Dealing With Worry

This year has been difficult for me for reasons that deserve a post of it’s own. This has led me down a path of occasional sub-optimal performance in my job, and personal life too. It has taken me some time to get my act together; and work out how to deal with stress and worry-some situations. Meditation, reading, close people and honest conversations with my internal being/ self has helped me develop an always evolving WIP framework for dealing with situations which make me feel anxious and/ or overwhelmed. Below I outline this framework for dealing with worry-some situations:

1. Describe your feelings. Articulate what you feel, not what you think. A big help for this has been referencing the feelings wheel to help me articulate how I feel, and if necessary, how to communicate these feelings(using NVC) to myself, and if necessary, other people in a way that articulates my needs clearly.
2. Get the facts in an impartial way. Writing down these facts is an important step, since it makes something that seems abstract more concrete.
3. Analyse the aforementioned facts. Some useful questions I use are: Given these facts, what’s the worst that could happen? How do I feel about this? Again, use the feelings wheel to help with this.
4. Finally, make a decision based off these facts. Act on your decision. Do something about it!

These steps have really helped me deal with anxiety-inducing situations in a much more productive way. I write this, primarily for myself to reference later, and hopefully help some random person out there.