The Recovering Organizational Junkie's Journey
I am a recovering Organizational Junkie.
Yes, I believe there is such a thing, and I will tell you why and how too much organization could be holding you back.
As a therapist and self-help book connoisseur, I have found many strategies that help with anxiety. My favorite go-tos have been: scripting, visualization, planning and listing. Let me break them down for you and tell you why they have been helpful before I share how I took them too far.
Scripting: With scripting you write out or mentally map out, how you think something will go, or how you want it to go before it happens. This is great because when you actually do something, it feels familiar and easier to tackle since you took some time to think it through.
Visualization: This one goes along with scripting. When you practice visualization, you imagine a situation (especially an anxiety provoking situation) and see it going well for you in your mind. You start to associate the positive emotions from your visualization with the actual even so that when you do this event in real life, you feel the positive emotions remembered from your visualization instead of the anxious feelings you were thinking before.
Planning: Ah, planning, planning, planning. I love to plan. I have tried different systems for planning over the years and I don’t think there is just one that is the best, it depends on how you think in the moment. Right now, I am using Google Calendar and it feels so great to map out my week and see what my week will look like on my phone, my computer or iPad. It helps me to visualize how I want different things I have planned to go. It also helps me to feel organized and like I can get to each of my appointments and get tasks done.
Listing: Listing is a perfect go-to strategy when I’m feeling anxious in the moment or when I am planning out tasks and events as I plan for the week. With listing you write down everything you need for a particular topic. You can do this on the computer, on the Reminders App on your iPhone or on good old paper and pencil. Listing helps to get it out of your head and helps to see things more concretely.
These are my favorite strategies but let me tell you how at one point in my life I took them too far. One day several years back I was happily planning away, following all of my strategies and I had my anxiety in a tight grip. I wasn’t letting it get control of me, I had control of things.
Then a random little spontaneous thing happened. Really, little. Now that I think it, I know it was nothing but at the time it pushed me to a breaking point.
It was a Sunday morning and I had planned to stay home, relax and do some chores. I had my yoga pants on and hair up in a pony tail and as I causally sipped my coffee, my husband came over and said he wanted to go to Ikea.
There are few stores I love more than Ikea. I step into that Swedish store, and I’m taken back to my childhood, feeling like I was getting a drop of culture as I tried to read the impossible long furniture names, when I got clothes hangers with just a slightly different shape and ate way too many meatballs that strangely go so well with the brown sauce and lingenberry jam.
But that morning when my husband wanted us to go do something different than I imagined, I couldn’t fit it in with my reality that I had created for myself. It just didn’t fit. I wouldn’t have time to do the laundry I had planned. It threw me off. As he insisted because, really, we were doing nothing that day, it pushed me into a meltdown.
“Britt” told me, “It’s not a big deal. You have to let go, you have to live”.
I looked into his eyes then and I knew that I had a problem. This Ikea trip wasn’t a problem, I just had to be able to let go of the visions and the plans in my head. They are plans but more like guidelines. In the end, we need to live and to live, we have to feel free.
This is the moment I learned the key to my techniques that I was missing before. All of these, the scripting, visualization, planning and listing, they help. But, they are guides. They support. They are not the rules. What is most important is living. Use the tools as guides but wake up and live in the moment, embrace the little surprises. Cherish the moments that break you out of routine because those are the moments we live for.
Now, I still do plan and use these tools. I love these tools. But I always jump at opportunities to break the mould, do something different from the expected, live a little. Or a lot.
That flexability I once feard, now helps me to not hold my anxiety in a tight grip, but to let it flow through my fingers and let it go. I see it, I know it and let it go.
-Brittany