Anxiety has always trailed me, like a shadow stitched to my feet a la Peter Pan. I can remember panicking as a five-year-old, pulling my nap mat over me and imagining what it’d be like to cease thought, to die, like a spider I’d just seen get smashed. (What a conversation my mom had to have, right?!)
In second grade, my teacher had everyone string large, wooden beads on yarn and make “worry necklaces,” where we were instructed to think about our worries as we held the beads, letting each one go as we moved our fingers from bead to bead. My classmates just liked making the necklaces, only to forget about them the next day; I clung to my necklace for months, keeping it safe in my room. It was a talisman that soothed me whenever I started overthinking, and my introduction to new ways of managing my anxiety.
As I’ve gotten older, walking, journaling and talking about whatever’s bothering me has been most helpful (and, often, baking, when I need to keep my hands busy yet let my mind wander). But while reading Guy Raz’s How I Built This, based on the podcast of the same name, Raz mentions a technique he uses when he’s consumed with worry that’s worth a shot: keeping records of those worries and periodically returning to them. It’s that simple—write a list of everything that’s making you anxious. Get it all out of your head and onto paper, then review it a few months later.
At first it seems like a recipe for depression, or at the very least, a defeating feedback loop of ruminating on your fears. Not so, Raz argues.

“The act of emptying my anxieties onto the page itself was itself a therapeutic act that helped me get back to sleep, but the real salvation came three months later, when Hannah [my wife] pulled out the notebook and read my list of worries back to me. Not a single item on that list was relevant any longer! Not one of my worries had materialized in any meaningful way.”

-Guy Raz

With time, many things work out, and that’s what creating a worry list—and returning to it—has reassured Raz. It’s given him the confidence to move forward, no matter how tough things get, because he can see the pattern of how big his worries seemed at the time and how often they worked out. Ahh, the power of perspective.
When I journal, it’s all stream of consciousness (a hot mess of word soup, without much attention to paragraph structure or organization) that I rarely revisit (because it makes me cringe). But now, maybe I need to. It’s worth a shot, right?

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