Anxiety Messing With My Time Management. How do I keep anxious thoughts off my mind?

[WJD]

Hey everyone,

I'm still currently in school (year 11) and have always had troubles with anxiety. This combined with having learning difficulties is not a fun experience. Despite this I do actually perform fairly well at school but couldn't help but realise how much my social anxiety effects how well I manage my time with not just school work but everyday activities. What I mean by this is whenever I face a traumatising social experience all I can do when I get home is keep thinking about that experience and what people would of thought of me at the time, and the thought keeps occurring over and over again until I gradually forget about it. This can put me really behind on all the tasks I need to get done. The thing that sucks is if or when I do university i'm probably going have to face these social experiences on a daily basis so I was looking to develop management techniques for how I can keep these events off my mind. I searched online but couldn't find any helpful advice as no one seems to link poor time management to social anxiety. This is something I really have to fix because in order to get good grades it feels like I have to dedicate almost my entire life to studying due to the effect my anxiety has on me managing my time, so if you know any useful techniques for managing my anxiety in situations where I need to get stuff done it would be really helpful.

[Hope_for_the_best]

Have you tried counselling? Your core issue is social anxiety, so getting it addressed will help you to stress less. On top of it, have you heard about a strategy called "creating a worry period"? Basically, it means you set a fixed time each day to worry about things, but at other times you don't worry about anything. It may come handy when you need to concentrate and study. Say when a particular worry pops up during your studies, you jot that down but worry about it in your scheduled period.

[BballJ]

Hi WJD,

I think any form of anxiety can lead to poor time management, anxiety lets us dwell on silly things and we almost just lose track of time because of it. Like Hope.for.the.best said above, have you ever considered counselling at all? It may be something to look into so you can better understand why you have social anxiety and how it all relates, I think if you can understand why it happens and get to the core of it, you may be able to almost learn to live with it without affecting your day to day life. Counsellors generally will also give you techniques to deal with the worry as what works for one person may not work for another person.

You have everything to gain by seeking as much help as possible and these forums are great for that but also have a trained professional can help a lot as well.

My best for you,

Jay

[WJD]

Hi Hope.for.the.best,

I've been doing counselling for a while and aim to bring the issue up next session. It's probably something I should of brought up by now but I keep putting it off.

I will give creating a worry period a try. Not sure if it'll work for me but i'll see how it goes anyway.

Thanks for the advice.