When Do You Experience Anxiety?

Once you have completed exercise 1.1, you have accomplished the first step in treating your anxiety: understanding what anxiety and fear feel like for you. The next step is to increase your awareness of when anxiety tends to occur for you. You can do this through something called self-­monitoring. As the name implies, we want you to monitor your experiences throughout each day. This exercise can provide you with some very important information.

Thoughts and feelings don’t occur randomly (even though it may sometimes feel as if they do). Your internal experiences generally follow a set pattern, kind of like a habit. Therefore, by monitoring your internal experiences, you can start to understand the types of situations that generally bring on anxiety, as well as the times of day when you might be most vulnerable to experiencing anxiety. For example, if you find, through self-­monitoring, that you tend to experience more intense anxiety in the morning, you can use this information to make sure you shore up your defenses during that time. You may schedule time in the mornings to practice certain skills that we’ll discuss in this book, or you may schedule your morning to make sure that you don’t have too much on your plate around that time.

Exercise 1.2 provides you with a basic self-­monitoring form. It would be a good idea to make copies of this form so that you have a form for each day of the week. It is best to begin by monitoring your feelings and noting the times they came up for at least one week so that you can get as much information as possible. In the first column, write down the date; in the second, the time of day. Next, identify the situation you were in when the anxiety occurred. For example, were you at work, out with friends, driving your car, or at home alone? Next, rate the intensity of your anxiety on a scale from 0 to 100, with 0 being no or very low intensity and 100 being the most anxious you have ever been. Finally, rate your urge to avoid the anxiety or escape the situation you were in, using a scale from 0 (no urge to avoid) to 100 (strongest urge to avoid you have ever experienced), and indicate whether or not you did something to avoid or escape the anxiety.

Exercise 1.2 Anxiety Self-Monitoring Form

Keep this monitoring form with you throughout your day, and fill it out whenever you notice anxiety coming on. Filling it out as soon as you can after you have experienced anxiety will provide the best information, because the experience will be fresh in your mind. Of course, it is also important to keep in mind that monitoring your anxiety can itself be an anxiety-­provoking experience. We’re asking you to bring your attention to something that you might not always want to attend to, and the simple act of bringing attention to something unpleasant or uncomfortable can make it feel a little more intense. Now, this is very natural but, in the end, may actually help reduce your anxiety. However, we want you to be aware of this going into the exercise so that you won’t be surprised if your anxiety feels a little more intense than usual. We also hope that this will not keep you from completing the exercise, as it is a really important step in learning to manage anxiety. Indeed, by increasing your awareness of the pattern of your anxiety, you may start to identify cues for your anxiety that you weren’t aware of before. And the good news is that simply knowing more about the types of things that cue your anxiety or cause you to feel anxious can make your anxiety feel less unpredictable and, as a result, far less overwhelming.