A worksheet that helps you link coping strategies with your anxiety level and symptoms.
Building your knowledge about your anxiety and how you cope can decrease the impact anxiety has on your life. What helps us when our anxiey is low may be less effective when we are experiencing high levels of anxiety. So knowing what is helpful at which level can increase our ability to make more effective decisions when our anxiety arises. This worksheet helps you to link your coping strategies with specific levels of your anxiety.
First, it is important to notice that your anxiety can have different intensity levels. For example, see if you can roughly gauge where your anxiety falls on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most intense and 0 being not present. What you experience at a level 8 of anxiety will be different than what you feel at a level 3 of anxiety. For each person this may be different. Try to be curious to see if you can notice some differences. Sometimes in the begining you may notice more when you are at the middle to higher end of anxiety. With more practice you will be able to recognize anxiety signs earlier, and be better able to pick up the more subtle signs.
Next, try to see which activities and responses help decrease the impact of the anxiety on what you are doing a little bit. Often times it is not just one activity, but several. It may be a behavior, a thought, and/or image. Experiment a little and be curious. Maybe you stumble on one by accident. Write in the strategies that work better with which symptoms and at what level of your anxiety.
Remember, the goal is not to get rid of the anxiety, but rather reduce feeling parallized by it. When you have experimented a little go ahead and start to fill out the form below. You can always adjust the form with more expereince and for different situations.