How a planner can help you to better manage anxiety
Keep track of your anxiety by monitoring your mood and sticking with healthy habits. Here we outline how the humble planner can help you to achieve your goals when it comes to anxiety.
How a planner can help you to manage anxiety
By Joyce Chong
Anxiety is part of life. It keeps you safe from danger - think of anxiety as your body’s alarm that is designed to protect you from threats in your environment. At times, your alarm may be overactive. This can be experienced in response to stressful events (job stress, global pandemic, relationship breakdown, cumulation of daily hassles), or reflect a longer-standing anxiety disorder (such as social anxiety disorder, panic disorder; learn more about when anxiety tips into an anxiety disorder here).
We’ve worked with many individuals over the years to build skills to manage anxiety better - skills such as tuning in to triggers and early warning signs for anxiety, learning relaxation and mindfulness skills, shifting thoughts that contribute to anxiety, and gradually facing triggers for anxiety that they have previously avoided.
As with most things, sustaining the skills to manage anxiety in the longer term takes regular practice, and can easily get lost amidst the busyness of everyday life. So how can you ensure those anxiety management skills stay with you for years to come?
Enter the humble planner…rather than just serving as a To Do list, a planner can help with setting anxiety-related goals, keeping anxiety management skills on your radar, and track your levels of anxiety (and related concepts) so you can better understand and manage anxiety. Below we’ll show you how to use a planner to better manage your anxiety - we’ve used our Productive Life Planner which has specific sections for projects (or goals) and managing your wellbeing, but feel free to use any planner that will suit your needs.
TIPS TO BETTER MANAGE ANXIETY USING A PLANNER
Below we outline some tips for using a planner to help you better manage anxiety. These are based on our work over the years with the many individuals we’ve helped to make sustainable changes when it comes to anxiety, where we’ve seen what helps and hinders longer-term shifts in anxiety. These tips are by no means exhaustive, but will give you a good starting point. Let’s see how using a planner can help Heni.
Heni is a new graduate who has been experiencing anxiety for the past year. She has just commenced her first ‘major’ role in a high pressure environment, and is taking on challenges that she has not yet encountered. Heni is acutely aware of the need to look after her anxiety so that she can perform in her role and avoid burnout. She also recognises that she is prone to worrying about negative appraisals, which then feeds into her confidence levels and her anxiety.
1.Set goals for managing anxiety
Think of what goals you’d like to achieve when it comes to better managing your anxiety. Is it that you have an upcoming social function when the idea of making small talk with strangers causes you significant anxiety? Is it that you live in a house that has spiders when you have a spider phobia? Or is it that you want to be able to better manage your panic symptoms?
Whatever your goal is, use your planner to break down the larger, overarching goal, into smaller components that are less anxiety-provoking and move you gradually towards your overarching goal.
Heni has been tasked with the project of giving a conference presentation in April on behalf of her workplace. This is a trigger for increased anxiety for Heni - not only is it the first presentation she is giving on behalf of an organisation with high standards, she also suffers from public speaking anxiety.
To help reduce her anxiety, Heni decides to break this larger and more overwhelming task into smaller and more manageable actions using SMART goal-setting:
First, she reaches out to her colleague Will and buys him lunch to seek advice on designing her presentation. She also sets time frames to ensure she stays on track with this project.
Second, she decides to sign up to do a public speaking anxiety course, and looks at linking in a friend so she can practice her speech before the day.
2. Keep healthy habits on your radar.
There are many healthy habits you can adopt that support your anxiety and wellbeing. For example:
Habits for physical health include getting sufficient sleep, exercise, and nutrition.
Habits for psychological wellbeing include practising relaxation, journalling, and many of the psychological skills learned in therapy (e.g. exposure, controlled breathing, cognitive restructuring, mindfulness).
It’s easy for these habits to fall off your radar, so by using a planner as reminders to engage with the habit, you’re increasing your chances of looking after your anxiety.
Heni believes that there are a few things that are particularly helpful when it comes to managing her anxiety. She finds exercise and sleep to be vital for her to stay calmer. She also knows that journalling and reflecting on events of the day on a regular basis make a difference to her anxiety. Keeping these healthy habits on her radar using a daily planner helps her to stay on track.
3. Track stuff.
We’re talking all sorts of stuff to do with anxiety, including:
Physical and psychological habits that help you manage your anxiety.
Emotions such as anxiety, stress, overwhelm, and any other related concepts (e.g. level of social confidence when it comes to social anxiety, severity of worry in generalised anxiety disorder).
We especially love being able to track anxiety over weeks, months, and even a year, as tracking helps identify what particular triggers and patterns there may be to your anxiety (see the next point!).
Heni finds that tracking a combination of her moods (anxiety, overwhelm) and confidence level, as well as her energy and motivation, help her to see her progress with managing anxiety. She can also take this information in to her sessions with her psychologist and they can dissect the information together and set new goals.
4. Reflect
Once you have tracked emotions and habits related to your anxiety, use this data to help you reflect and learn more about:
What triggers your anxiety (e.g. prolonged weeks of tight deadlines, certain emotional stressors, or even a lack of exercise)
Which habits make a meaningful difference to your anxiety (do more of these!) and which habits may have less of an impact.
What helps you stick to your helpful habits and what reduces your ability to stay on track (e.g. busyness at work, burnout, late nights).
After consistently tracking her anxiety, Heni takes the information in to her session with her psychologist. They reflect on the patterns together, and identify that comparing herself to others and facing social situations more generally are triggers for increased anxiety. Using this information, they incorporate a few additional exercises in this area to help Heni better cope with such situations.
All of the above tips are designed to help you understand your anxiety better, and to help you stay on top of managing your anxiety. Using something as simple as a planner can really make a difference to how you understand and look after your anxiety.
If you’d like more tailored support to help stay on track with your anxiety, why not contact us and book in with one of our psychologists?
How a planner can help you stay on track with your studies
Between studies, assignments, paid work, volunteer work, sporting commitments, social life… is it any wonder things that student life can feel overwhelming? Here’s how to use your a study planner to organise yourself.
3 simple tips to organise your student life using a planner
By Joyce Chong
Student life can be pretty hectic. Sure, studying may be the main focus of student life, however there’s so much more going on including assignments, labs and projects; preparing for tests; volunteering/extra-curricular activities; paid work; family commitments; social commitments; and placements / practicums. When your commitments are that varied it’s also important to look after your physical health and psychological wellbeing so you can make it through the academic year!
With so much on your plate, it’s too easy to drop the ball, forget things, or even feel just overwhelmed. Importantly, this is not a sign of failure to thrive and adapt, just a sign that you might need a system to help you better juggle all of your commitments.
So today, we’re going to lift the lid on three simple tips for using a planner to organise your student life. You can use any planner (you might have a student planner lying around) though we’ve used our Productive Life Planner which has specific sections for projects (or goals) and managing your wellbeing. Let’s deep dive into how a planner can help.
TIPS TO ORGANISE YOUR STUDENT LIFE USING A PLANNER
Below we 3 tips for using a planner to help organise your student life that you can action today. These will give you a good starting point. Let’s see how using a planner can help Ali (whom you may recall from Planet Burnout).
Ali is a conscientious student, who spends every waking moment studying. However, the pressure he places on himself leads him to feel overwhelmed and he procrastinates as a result. Predictably, burnout creeps in at the end of semester and Ali barely has enough fuel in the tank to get through exams. He often feels like a failure.
Tip #1. Set UP A STUDY PLAN, GOOD HABITS, + HELPFUL ROUTINES
Groundwork is everything when it comes to succeeding, and as part of this try setting up a study plan with these questions:
What deadlines do you have for assignments? Work backwards from this point, breaking down all of the steps involved in completing and submitting these assignments. Add these to your planner.
What plan do you have for studying for the final exams? Break down your topics and schedule time to regularly summarise, review, and test yourself throughout the semester (don’t leave it up to cram in the study break just before exams!).
What habits support your studies? We’re talking physical and psychological habits that help you stay focused and on track with studies. It could be exercising, journaling, meditating, catching up with friends. All of these take time, so be sure to include them in your schedule so you can see your commitments over the days/weeks/months.
Once you see everything that is on your plate it becomes easier to set boundaries with yourself based on the available time that you have for that ‘quick coffee’ or ‘social media break’.
Ali, whilst prioritising his studies, has not taken into account the importance of physical and psychological habits that help him stay on track. He endeavours that this semester will be different, and aims to include exercise and self-care for sustainability in his studies. He could start off by:
Given Ali has a tendency to spend any available time studying, it will be best to first schedule in self-care activities. Thus he (i) Blocks out 3 x 30min blocks each week in his planner for exercise; (ii) Sets aside 30 minutes at the end of the day before sleep to wind down, practice mindfulness and journal (iii) Each fortnight he also prioritises his appointments with his psychologist to work through his perfectionism; and (iv) On alternate fortnights he sees friends.
With the remainder of his time he is able to devote it to his studies, and maps out upcoming assignments, tests, and exams.
Tip #2. TRACK THE THINGS THAT HELP YOU STAY ON TRACK WITH YOUR STUDIES.
Why should you track? Because tracking allows you to identify patterns in your study techniques and how you manage your physical and psychological health. We’re looking for patterns such as:
Studying for certain topics are easier at certain times of the day.
Being more likely to succeed with exercise habits when a friend is involved for accountability than when left to exercise on your own.
A few days consecutive days of feeling stressed primes you to experience heightened anxiety and panic symptoms.
Having all of this data allows you to make powerful decisions when it comes to making changes that work (see the next section!), thus enabling you to be more efficient.
Since Ali has a tendency to focus exclusively on studying (leading to burnout), a priority for him would be tracking how well he sticks to habits that benefit his physical health and psychological wellbeing (see example below in pink). He also uses a daily planner to track his schedule for the day, outline his Top 3 Priorities for the day, and other tasks on his To Do list.
Tip #3. Review how you’re going + make changes to re-ALIGN.
When planning doesn’t go according to plan, don’t give up! All of that information you’ve tracked gives you insight into how to make changes to realign and stay on track with your studies.
Maybe you tried to study a challenging topic at a time when you were most tired, and would be more likely to grasp the content if you studied it at a time when you were more alert;
Maybe what you’d planned to take on for exercising took far too much effort and coordination (e.g. stand up paddleboarding) and instead it would help to choose a more flexible and portable option (e.g. walking); or
Maybe you were underestimated how long tasks took, which led to feeling overwhelmed at your progress, in which case adjust your time frames to be more realistic when setting your schedule.
Maybe planning doesn’t come naturally until you schedule in some regular time each week/day to engage in it.
The point is - don’t give up. All setbacks provide insight into why something didn’t work.
Having tracked his student life for a good month, Ali looks back on the data he has collected and identifies that he is likely to fall behind with his wellbeing habits when there is little accountability. Thus, he decides to exercise with a friend, and sets up a reward system for himself.
Looking over what Ali tracked for his productivity and performance, he recognises that he underestimates how long things take (e.g. summarising a chapter) which can easily lead to feeling demotivated and thus procrastination when time frames blow out. As a result, Ali ends up allowing more time for each task.
Following these adjustments, Ali reviews again after another fortnight and sees there have been some improvements. It also reveals some additional changes that he can make regarding how he organises his student life.
These 3 simple tips are a good starting point to help you organise your studies using a planner. Importantly, it takes time to get into a rhythm and pattern that suits your student life, so don’t feel discouraged if it takes several iterations to find a flow that suits you.
And if you’re interested in learning how to improving study skills, why not check out Nimble Noodle, our online study skills program?
You can also book in with one of our psychologists for a more tailored approach to organising your student life.
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