The 5x5 Rule for Managing Anxiety - Video Transcript

Hey everyone, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist and today I'm going to be talking about mental trick that you can use in order to stop yourself from overthinking and to stop caring about things that you will eventually forget. So things that are, that seem kind of anxiety provoking today, but in the grand scheme of things are pretty inconsequential and a lot of times with anxiety, we do have a difficulty accepting things that are out of our control, but a lot of where anxiety stems from is sort of self inflicted, so we kind of trap ourselves with these thinking styles that we're unaware of, and that happened automatically, but once we create more awareness about them and sort of pay attention to what's happening, we can start to shift those thought patterns and so this is one technique that you can use to do that, and it's called the 5x5 rule.

So basically, when you're thinking about something you want to ask yourself, is this something that I will still be thinking about or worrying about five years from now, if the answer is yes, then definitely continue processing through it. Um weighing the pros and cons and really give it some thought because if it's something that's going to impact you five years from now, it's probably a pretty big life decision, so something maybe like taking a job in a new city, um you know, you really want to think that through you don't want to make any impulsive decisions or let your anxiety be the driver of that. If the answer is no, that you will not necessarily be thinking about this in five years, then give yourself five minutes to fret and really, really experience your feelings right?

You don't want to push the anxiety away. Um the goal is to sort of accept those feelings and just sit with them for about five minutes. Set a timer. If you have to, you know just set the timer on your phone and then after those five minutes move along and what this does, how this works is that it allows us to think more long term and it really puts those thoughts or those anxious feelings into context.

So something that may not matter in five years might be let's say you have you are invited to a going away party and really not sure if you want to attend and you're just kind of ruminating about this. You're sort of weighing out whether or not you should go five years from now. It's probably not.

You won't even remember making that decision right? It's not going to matter, but in the moment it feels very overwhelming for you. So this is a good opportunity to sort of give yourself those five minutes to fret, to think all the anxious thoughts, feel all the anxious feelings and then just make a decision and let it go.

And so this helps us to kind of prevent overthinking during a stressful moment because if we allow our emotions to run the show, we'll just keep ruminating about it right? But if we give ourselves some parameters um and just set that timer for five minutes, then we're not allowing our anxiety to take control.

We're giving it space, but then we're also taking that control back and realizing that in the grand scheme of life, whether or not I attend this party is not going to be that drastic of a decision. And so this might be really difficult for a lot of people to do it first. But really the more you practice, the easier it gets and then eventually it it just really starts to kind of stop those automatic thoughts and that negative thinking and over time you won't get us triggered by some of these more inconsequential anxiety provoking situations.

So I hope this was helpful. Try it out, leave a comment or ask a question and I put out new content every friday. So be sure to subscribe to my social media at cathartic space counseling on facebook and instagram or you can subscribe to my youtube channel where I also put out my weekly videos, that's the anxiety therapist.

And if you just want to learn more about how I can help if you're in the state of Illinois or Michigan you can check out my website which is www dot cathartic space counseling dot com. I hope you have a great weekend, take care.