In a recent issue of Health, Clare Hannam shared a technique she learned from her therapist. Therapist provide many tools to help you manage your anxiety or depression. Not all tools work all the time for every client, but it is best to have more than one tool to choose from.

According to Clare,

“Because my anxiety flare-ups can seem totally random, it’s important for me to treat my mental health like it matters every day, not just when I’m feeling off. I consider mental health to be an important part of my overall wellness, so I do small things to take care of it all week, just like how I exercise and take vitamins for my body.”

This is an excellent perspective on managing your mental health. So the Rule of Three works similar to the idea of scheduling your anxiety.

Claire shared, “When I’m feeling stressed, I only allow myself to devote energy to worrying about three things at any given time. I visualize a tree with three branches on it, with one worry assigned to each branch. After the tree is full, that’s it—no additional worries are allowed to take over my mental space.”

Thus, you are limiting the number of worries you’re focusing on instead of a whole grove of worry trees with infinite branches as is typical with unmanaged anxiety in stress. Scheduling your worry time (1 hour a day) similarly causes you to limit or decrease your worrying time and frees you up to focus your energies on what IS in your control. It also makes it more likely that you will weed out worrisome thoughts that are highly improbable or unlikely to happen since you have to limit which thoughts you focus on.

” If my tree is already maxed out when my cab gets stuck in traffic and risks making me late for an important interview, I either have to abandon one of the other branches or choose not to worry about th current situation”, according to Claire.

The rule of Three and Worry Scheduling are two of many tools that you can learn in therapy.

If you are in need of therapy, contact us or someone in your area if you live outside of Florida.