Hi, I’m Ilia Jones, licensed professional counselor in Suwanee, Georgia, and I want to talk about some therapy tricks to do with anxiety and worry.

One of those is to schedule worry time.

I encourage my clients to sometimes set an alarm every day for 3:15 and have 15 minutes of designated worry time.

That way, they can spend the rest of the time trying to not worry.

Thoughts will pop into your head, but when they do, you just say, “Nope, that goes into my worry list. 3:15 today.”

And then make sure you spend that 15 minutes every day worrying about every last little thing.

So scheduling your worry time can be really helpful.

I also sometimes ask people who are worried or feeling anxious about an event in the future to actually set a calendar alert so that they can start worrying about that later on.

Because if I’m starting to worry now about what I’m going to do for spring break, I’m really way early.

So instead, I’m going to set an alert and on February 15th, I’m going to have a calendar alarm that reminds me that I can start worrying about my spring break plans.

Another thing to do is make sure you’re planning and preparing for if you think you’re going to panic about something.

The day before you fly on an international flight, make sure you schedule time so you can have panic and you can have worry and you can have anxiety because you know it’s coming.

That’s a really good reason and a really good event to kind of panic and stress about, and you can plan and prepare for that.

And sometimes getting all this anticipatory dread out of the way and telling yourself that you’re going to panic and you’re going to be anxious tends to have a very good result and actually minimizes and reduces the chances of that panic attack happening or of that overwhelming anxiety feeling.

So those are some tricks that I encourage my clients to use. I hope they help.