3 Tips for Overcoming Your Anxiety in the New Year
January offers you that clean slate you have been waiting for as you make plans to live the life that you’ve imagined. While this fresh start can feel exciting, it often brings with it plenty of anxiety. Will I finally be able to make the changes in my life I have hoped for? Am I capable enough? Strong enough? Disciplined enough? These past two years have been stressful and heartbreaking…will things ever get better?
It is normal to feel anxiety at the start of a new year, but that doesn’t mean that this has to be another year of living in survival mode.
I’m here to provide you with tips and resources so that anxiety doesn’t have to sabotage your goals, hopes, and aspirations. You are worthy of a life of joy, peace, and belonging. Let’s get anxiety out of the driver seat so that you can live the life you imagine.
TIP #1— Form habits that foster self-love rather than resolutions that enlist perfectionism and produce self-criticism.
Rather than enlisting your will power and need for perfection to accomplish your goals, begin by forming habits that better your life and leave space for self-compassion and acceptance.
Perfectionism may be sabotaging your goals and your mental health. Curran and Hill (2019) define perfectionism as “a combination of excessively high personal standards and overly critical self-evaluations.” They point out that experiences of clinical depression, eating disorders, and premature death among college students is linked with “individuals [who] attach irrational importance to being perfect, hold unrealistic expectations of themselves, and are punitive in their self-evaluations.” If you are hoping to make this year a healthier, happier, and more peaceful year, when you can accomplish your goals and live the life you imagined, then approaching your new years resolutions with perfectionism is not the route to go.
Unlike will power, habits are triggered automatically. After you have put in the work to form a habit, it will become an effortless part of your life. Experts provide this step-by-step tool for forming a habit:
How to make a new habit
Decide on a goal that you would like to achieve
Choose a simple action that will get you towards your goal which you can do on a daily basis.
Plan when and where you will do your chosen action. Be consistent: choose a time and place that you encounter every day of the week.
Every time you encounter that time and place, do the action.
It will get easier with time, and within 10 weeks you should find you are doing it automatically without even having to think about it.
Self-acceptance, not perfectionism, will offer you the freedom and space you need to be consistent, which is the key to forming habits. Next time you find yourself not following through on your goal, offer yourself compassion. This will decrease your fear of continued failure and give you the motivation to keep fighting for yourself and your goals. Each time you decide to get back up and try again, you are affirming that you are worth fighting for and building the foundation you need for your habits to form.
TIP #2— Welcome the good in your life.
One key way to welcome the good in your life is to practice gratitude. A gratitude practice is a way of living mindfully in the present moment. This powerful tool rewires the brain to increase joy and decrease stress in your life. Experts report that gratitude has been known to reduce stress and anxiety, improve physical health, alter brain function in those who suffer from depression, and improve relationships. If your goals this year involve better physical health, a more fulfilling marriage, an experience of peace and happiness in your life, or sense of belonging, practicing gratitude will greatly benefit you.
Gratitude Practice: There are a variety of ways to practice gratitude, and this resource offers several examples and guides to get you started. I encourage you this year to make it a habit to notice the good in your life. Notice the little moments in your day as well as the people around you who bring goodness into your life.
Another way to welcome the good in your life is to surround yourself with people who remind you of who you are. Have you ever experienced grabbing coffee with a friend and feeling as if you have come home to yourself—you have come alive— as you share in conversation? Add this person to the list of positive relationships in your life and make it a point to regularly spend time with them. Anxiety disconnects us from our true selves. Often it takes a positive person in your life to bring you back home to your true self so that you can live life with freedom and joy.
Relationship Practice: I encourage you to make a list of the people in your life who bring out the best in you. Make it a point to spend time with at least one of these people every week.
TIP #3— Become your greatest ally.
If you feel as if your life is out of your control and you are living as a victim to whatever the day brings, I invite you to take back control and become your greatest ally.
One of the best ways to become your greatest ally is to develop boundaries. Boundaries empower you to be the gatekeeper of your own heart as you decide what you will and will not expose your most vulnerable self to. By having healthy boundaries, you are able to respond to your needs, have a greater sense of autonomy in your life, and feel safe and connected in your relationships. There are several types of boundaries (sexual, physical, emotional, intellectual, financial, etc.) that you can have with yourself and with others. Below, I offer you a couple types of boundaries you can set with yourself that will empower you to become your greatest ally.
Emotional Boundary: Safety in Relationships
An emotional boundary you can set with yourself involves deciding who are the people that you feel safe being emotionally vulnerable with, and who are the people that have not yet earned your trust, and you want to have less vulnerable conversations with. Have you ever found yourself oversharing to someone who you later learned was not an emotionally safe person for you? If so, you are not alone. Social media has created opportunities for more widespread communication, yet it has come at the cost of blurring boundaries. Not all relationships should have the same level of intimacy.
Safety in Relationships Practice: I often tell my clients to explore their depth of relational intimacy with someone by imagining inviting that person into their home. Imagine that you have a front yard, a front porch, a living room, a kitchen, a guest bedroom, and then your own bedroom. The bedroom represents the most vulnerable parts of you—your deepest secrets, your biggest fears or insecurities, etc. The front yard represents the typical small talk you would have with a stranger. As you imagine a particular person in your life, where do you feel comfortable with them being in your home? There are some people that you may feel comfortable inviting into your living room, but wouldn’t want them in your bedroom. And then there may be others who you would feel more comfortable with on the front porch. If you do this exercise and find that you could imagine most of your relationships in your metaphoric bedroom, then you probably could use some boundaries in your life. If you tend to keep most people on the front porch, maybe its time to let some safe people in. I’d encourage you to spend some time thinking about these relationships and deciding on the level of safety you feel with each person. This will help you navigate conversations in a way encourages a sense of belonging, safety, and connection.
Intellectual Boundary with Yourself: Self-talk
My guess is that you are often your greatest critic. Perhaps you find yourself in the midst of a mistake and immediately you think to yourself, “I can’t seem to do anything right” or “I’m so stupid, how could I do that?” These thought patterns, if said frequently enough, will become some of the most influential voices informing your sense of self-worth. Four common ways that people tend to use negative self-talk involves:
Personalizing- you blame yourself for everything
Magnifying- the negative things about you are blown out of proportion to the positive aspects of you
Catastrophizing- you tend to expect the worst
Polarizing- you see things in black and white and leave little room for anything in-between
Becoming your greatest ally involves replacing these thought patterns with more gentle and self-compassionate thoughts. Imagine your friend experienced the same mistake, how would you respond to them? My guess is that you probably wouldn’t say, “you idiot, you can’t do anything right.” Make it a point to begin speaking to yourself the way you would with a close friend. Offer yourself compassion and grace.
Self-talk Practice:
Spend a couple days noticing your self-talk patterns. What do you tend to tell yourself about your worth, your sense of belonging, your abilities, etc? Are you supportive of yourself? Write down any frequently used negative thought patterns.
Take some time to explore this thought pattern with curiosity. Are these thoughts accurate? Are they overgeneralizing? Is this an all-or-nothing thought? Was there someone in my life who first introduced this thought to me? If so, were they someone who I feel is safe and trustworthy enough to inform my sense of worth? *If you find that these thoughts stem from past trauma and/or abuse, working through these thought patterns may require professional support.
Look back over the thought patterns you listed, and reword them in a more truthful, supportive, and kinder light.
Developing new self-talk patterns takes time and consistency. I encourage you to approach the process with grace. The goal is to release your inner critic and become your greatest ally.
You are worthy of a life of belonging, joy, and peace. Anxiety does not have to have the final word. May you enter into this New Year with gratitude, self-compassion, and patience. Each step you take is one step closer to living the life you long for. If you are looking for a deeper level of support on this journey, send me a message. I would love to give you the tools and support you need as you continue to heal and grow.
