Linking A nxiety, Emotion, and Mindfulness 29
distressing anxiety depending on the approach you take.
The future is always uncertain, and thus you might naturally
feel concerned about it; however, the decision to use worry
versus other approaches can have a major impact on your
mental health. This is why it’s incredibly important to use
good judgment in both your evaluation of threat and your
choice of responses to your emotions. Being clear about how
you respond to emotions and where difficulties might lie is
the first step in figuring out how to outsmart your anxiety.
Assessing Your Anxiety and Emotions
Learning to properly assess your anxiety is a healthy and
important first step toward understanding the role anxiety
has in your life, including its causes and consequences.
Defining and measuring your anxiety symptoms will help
you decide how best to address and outsmart your anxiety.
To this end, we will provide checklists to help you identify
common anxiety symptoms, scales for rating both the
intensity of your anxiety and your level of distress, and
guidelines for formulating and testing hypotheses about
your anxiety symptoms. By using these assessment tools,
you will be able to:
- Identify the nature and severity of your anxiety.
- Establish baseline measurements of your symp-
toms so that you can monitor changes in your
anxiety as you incorporate skills from this book
into your life. - Determine realistic goals for managing and out-
smarting your anxiety.