Hi. This is Dr. John Dacey, with my weekly podcast, New Solutions to the Anxiety Epidemic. If you have started carrying out a plan to reduce your anxiety levels, and I hope you have, it’s time to lay the groundwork for evaluating your progrgess. I’m going to introduce you to the concept of formative evaluation. The good news about formative evaluation, that is, checking while your plan is in effect, is that once we learn to do it, this process alone can help to reduce anxiety. Evaluating progress in your plan as you are carrying it out offers several advantages:

It helps you gain perspective on the problem.

It takes you away from your worries about future dangers back to a concern with the present (called “centering,” as you may remember). Concentration on checking progress often also disrupts anxious thoughts.

Being self-aware tends to breed a sense of self-control.

Evaluation causes you to think of yourself as a person who "has anxiety," rather than a person who "is anxious." This allows anxiety to be seen as a part of you rather than the whole, and thus it becomes more manageable.

Formative evaluation encourages “how” questions (“How are you feeling right now?”) and “what” questions ("What is the most troubling aspect of your situation?"). These promote the sense of being a "self-observer." "Why" questions, on the other hand, only produce more worrying.

At its best, formative evaluation amounts to what has been called "watching myself watch myself." When you master this skill, your anxiety levels are always reduced.

In this section, I present activities that illustrate effective strategies: charting; using drawings; getting help from buddies or from a therapist; check listing; journaling; and photographing. I hope that as you learn the techniques I recommend, the beneficial outcomes of evaluation will become obvious to you. I feel certain that you will experience these benefits.

Checklists and Charting

A major problem with most anxieties is that they tend to build up to a high level of stress without your being aware of it.  Checklists and charts can help you keep track of the symptoms of your anxiety while you carry your out his current plan. They also inform you of the frequency of certain symptoms that may be reoccurring.

There are many ways to use charts to keep track of the effectiveness of your plan. For example:

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday