The modern world uniformly considers anxiety a problem. What if, instead, anxiety is merely a signal? Often, negative feelings come because you aren’t sure that your path is what is best, you aren’t sure it will lead to what you really want, and you don’t know what you need to do next. In the life plan framework, anxiety is not an existential problem—it’s just a signal that you need to have another planning session.
Whenever you find yourself dealing with anxiety, write down everything you could possibly do to address what is making you anxious. You will be surprised at how much anxiety will vanish just by writing down what is on your mind. The more organization you use while you write, and the more you put into practice what you learn, the more effectively you will mitigate your anxiety. The planning process discussed previously in this book gives you a constrained, intentional, and effective way to construct a written plan for how to solve each
problem and prioritize it in the context of all other items on your list, vastly reducing your stress about it. A planning session with your life plan will help reassure you that you are on the path to better things,
mitigating negative feelings and often replacing them with positive ones. When you repeat this exercise across multiple sources of anxiety, you will use your purpose, your qualities, and especially your values to identify the source of anxiety that is most important to you. Reusing the analogy of paying down credit card debt, you will focus all your discretionary resources on the chief source of the worst anxiety until it is reduced to the point where it is replaced by something else.
As you do this, you’re going to notice significant changes. One of the most pernicious things about anxiety is that it acts like emotional overhead, stealing away your emotional resources from the productive things you would otherwise use them for. As you knock out chunks of your anxiety, you will recover that emotional energy, and you will feel yourself snowballing into greater momentum and capacity to accomplish more and more than you could before in less and less time —and not just on your anxiety lists. Freedom from emotional overhead will carry through every single moment of every single day, no matter what you spend it on.