Feeling Anxiety Over Something You Don’t Have a Lot of Control Over? Writing it Out Can Help.

There was a miscommunication.  It all started at the beginning of this week.  I needed to order contact lenses and I was calling around to find the best deal. 

One of the places I called was my optometrist's office.  No one answered, so I left a message asking how much a box would cost.  They called back and left a message wanting to know what insurance I have.  I called back and left a message, and told them what it was.  They called back and left a message and said that a box would cost X amount.   X amount was more than I wanted to pay, so I called back to say that I was going to order from somewhere else.  This time, I was able to talk to somebody, and they were glad I called back to let them know.  Then the next day, I got a message saying they had already ordered the contact lenses, and the woman I spoke with said that I had told her to!  Ack!  So it was after hours, but I decided to call back and leave a message saying that there had been a miscommunication.  And now I have to wait till Monday to have this silly thing resolved.

Silly as it may be, anxiety over this little unresolved issue could ruin my weekend if I let it.  I could mull over this thing over and over again, thinking about where I went wrong and how I could have been more clear.  I’ll review in my mind the messages over the past week and dwell on the one thing that I said that could have been interpreted to mean to go ahead and order the contacts.  I’ll worry about whether I sounded rude in my recent message when I didn’t mean to.  And I’ll worry that my conversation with the office won’t turn out well.

I read or heard somewhere that students who wrote out their anxieties about a test they were about to take actually did better on the test than those who did not.  So I decided to try to apply the same idea to this little issue.  And you know what?  So far, it’s helped!  By the end of that exercise I felt much better and positive about the whole thing.  The whole situation became more clear and I was able to put it in perspective.  If I feel tempted to revisit the issue this weekend, I’ll pull out my piece of paper.  I’ll probably pull it out before I talk to the optometrist’s office so I can remember to be polite, and to remind myself that no matter what, it’s going to be OK.  Worst case scenario, I’ll learn a valuable lesson about being much more clear.

So here’s to putting things on paper.  It really does help!