← Your Anxiety Toolkit - Practical Skills for Anxiety, Panic & Depression
Your Anxiety Toolkit - Practical Skills for Anxiety, Panic & Depression
436 6 Schedule Habits That Are Secretly Making Your Anxiety Worse
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Feeling overwhelmed by your to-do list? In this episode, anxiety specialist Kimberley Quinlan reveals six sneaky schedule habits that may be fueling your anxiety—and exactly how to shift toward calm, clarity, and confidence in your daily routine.
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If you're feeling overwhelmed by how much you have to get done, you're constantly playing catch up and you're always anxious about your list of to do's. This is going to be an episode that will be particularly helpful for you. Hello, my name is Kimberly Quindlen. I'm an anxiety specialist. I am the host of your anxiety Toolkit podcast. And today we are going to do a deep dive into how you can manage your anxiety about time, about your schedule, about your daily habits. And hopefully you will leave here with some very tactical, strategic skills so that you can actually work to reduce your anxiety and get more done instead of stressing about your schedule and what you do have to get done and how you're constantly feeling behind. So I'm so excited that you're here and this is something I have had to work on myself. So let's do this together. So let's first talk about why time and schedule anxiety is so common. We right now, in this era, we have so much on our plate. We are constantly being overwhelmed with to do lists. Me, I cannot get over just, just how much we're expected to get done in one day. Call the gardener, get the kids, make the calls to the pharmacy, pay the bills, get food. We're supposed to eat healthy, we're supposed to get exercise, we're supposed to do well in our job. We're supposed to have learned a language or, you know, expanded our horizons and take care of family. It is so much and if you feel overwhelmed and anxious about that, you are not alone. I am so with you. We have a constant pressure to do everything, not only just get it done, but to do it perfectly. You might even feel a pressure to manage your mental health alongside of this, which can make it particularly even more difficult because again, there's only a certain amount of time in each day. So my hope today is we're going to go through, we're going to identify six schedule habits that are making your anxiety worse. Hopefully again, you're going to leave here with some strategic skills so that you can go on to live a more confident, at ease life in your day to day. So let's also take a look at some other reasons why time and schedule anxiety are so common. Number one is we often are either over scheduled or under scheduled. And I'm going to talk about that at length here in a second. We also technically, and we tend to be, when you have anxiety, we tend to be high performers. The people I know with anxiety, my clients with anxiety, they tend to be the Most intelligent people I know, they are the most skilled and talented people I know. They tend to want things to go really well. They value doing well, showing up, putting in their best effort, while also having to manage the anxiety that they experience. And that in and of itself can create a ton of anxiety about schedules and about time management. In addition to that, our culture reinforces this stuff. Culture praises our society, praises those who are productive, who get a lot done. I have a lot on my plate. I run two different businesses, I have children, I'm a therapist. I do notice that a lot of people praise you for being overproductive, but it's actually not that healthy for your mental health. In fact, I would be as brave as to say it's unhealthy to be so productive all the time. The pressure from society can make this very, very difficult. And so let's get into those six specific schedule habits that are making your anxiety worse. And so we can get to the bottom of it. Okay, so let's start with number one. The biggest schedule habit that I see people make that make their anxiety worse is that they're either over scheduling or under scheduling. This is so important to first look at before we get to the other ones. And what I mean by this is some of my clients, that they are meticulous about the schedule, that they feel like this internal pressure that they have to start things on time, they cannot be late under any conditions. They've crammed in every little thing they have to do, they've scheduled their daily activities down to the minute. And while I am a huge scheduler, I love to schedule. That model will only make anxiety happen because the truth of the matter is life does not care about the schedule. Things happen, things don't go as beautifully as we would want them to. And when you've over scheduled, you're going to be incredibly anxious anytime things fall behind. Now, on the other end of the spectrum are those who completely under schedule, they're avoidant of schedule. They don't want to have to put things on a schedule because it creates anxiety for them and therefore they avoid it. They procrastinate, they, they don't have a list, they don't manage their time, their to do list at all. And while it may reduce some of their anxiety, it also contributes to anxiety as well. Because again, people with anxiety tend to be highly intelligent folks. And when you're highly intelligent, you do need some structure. And I am going to say here, a lot of people who avoid scheduling because of that end up having more anxiety. In the long term. So it's something we really have to look at here. Now, these two spectrums are going to create a lot of discomfort, and we're going to try to meet you in the middle somewhere, and we'll talk about that later on in the episode when we get to some strategies that might be really, really helpful for you. Okay, so let's talk about the second schedule habit that people engage in that make anxiety worse. And this one is so, so important, and it is that you are not scheduling time for pleasure and rest. When I researched time management, I did so much research on how to manage my time better, how to have less anxiety, how to get a system that works. One of the things that very few people talked about was the importance of scheduling pleasure first. Most of them in our very, you know, corporate America environment, you know, talked about, you've got to get going, you've got to get the first thing done, you've got to get the hardest thing done first. And I agree with all of that. But if you have not first scheduled sleep and some hobby pleasure, fun time, you are going to burn out. You're going to be unhappy, you're more prone to be depressed, you're. You're more prone to be anxious. And so when I created the Time Management for Optimum Mental Health course, which is a course we have over@cbtschool.com, i talked about the importance of first scheduling pleasure. Of all of my courses that I have at cbtschool.com, most frequent comment is that this concept changed their life. Of all the courses, this one thing was the most important. I am blown away by how many people never prioritize pleasure, never prioritize their hobbies. Again, we have such a long list, and when we have a mental health issue, we just assumed that pleasure should be the first thing to go. And that is completely not the case. We must schedule pleasure first. And that is the core first step. When we talk about time management, it is so, so important. When we don't do that again, I'm going to stress to you, I know I've said this once, but we tend to be more depressed, we tend to be more anxious, and the whole joy of life goes out the window. I will say often to my clients and students that one of the biggest antidotes to anxiety is having fun. Anxiety wants us to be serious all the time and take things so seriously and make everything important and put all this pressure on you. And sometimes the best thing you can do is ask yourself what would I do if anxiety wasn't here? And often the answer is I would watch some tv, I would see my friends, I would go out for lunch, I would meet somebody at the park, I would take a walk. I would sleep and rest. I would have downtime where I actually allowed that rest to happen. So this is so, so, so important. The third thing that we do in our schedule that cause anxiety is we treat all tasks as if they're equally important and that they're very, very serious. Now, this one was the hardest for me when I had to work through this. There was a period of time when I was working so hard I had no pleasure in my life. And. And every task I did from the minute I woke up to the minute I went to sleep felt like it was so urgent and so important, and the grip was so, so tight. Now, what was interesting is I identified that I was engaging in some workaholic behaviors, and I attended our Workaholics Anonymous meeting, and they brought up this idea of adrenalizing, and this concept blew my mind. Now, adrenalizing is an act where you are generating a lot of energy, but you're doing it in sort of a frantic way. You're like, everything is very important and urgent, and you have no patience at all, and you have to get it done fast, and it should happen now. And you're almost a little bit aggressive and angry, and you're like, banging on this typewriter on the keyboard and. And you're sort of moving very, very fast. And that act of adrenalizing, that act of moving fast and bang, bang, bang. Getting through the schedule without any mindfulness literally is creating adrenaline in your body. And when you have adrenaline in your body, your brain and your body is going to assume there's danger, and it's going to start to create a nervous system of. Of anxiety and panic and exhaustion. So when I am catching myself adrenalizing, I know now to catch and say, okay, wait, you're rushing, you're gripping, you're being aggressive in your body language as you go through the day. How can we slow this down? And what we find is, well, what I found was I was treating really basic skills like brushing my teeth, you know, typing out emails as if they were super, super important, like, must do. Terrible things will happen if I don't do them. Whereas those are more just daily administrative tasks. So I had to learn that to catch and check in with myself. If I'm doing activities that aren't super important, they need to get done. But they're not life or death, they're not urgent, they're not. There's no major consequence. I had to learn to slow down and not treat them like they were such life and death importance. Now, yes, there are things like deadlines, getting my taxes done, you know, making sure I'm on time to pick up my kids. Those things have to be done. They are important. But I don't have to show up in my body in this urgent, impatient, aggressive, rushed, you know, life or death body. I don't have to show up that way. And can I check in and re regulate myself, do some breathing, slow things down and remind myself these things aren't life or death. They're not important. Yes, I feel anxious, but can I change how I respond to that anxiety and adrenaline I have in my body? So that's core. It takes some time, it takes some work. This took me about a year to slowly catch. When I was doing this rushing, adrenalizing behavior, I had to sometimes look at my schedule and go, okay, I do tend to adrenalize more in the mornings. That's the truth. I do tend to adrenalize more in the morning. So in the morning, what can I schedule to make sure I'm being more intentional about slowing down? Okay, so number four is avoiding hard tasks through engaging with busy work. This is so important. You might find that there are some tasks you need to get done that are important. You've identified them as important, and because they create anxiety for you, you avoid them. And when you avoid them, you feel terrible about avoiding them and you know it's not right and you don't want to be avoiding them. And so what you do is you say, it's fine, I know I need to get that thing done. That's a high priority task. So what I'll do is I'll just go and clean the kitchen. That would be, you know, that's a thing I also need to do. And so you go and start cleaning the kitchen because you want to feel like you're being proactive and productive, but you don't want to feel guilty for not doing that important thing. So you go and clean the kitchen. Once you clean the kitchen, you notice the trash needs to get taken out, so you take that out too. And then you finish taking out the trash and you still are thinking, I really need to get that one task done. But, you know, I'm not feeling ready yet. And so I'm going to engage in some other busy work, maybe tidying a drawer or you Know things that feel like you're being busy but you're actually not getting the tasks done. I personally have had times where I've spent the whole day feeling productive, feeling like I was getting things done, but really I just spent the day doing the one or two level importance things and at the end of the day feeling anxious, feeling angry at myself because I spent the whole day doing busy work instead of actually getting the thing done that pushes the needle forward. I cannot tell you how many times I have done this. It has been one of the biggest sources of anxiety in my work. This is a big one for therapists. We tend to avoid doing our notes and we will find any job that we can do to avoid doing notes because notes are annoying and boring. And then all we've done is we've pushed it off and created more anxiety. So what we want to do here is we want to acknowledge that yes, doing that very hard important thing is going to create some discomfort, but it's better than the discomfort of doing busy work all day, feeling exhausted at the end of the day and still now feeling anxious because we still have that hard, important thing to get done. So I'm going to very much stress. When we talk about scheduling, and we do talk about this in the time Management for optimum Mental health course, we talk about getting down the things that we have, we get a list of the things we must do, we get a list of the things we should or could do, and we prioritize things based on how important they are and how urgent they are in order to get done done. So again, we're not treating everything like it's all important. What we want to do is we want to get very clear about the priorities, the hierarchy of important to unimportant, and we want to structure our day based on that sort of understanding or hierarchy that we've created. Okay, so if you're looking for a.
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Big hugs.
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And now let's get back to the show.
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Okay, number five. The number five scheduling habit that causes us to have more anxiety is that we say yes to too many things. And usually we do this because we're afraid of letting people down or we're afraid of them judging us. Now, if you have anxiety or a mental health struggle, and if you are in treatment for that or you're trying to overcome that and get better at managing that, you are going to have to learn how to say no. You are going to have to learn how to not people, please. Because I always think to myself, saying yes to them is a saying no to me. Saying yes to them might be saying no to me. And I have to not do that anymore. I have to prioritize myself. I matter. My needs matter. My mental health matters, My rest matters, My sanity matters. And so it's very, very important that you get very intentional about what you say yes to. There was a period of time, I'll tell you a story where I was so burnt out and I was so unwell, and a lot of that was to do with the fact that I was trying to do too much and I had said yes to too many people and I actually made this little, like, flowchart of things I was allowed to say yes to. So the first question was, like, am I saying yes because I want to or am I saying yes because I feel like I have to? And as you can imagine, if I was saying because I have to, I would have to practise saying no. Now, remember, saying no doesn't mean you just say no. And that's it. It's okay to share with people, hey, listen, I'm at capacity. I'm doing my best to try and prioritize my mental health. I'm really sorry, I hope you don't take this personally, but I'm going to have to say no. I got really good at saying I'm at capacity. Please, if you could understand my need that I have to say no to this. But it does not mean you're not important to me. It doesn't mean that what you're doing, your agenda, the thing that you've asked me to do, isn't important. Let's negotiate on when we can get that done. Another really important piece here in this sort of flowchart was Is this something that I actually have time for? There have been times in my career and in my life as a mom and a wife where I've had to say no to really wonderful opportunities because literally there actually was no time. Because I work at scheduling every day. I look at my schedule every single day. I'm very, very, very intentional about it. I am a massive advocate for doing very mindful and intentional scheduling. When I look at the calendar, I have to be honest, there is actually no time for this. Do not take on things if you literally have no time for it. Again, if you're putting something on your plate that you actually don't have time for, you have to understand that it is an immediate onboarding of anxiety and stress onto your daily life that you cannot afford that is not healthy for you. We have to protect your needs at all costs. So that's so important to get really good at saying, I'm so sorry, I'm at capacity, I'm going to have to say no. All right, we're on to number six. And this one is so, so important. And I think we have all fallen into this trap way too many times now. The sixth scheduling habit that causes us to have more anxiety is that we use time to measure our worth. We do things and we put things into our day, thinking that if we do it, we'll be more worthy as human beings. If I can just get this thing done, then I'll feel good about myself. And yes, I feel good about myself when I get things done too. But at the end of the day, you want to make sure that the things on your schedule aren't things that you're doing so that you can feel like you're worthy of joy, pleasure, treats, love, accolades. You have to remember here that you are worthy whether you get the things done or not. When I got sick in 2018, I had to wipe my schedule and it was the biggest hit to my self esteem. And that is when I realized that all the busy work and all the tasks and all of the to do lists were being done so that I would feel good about myself. And I had to learn to feel good about myself. Whether I'm achieving or not. I had to start to learn that I was worthy and valuable and lovable. Whether I was a shining star or I was someone who was struggling to get up in the morning. These were massive mental health mindset shifts I had to make. And it allowed me to see just how conditional my self love was for myself. I was only treating myself kindly. If I got all of the tasks done. So what we want to do here is we want to shift to being in a mindset in a place where every day we are thoughtful, we put aside time to take care of the things that are important, the musts and the shoulds, and then we can look at the coulds and see if we've got space to slide them in. We want to schedule sleep and pleasure first. We do not just schedule sleep and pleasure once we get the to do list done, because there's always going to be a to do list. It's always going to be there. It's probably always going to dominate you. My to do list right now is so long, there is literally no way I will ever get it done. And so I have to be okay. When I put my head down on the pillow at night, I have to remind myself, you did the best you could. You did a great job. None of these things determined your worth. You were intentional. You were good at getting the things done that you said you were going to get done. And it's enough. Rest easy now, my friend. It's, you know, again, rest easy, my friend. I have to repeat that you are enough whether you got them done or not. Another really important thing here is catch how you're using scheduling to try to manage your anxiety. If you're someone who has an anxiety disorder, ocd, any type of anxiety disorder, or even depression, catch whether you're using the schedule to reduce or remove uncertainty. Are you spending too much time focusing on the schedule and, and making sure this happens at this time? And can I squeeze it in? Because it is likely that that is becoming a compulsion like we talked about before. Also, avoiding the scheduling process, avoiding setting time to really look at your calendar is also an avoidant compulsion and one we want to catch. This must be a balanced and moderate flexible practice. It's sort of something where we do some scheduling, but we don't do it to the degree that we're being meticulous and compulsive. We allow things to not go well. We allow things to fall off the. On, you know, fall off the wagon. But we're also not doing that as a way to reduce or remove anxiety. We're not in constant avoidance. We sit down, we look at the schedule, we acknowledge what we have to do. We're kind to ourselves. We look at the schedule and say, does this harness a healthy mental lifestyle? For me, there is an amazing resource which I'm going to encourage you to look up. It's called the Healthy mind Platter. It was Designed by Danielle Siegel and David Rock and is a beautiful visual of the seven important factors we must include in our day for optimum mental health. Now this is so beautiful and I love that they did this because it's similar to the healthy pyramid, the food pyramid we used to have. But this is for optimum brain matter. It's talking about the things we must do to really nourish our brain and anxiety and depression. And mental health is a brain disorder. These are things we want to make sure we're having time for. Includes downtime in time, which is like therapy and journaling and mindfulness. It's physical time, it's sleep time, it's time where you're learning something. We want to try to implement this as much as we can, but again, we don't want to over schedule. We don't want to over commit. Maybe from today you take one baby step towards these concepts and strategies and just implement one. Try them for a week. Give yourself some time to get that to be a new habit. Then you come back, listen to this again and add on the next thing. A lot of these are actually taking things out. Not just adding things in, taking out things from the day, rescheduling things to more realistic timeline. Checking in and not acting from a place of urgency and adrenalizing is going to be super key as well. At the end of the day, this must be a compassionate act that you do for yourself. I want you to leave here in this episode feeling empowered to use your schedule as a way to supplement and complement your recovery. It has been a huge piece of my recovery with multiple mental health struggles and difficult times in my life. And every single time, I know I can rely on my schedule and I know I can trust myself more now because I hold myself to my schedule without getting caught up in avoidant behaviors or busy work or people pleasing. I know I'm holding that boundary for myself for my own mental health. Now, the last thing I want you guys to think about here, I actually did a whole episode on this called the rest Rest to productivity ratio. You want to make sure that there is a rest to productivity ratio that suits you and that's going to be different for every single person. There are weeks when I'm not feeling well where my rest to productivity ratio are more even. Right? They're more like one to one and that I have to rest more. There will be seasons in my life where I'm feeling medically and mentally well and maybe I can push a little harder with productivity. But I want you to be flexible in this. What is somebody else's rest to productivity ratio is not yours. We are not here to compare. There's no right way to do it. They might be in a season where they are really in a high productivity period of their life. It's okay if that's not you. It's okay if you need to slow down a little bit and take time to rest and recover and get your therapy homework done and practice your mindfulness skills and connect with fellow human beings who are going through the same similar things that you're going through. So there you have it. They are the six scheduling habits that are increasing your anxiety. And hopefully you've left here with some really strategic, helpful, effective concepts and skills that will help you to create a schedule that provides you a platform to thrive, to have more confidence, to have less anxiety, to feel like you can trust yourself again. That has been my experience, and I know it can be yours as well. If you're interested, head over to cbtschool.com timemanagement we have a complete time management course that I created specifically for people who have mental health struggles, because I know that most of those courses and books do not consider that. And so I hope you find that as helpful as the rest of our students have. All right, guys, I'll see you in the next episode. Please note that this podcast or any other resources from CBTSchool.com should not replace professional mental health care. If you feel you would benefit, please reach out to a provider in your area. Have a wonderful day and thank you for supporting cbtschool.com.