CHAPTER 10: Planning Ahead

“Life is like riding a bicycle, to keep your balance you must keep moving” — Einstein

We have now gone over the 3A Toolkit for managing anxiety or worry and we will now finish putting together your personal 3A Toolkit that highlights the strategies that are most helpful for you. You have already been considering what works for you by noticing your own experience of stress and anxiety (Awareness), you have learned to label this experience (Assign a Label), and have been practicing strategies from all four categories (Action) to manage your response to stress and anxiety. You have also learned that even when you are not able to manage the anxiety or stress in the moment, you can still learn a lot after the fact by going through the debrief. By continuing to practice working on the Awareness, Assign a Label, and Action components of the 3A Toolkit, you will develop the capacity to regulate your response to stress and anxiety.

Your Own 3A Toolkit

You now have all the pieces to assemble your own 3A Toolkit. Let’s first review the overall plan for shrinking worry:

Then let’s look at what a filled in 3A Toolkit might look like:

3A Toolkit

AWARENESS (Collecting information)

MINDFULNESS AWARENESS THINKING

“Is this thought helpful?”

BODY ACTIVATION

• What do you notice about your body?

• What is your level of activation?

TOP-DOWN ASSIGN A LABEL (Organizing information)

SELECT A FEELING LABEL FOR YOUR EXPERIENCE

“I feel ” ACTION (Responding to the Information)

HELPFUL THINKING

Messages of safety • “I can get through this” • “This feeling will pass” • “Thank you for trying ot help me Mr. Worry but I am safe”

Focus on helpful thoughts: • Capable • Things you can influence • Present moment

BODY CALMING Levels of activation 0-5 • Breathing • Figure 8 breathing • Tummy clench and release • Butterfly hug • Orienting • Grounding 5-10 • Exercise slow and deliberate • Movement • Finger pushups • Bilateral movement • Shaking

From reading through this workbook and practicing the strategies, you will have ideas of your own about what strategies will work for you. Here is a blank 3A Toolkit for you to complete with what will work best for you:

3A Toolkit

AWARENESS (Collecting information)

THINKING

TOP-DOWN ASSIGN A LABEL (Organizing information)

NAME IT TO TAME IT ACTION (Responding to the Information)

HELPFUL THINKING

BODY ACTIVATION BODY CALMING

Resilience

Learning to manage your responses to stress and anxiety will not happen right away. With practice, you really will be able to better regulate your responses to stress and anxiety and achieve better integration and wellness. Through managing your stress and anxiety, you are also building your resilience. Resilience is the ability to bounce back and recover more quickly from worry and other challenges.

To help explain this, consider a concept from neuroscience called the window of tolerance (Daniel Siegel, 2010). This is the range within which you feel like you can manage the challenges in your life, the ups and the downs. On either side of this window, you have hyperarousal (e.g., anger, anxiety, stress, frustration) and hypoarousal (e.g., sadness, depression, fatigue, numb, unmotivated). Anxiety, worry, and stress are on the hyperarousal side of the window. Every time your return from hyperarousal back to your window of tolerance (feeling regulated and calm), you widen your window and increase the range within which you can manage challenges. This is

resilience, the ability to recover from challenges. Over time, through following the 3A Toolkit framework, you will learn to manage stress and anxiety and build your resilience through widening your window of tolerance, which you do every time you shrink your worry using your 3A Toolkit.

Window of Tolerance

Hyperarousal

Optimal arousal (window of tolerance)

Hypoarousal

Increased sensations, emotionally reactive, hypervigilant, intrusive imagery/thoughts, disorganized thinking, anxiety, stress, anger

Chaos

Emotions are tolerable, attentive and able to learn Integrated Regulated

Relative absence of sensation, numbing of emotions, disabled thinking, reduced physical movement

Rigidity

Planning Ahead

Now you have a good understanding of stress and anxiety as well as your own 3A Toolkit for managing your responses for stress and anxiety. Consider how you can make time to practice the strategies that are working for you. Consider the time of day that works best for practice, reminders, and perhaps involving a supportive friend or family member to practice with you. Remember to use the debrief process to rewind any experiences of anxiety and stress that you want to manage differently, and consider the strategies you want to use next time.

What strategies will you practice most often and when?

On the next couple of pages, there is the sample 3A Toolkit to review the approach and a blank 3A Toolkit for you to complete for yourself. I am grateful to be able to share this approach with you and wish you all the best as you learn to manage your stress and anxiety.

What You Can and Cannot Influence

It is really helpful to note the difference between all the things you can influence and all the things you cannot. Putting energy, conscious or not, into factors that are outside of your influence can really drain your resources, which is not helpful for managing stress and anxiety well. You certainly may feel sadness, loss, anger and many other things about aspects of your life that are outside of your influence. Notice the feeling as it is already there, and treat yourself with kindness and compassion as you care for the feeling and yourself. And follow this up with shifting your energy and attention to aspects of your life that you are able to influence. Below is a simple diagram to help you explore some of the things in your life that you can influence and some that you cannot. A few examples are listed to get you started but you will want to add many more of your own.

What other people think What other people do What other people say Past mistakes Weather Height

My response to stress and anxiety Healthy habits Being kind Working hard Asking for help

Healthy Habits

Being healthy involves keeping a balance between aspects that are important to healthy functioning bodies and brains. The following are examples of areas of your life to try and balance in order to be healthy, in addition to the healthy habits you have already learned with respect to your foundation of mental health and about thinking, body calming, relationships, emotion, and memory. Consider how you are doing in each of these areas and whether you can make any small changes to move you in a positive direction (note: adapted from The Yes Brain by Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Brysen).

Sleep

We need adequate and regular sleep in order for our brains and bodies to recover and have enough resources to deal with challenges. Sleep also helps us consolidate learning.

Exercise

We need exercise for both our physical and mental health. Consider your exercise habits and what kind of exercise helps you to feel better.

Social

We are social creatures and benefit from quality interactions with other people, in person if possible. This helps us feel supported and resourced in order to tackle the challenges of our day.

Play

At all ages, we benefit from being creative and trying new things. Consider what you really enjoy doing and how you can create time in your life for fun and enjoyment.

Rest and relaxation

We need time to be idle with no particular purpose some of the time. This can help our brain recharge, especially our thinking brain.

Goals

All of us have things we need to do related to school, work, and running our lives. Tackling goals and challenge help us feel capable and accomplished.

Nature

Spending time outside and if possible, in nature, helps keep our brains and bodies healthy.

Reflection, Contemplation, Integration

Time to reflect on, contemplate, and integrate your experiences and ideas. You need time to make sense of things and decide what they mean for you and your life.

The Nature of Change

“There is nothing permanent except change” —Heraclitus

As part of planning ahead, it is helpful to contemplate change itself. Learning to manage and shrink your anxiety involves considerable change. It involves changing your behaviour from avoidance to approach, it involves changing to more helpful thinking, it involves changing how your relate to yourself and possibly others, it involves changing how your body responds to stress and anxiety, and it involves changing how your relate to your own feelings and memories. Most of all, it involves changing how you relate to anxiety itself.

In a way, you have been practicing being anxious for a long time, although not on purpose. To quote neuropsychologist Donald Hebb “neurons that fire together wire together” (1949). What this means is that you have strong neural pathways that support your anxious response. To develop new neural pathways will take time and lots of practice, but it is definitely possible according to research on neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change and adapt throughout our life. This is excellent news for you as you learn a new way of relating to your anxiety and a new way of responding more intentionally, instead of automatically reacting, to stress.

Consider your experience and history with change, from small changes, such as going to bed earlier, to large changes, such as education or career shifts. Be curious about what assumptions and expectations about change you hold from your past successes and challenges with change. Consider what assumptions and expectations you might have about learning to manage your anxiety. These assumptions and expectations really are a kind of thinking that operates beneath our awareness but can really influence you. Just as you have learned to do with thinking related to anxiety, ask yourself “is this helpful?”. You may have assumptions and expectations about change that don’t serve you well. Once you notice these, consider if you can challenge them and perhaps replace them with new expectations for learning to manage anxiety.

Finally, your progress will not be in a straight line. Learning to manage and shrink anxiety and worry takes time, energy, and a lot of practice. You will be better at this some days than others, there will be ups and downs along the way. When you hit a bump in the road, remember all the positive steps and progress you have made, and reflect on all the pieces of your strong and stable foundation from chapter 2. Most of all, I am really proud of how hard you have worked to get this far. Thank you for letting me join you on this path towards managing your anxiety.