R. Scott Gornto

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7 Steps to Control Your Anxiety

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In Chapter 11 of The Stories We Tell Ourselves, I share these seven steps to control your anxiety:

1. Notice your body and emotions (a.k.a. self-awareness).

2. Breathe deeply.

3. Control what you can control.

4. Surrender to what you can’t control.

5. Talk to yourself in a positive manner.

6. Do something life-giving in the moment.

7. Repeat all of the above if necessary.

If you suffer from bouts of anxiety on a regular basis, I encourage you to copy this list onto a small piece of paper, or save it on your phone, and carry it with you. The next time you find yourself succumbing to anxious thoughts, getting frustrated by life’s circumstances, or losing your cool because of a relationship in conflict, pull this list out, read it, and follow it.

Some of the steps are straightforward. Others need a little clarification.

When I say, “Control what you can control,” that essentially means control yourself. Take responsibility for what you can in the moment: your reactions, your emotions, your ability to enact healthy change in any situation.

For me, “Surrender to what you can’t control” encourages me to say, out loud, all the things about a situation that are outside of my control. When I say them, I release them from my mind and find myself less anxious about them. After all, what can I really do about those issues?

Lastly, “Do something life-giving” means doing almost anything that energizes you. Listen to music. Pray. Vent to a trusted friend. Used in moderation, these healthy coping mechanisms can bring your anxiety down.

And if that doesn’t work, start at the top of the list again. 

By daily practicing the suggestions on this list, you should be able to decrease your anxiety levels on a consistent basis.

Do You Accept Life the Way That It Is?

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In Chapter 11 of The Stories We Tell Ourselves, I wrote, “Anxiety is a refusal to accept life the way that it is rather than the way we want it to be.”

Do you agree with that statement?

Think of a recent event where your anxiety noticeably increased. 

Maybe your boss has scheduled an unexpected meeting with you for next week. 

Maybe your child got injured. 

Maybe you had an argument with your spouse.

These are all situations where it’s normal for anxiety to rise, but you don’t have to allow that anxiety to keep increasing by refusing to deal with reality.

More often than any of us would care to admit, we allow our minds to run away with reality. We make up stories to fit how we want situations or relationships to work out in our favor. But when reality clashes with our fantasies, anxiety rises. Frustration mounts. The need to control others increases (because we want them to do what we thought they should do).

But all of this is mental posturing to comfort ourselves before, during, or after a difficult circumstance. We want to make sense of the world and make ourselves feel better about it at the same time, so we concoct stories that are often quite incongruent with the truth—stories that place ourselves in the best possible light with the best possible outcome … for ourselves. 

When those stories don’t become our reality, anxiety increases.

So, the simple answer to decreasing your anxiety is to stop telling yourself such stories and face reality.

But we’re all such incredible storytellers that it’s never that easy. 

In fact, it takes daily practice to learn how to accept life the way that it is, which I’ll discuss in next week’s posts.

The #1 Reason You Get Frustrated

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“I’m just . . . I don’t know. Frustrated.”

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard that expressed by my clients. That word—frustrated—reveals to me that they don’t know the real problem behind their problems. 

They’re frustrated because they want to see the circumstance or relationship change for the better but they don’t know how to make that happen. 

In The Stories We Tell Ourselves, I included sadness and helplessness in my definition of frustration. There’s a certain resignation to stagnation when someone admits to being frustrated. They don’t know what next steps to take.

More often than not, the real problem behind such frustration (which is usually centered on someone else, i.e. the perceived source of the problem) is the frustrated person sitting in front of me.

They’re frustrated because they can’t control the situation.

They’re frustrated because they can’t control the other person.

They’re frustrated because what they thought would (or should) happen didn’t happen.

Our desire to control others runs deep, even when we don’t think that’s what we’re trying to do. So when other people refuse to play the part that we’ve already assigned to them in the stories we’ve mentally made up, we get … frustrated.

We feel helpless that they won’t cooperate with our desires.

We feel sad that they, apparently, don’t want to rectify the situation.

We feel frustrated that we can’t change what’s happening by ourselves.

Ultimately, we’re frustrated by the fact that we can’t actually control other people. After all, wouldn’t that make our relationships so much easier?

Yet a relationship of that kind wouldn’t be a authentic relationship; it’d be one person controlling the other. 

The 90/10 Rule (Part 2)

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In “The 90/10 Rule (Part 1),” I related that my dad would always tell me, “Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you react to it.” I agree with that statement, and it’s helped me immensely as a husband, father, counselor, family member, and friend.

But since beginning my practice and writing The Stories We Tell Ourselves, I’ve come to believe that his statement could be adapted:

“Life is ten percent what happens around us and to us and ninety percent the stories we tell ourselves.”

In other words, often how we react to a situation isn’t dictated by the actual circumstance or the person who’s sitting across from you. Rather, our reactions are based on the (often fabricated) stories we’ve already told ourselves about the situation or person.

These internal, made-up stories are ways for us to make us feel better about ourselves. They’re fictional narratives based on half-truths that offer us an easy route toward some semblance of control over the situation, like a movie director placing all of her characters exactly where she wants them and having each of them deliver the dialogue that’s already been written for them. 

That’s complete control.

But that’s not real life. 

When the stories we tell ourselves meet reality and the people in our lives don’t act or speak the way we expect them to, relational anxiety skyrockets. The fear of having no control escalates, which usually causes us to seek more control, and the cycle continues.

But if we can understand that such relational anxiety is based on the made-up stories in our minds, we can begin to learn how to tell ourselves the right kind of stories—the true ones—so that our relationships might deepen and our anxieties lessen.

The 90/10 Rule (Part 1)

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When I was growing up, my dad told me, “Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you react to it.”

What my dad was trying to tell me is that much of what happens to us in life is outside of my control, but the one thing I could control no matter the circumstance was myself.

It’s a lesson I’m still learning. 

Every day it seems there’s some new way for me to practice letting go of control and learning how to better control my reactions. These lessons came even faster after my wife and I had children.

But once it finally sank in how right my dad was, I felt freer. 

When I realized that I couldn’t control how others acted or what they really thought of me, I was able to devote more of my mental and emotional energy to my clients, to being a good father and husband, and to being a better person in all of my relationships. 

I just had to relinquish control over the lie that I had control in the first place and choose to take responsibility for my own actions.

But I don’t think my dad was 100 percent correct in his 90/10 quote. 

That’s for next time.

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