanity

Love Kindness SocialIntelligence

transcendence

Appreciation of Beauty Gratitude Hope Humour Spirituality

justice

Teamwork Fairness Leadership

moderation

Forgiveness Humility Prudence Self-Regulation

Choose at least five character strengths that you think apply to you to start with, and consider how each of them helps you. Be as specific as you can. For example, the strength of curiosity keeps you looking for new learning and encourages you to keep an open mind to new experiences. This quality might have helped you asked questions at work even though you were uncomfortable doing this. Curiosity is a very helpful strength for learning about the 3A Toolkit for managing anxiety!

Strength How this strength helps you….

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

As we continue to learn about the 3A Toolkit and get better at shrinking worry, remember that these strengths are always here to help you!

Positive Emotion

Increasing how much positive emotion you experience is beneficial for flourishing, wellbeing, and healthy coping. It can also benefit physical health. Awareness of the benefits of growing the positive aspects of our emotional landscape has really grown in recent years and often falls within the positive psychology research arena. Positive emotion is also thought to help us to recover from challenges easier and be able to face adversity.

Paying attention to negative emotion also provides us with important information. Negative emotion can alert us that something is wrong and are essential for our survival. This whole workbook addresses anxiety, which is considered by most people to be a negative emotion and is certainly relevant for survival. The point of attending to and growing positive emotion is not to ignore the negative, rather to grow the positive. We can often miss positive emotion if we are too busy paying attention to the negative. It takes considerable effort to notice the positive.

It is often suggested that we benefit when we experience about three times as many positive emotions to negative. In Chapter 9: Strategies to Manage Memory & Emotion, we will further explore how to grow positive emotion. For now, consider how much positive emotion you experience relative to negative emotion and recognize what contributes to feeling more positive for you. Below are some examples of positive and negative emotion.

Positive Emotion

Joy Gratitude Serenity Curiosity Interest Hope Awe Amusement Inspiration Love Satisfaction Relief Altruism Contentment Enjoyment Optimism Happy

Negative Emotion

Anger Annoyance Sadness Guilt Fear and anxiety Discouragement Despair Apathy Shame Disappointment Frustration Hopelessness Grief Bored Insecure Shattered Unhappy

Most importantly, positive emotions open our minds, broaden and expand our awareness, and grow our resources.

Mindful Awareness

Another component of your mental health foundation is Mindfulness, the process of bringing your attention and awareness to your present moment experience without judgment (Williams et al., 2007). Examples of mindfulness practice include breath awareness and body scan. One of the ways mindfulness works is by creating space between a person and their thoughts and feelings. This can make the difference between being ‘hooked’ by a negative thought or feeling and being swept away by it, versus being able to tolerate it.

Mindful awareness will be important for all three phases of the 3A Toolkit. Mindfulness is also linked to improved neural integration, benefits to physical and mental health, and reductions in anxiety, among other positive results. There are many Apps available that support a regular mindfulness practice. If you are not ready for long mindfulness practices, even a few minutes can be beneficial. A great place to start is the three minute breathing space (Williams et al., 2007) (https://www.mindful.org/the-three-minute-breathing-space-practice/ ). Like other strategies and practices, mindfulness takes practice. I suggest practicing daily if possible.

Values and Beliefs

While character strengths address an important quality about you as a person, values and beliefs are important ideals you hold about the world around you or how you interact with the world. For example, you might value being adventurous and honest and believe that everyone should be treated fairly.

Anxiety can lead to changes in the way you act and interact with the world around you. Sometimes this can be challenging as anxiety will get in the way of you doing what you really want to. Consider what is most important to you, what you value and believe. Anxiety will often cross paths with key values and beliefs and it will start to feel like anxiety is making the choices for you. For example, if you value trying new things and being adventurous, anxiety may get in the way of living according to that value as the negative sensations and experience of anxiety override the desire to try new things.

Consider what is important to you, what do you value and believe?

How does your anxiety get in the way of living your life according to these values?

Now that you can see how much better it will be when worry or anxiety is no longer making choices for you, and you are able to be more consistent with what you value and believe, let’s have a look at the plan for learning to manage and shrink your worry.

As we move through the rest of the workbook and you start to build your 3A Toolkit, remember all the pieces of your foundation that will help you stay steady and strong as you do this challenging work.