Life With Anxiety – Locking the Door

As you know, anxiety is something that I’ve lived with since I was 11. That would be 22 years, for those keeping track. My anxiety presented pretty early. It revolved around school. I had chronic stomach aches every single morning. It made me anxious to speak up in class. (You can read more about it in my Anxiety workbook). I was always worried about everything, my grades, failure, making friends or rather, not making friends.

Anxiety and I are old friends.

For the most part, we don’t talk very much anymore and we rarely ever see each other, but lately, Anxiety has been making appearances in my life more so than usual. At the beginning of this month, I went through some things that really amped up my anxiety and ever since then, it’s been a struggle to let it get it out of control.

So I decided to get creative with it.

Life With Anxiety was born to put a funny and relatable spin on living with anxiety and the weird things that it makes us do. One of those things is locking the door. When my anxiety is high my capacity to worry about random things goes sky high.

It’s all about control. Anxiety is the fear of not having any.

Worrying about things like locking the door – it gives you a sense of control. If you do this thing – and check and double check – then bad things won’t happen.

I’ve been working on reassurance and self-talk and most of all – trusting myself so I stop worrying over the little things.

There are other ways to help reassure yourself. You can say “I locked the door.” as you’re locking the door, this gives you something to anchor the memory of locking the door to. You can use a check-list or habit tracker app to cross off locking the door so it’s not something you think about all day. Or you can take a picture of your door each time you leave your house.

These are all helpful ideas, but the most important thing is to overcome the fear to begin with. It’s important to get to the point where you lock the door – and then stop worrying about it altogether!

Life with Anxiety: Locking the Door.