31 days with our anxiety

write down and visualize the 4 steps

One of the most helpful things that we can do for our anxiety is to write down and visualize our four steps.

In my therapy office I will do this for clients on my whiteboard and often on big sticky notes that I roll up and send them home with. I encourage them to hang those up in their closet so they can see it daily and practice it daily.

One thing I’ve learned over the years by doing this practice is that it externalizes my anxiety away from me — in essence, I am not anxiety. It’s not my identity. Rather it is something I do. I can stand back and look at the steps and simply notice that at times in my life I fall into these patterns. This is a powerful move.

But by writing steps down and practicing them over and over again, I learn to increase my awareness of my patterns, and position myself to intervene in the moment to calm my anxiety. And the more I do this, the more I lay down new neural pathways that increase my opportunities to successfully navigate the healing of my anxiety.

Here are the 4 steps I walk through multiple times a day.

“Neurobiologists tell us that it takes two things to unlock and open up a neural pathway. The first is that the implicit must be made explicit. Sometimes you need help seeing what you don’t see. But you must be open to the feedback. Second, there must be some sort of recoil, a sense of discrepancy, of ‘Oh no, I’m not sure I really want to keep doing that.’

…according to current research, about five hours to take in new learning and begin to forge a new neural pathway…” | US: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship, by Terrence Real, pp. 24.