Anxiety Strategy Cards

Preparation is a crucial part of managing anxiety. These cards are for you to develop strategies for events and situations where they feel out of control and stressed, with their anxiety building.

Each card offers a valuable reminder of a powerful technique that will help them restore their physical, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral balance.

For example:

When I feel anxious, I could try … controlled breathing.
When I feel anxious, I could try … visualization.
When I feel anxious, I could try … a grounding technique.

Control–Influence–Accept Model

We can’t control every situation, so it’s helpful to recognize those that can be influenced by our behavior and those that cannot.

This will hopefully stop you from feeling overwhelmed and experiencing feelings of hopelessness, frustration, and anxiety. When you feel these things you have a loss of control or become very indecisiveness.  

I encourage you to perform each of the following:

• Identify a potentially tricky situation.

• Capture what can be controlled or influenced.

• What cannot be controlled or influenced must be accepted.

• List what needs to be accepted.

Having performed each step, you can now reflect on how you now feel about the situation and whether you are left wishing to control or influence anything you have accepted.

 CBT Worksheets for Anxiety

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) treats anxiety by restructuring the client’s thinking, with the therapist exploring maladaptive expectations and worries related to upcoming events (Dobson & Dozois, 2021).

1. Anxiety Record

Reflecting on and sharing what makes us anxious can leave us feeling vulnerable, but it is essential. Understanding what leaves us feeling this way allows us to prepare for situations and learn appropriate coping skills.

One of the most powerful techniques is recognizing and, if possible, replacing unhelpful thinking.

Use the simple form when you do your cards to capture the following:

What does anxiety feel like?
When does it happen?
What thoughts do you experience?
How realistic are these thoughts?
What thoughts could you replace them with?
Are they more realistic?

Capturing our anxieties is an essential part of reducing them and bringing them under control.

2. Dealing with anxiety: Reverse the Rabbit Hole

The two words “what if?” can be anxiety- inducing, sending our thoughts racing down a rabbit hole of all that could go wrong.

What if I forget the words when I’m on stage? What if my date doesn’t like me?

Reframing an experience helps us experience it differently. We can turn a negative into a positive — reverse the rabbit hole.

When we write negative outcomes in the left-hand column and then a corresponding reversed, positive outcome on the right.

What if I nail the speech? What if my date goes really well?

3. Tackling Anxious Thoughts

Anxiety can bias our thinking by making us buy into the likelihood of something terrible happening. As a result, it can be helpful to thing about these three points: