Making the Internet My Accountability Partner

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My anxiety has been through the roof lately. I’ve had a number of things going on in my life to contribute to that. Seeing as it’s something on the forefront of my mind I figured I’d talk about it here. Yes, I want to primarily discuss the self-care tools that have been helping me lately, but to make sense of why these things help we need to briefly touch on the aspects of my life that contribute to my anxiety.

The most impactful realization I’ve had is how out of balance I’ve been regarding work, social life, and self-care. Remember self-care is not just a bandaid for when things are going wrong it’s also a preventative measure to protect the things that are going well. I have been severely de-prioritizing my proactive self-care.

I mention occasionally that I work as a telehealth therapist, so my work is very emotionally demanding and it means I spend all day looking at a screen. And rather frequently, I will receive messages from loved ones during work hours. Typically those messages will not be responded to until after the session. Even so, doing this does not give me a break from both the social and emotional demands of interaction as well as from screen time. And then I have been spending most evenings and weekends with my boyfriend.

While individually each of these things in the moment feels good and helps me feel connected (which is a very necessary thing) in sum they leave me feeling drained. A side effect of spending all my free moments with the person I love is that I don’t have much free time to maintain my routines or engage in my hobbies independently.

Ultimately not having this balance that is key to maintaining my mental health has meant I’m dealing with a lot more symptoms of my mental illness. Thankfully I’ve been managing this for years and I have some pretty good tools to help now that I’ve identified the contributing factors. One is that I got proactive about setting boundaries and taking space for myself; I’m still working through the internalized beliefs that made it easy to de-prioritize my needs. These boundaries include during work not responding to personal messages until I feel ready and taking a break from screen time in between appointments. Even outside of work, I’ve been more intentional about how the stimuli of screen time will impact me.

I have also been spending less time with loved ones and more time with myself. I need alone time to recharge generally, but I also need alone time to be able to get regular exercise and engage in hobbies both of which are beneficial for my mental health. So now that proactive approaches like balance and boundaries have been addressed, let’s talk about the specific coping skills I’ve been using.

One has been to watch my pet fish. Not only does it help give me a hint of the oasis of nature, but watching them is also a form of meditation reminding me to be in the moment and to exist without judgment. Of course, breathing exercises have been really helpful in reducing the physiological symptoms of anxiety. In many ways, the self-talk has been most important. My boyfriend introduced me to the phrase “looking for problems, creates them”. I have been familiar with the concept and even teach it to my clients, but for some reason, this phrasing sticks with me. In moments of anxiety, I remind myself to not create problems just because I’m worried that they could exist. I remind myself that trusting my loved ones means believing that they will communicate their feelings, I don’t need to guess them and I should believe them when they tell me everything is ok. I also have to remind myself that doing what the anxiety says is feeding the anxiety and is not actually in my best interest. That’s when opposite action comes into play.

I hope you find this info helpful and that it can give you ideas on how to approach your own moments of anxiety. If you have any other tips or recommendations I’d love to hear them. Just because we know something logically does not mean it’s always easy to act on emotionally.