Is ongoing anxiety affecting your life?

We all go through stressful times but some people experience anxiety on a regular basis. If you worry about the worst that could happen, overthink before taking action, are self-critical and feel that everything has to be ‘perfect’, then you’re probably suffering from some degree of anxiety. The feeling of having ‘too much on your plate’ feeds those worries and while it’s impossible to reduce our worries – or our to-do list – to zero, you can learn to manage both. Here’s a useful strategy for doing just that – one of many featured in The Anxiety Toolkit by Dr Alice Boyes.

Manage Your Willpower, Not Your Time

If you are an anxious perfectionists you probably run your mental fuel tanks to empty, rather than keeping a little in reserve. Typically this is because you’ve run out of willpower rather than out of time. If this resonates with you, think of willpower as being like computer RAM. RAM is the type of memory that your computer uses for running your programs and apps rather than the kind it uses to store your photos and documents. When you’re running too many programs or apps at the same time, your system freezes.

You need to make sure you always have a reserve of willpower available for quick decision- making and controlling your reactions because if you run your willpower tank too low, you’ll end up making poor choices or exploding at people. The following are some ways of making more willpower available to you:

• Reduce the number of tasks you attempt to get done each day to a very small number. Always identify what your most important task is, and make sure you get that single task done. You can group together your trivial tasks, like replying to emails or paying bills online, and count those as just one item.
• Refresh your available willpower by doing tasks slowly. My friend Toni Bernhard, author of How to Wake Up: A Buddhist- Inspired Guide to Navigating Joy and Sorrow, recommends doing a task 25 per cent slower than your usual speed. I’m not saying you need to do this all the time, just when you feel scattered or overwhelmed. Slowing down in this way is considered a form of mindfulness practice.
• Another way to refresh your willpower is by taking some slow breaths or doing some mindfulness practices. Think of using mindfulness as running a cleanup on background processes that haven’t shut down correctly. By using mindfulness to do a cognitive cleanup, you’re not leaking mental energy to background worries and rumination
• Reduce decision making. For many people, especially those in management positions or raising kids, life involves constant decision making. Decision making leeches willpower.
• Find whatever ways you can to reduce decision making without it feeling like a sacrifice. Set up routines (like which meals you cook on particular nights of the week) that prevent you from needing to make the same decisions over and over. Alternatively, outsource decision making to someone else whenever possible. Let other people make decisions to take them off your plate.
• Reduce excess sensory stimulation. For example, close the door or put on some dorky giant headphones to block out noise. This will mean your mental processing power isn’t getting used up by having to filter out excess stimulation. This tip is especially important if you are a highly sensitive person.