A change in my blogging - just for a year

Here's the scoop:

I have chosen to change the way I will be blogging this year. 

In the past, I've always created blog posts focusing on and centered around individual events, and I really like blogging that way. I like coming up with creative titles and sharing details and photos that tell the story in a narrative way.

But this year, my college requirements have become more challenging, time-consuming, and stressful. In the next 10 months, I have to complete over 30 credits, pass the Praxis II test, and finish and submit my Field Experiences application. It all feels so overwhelming to me...and since my anxiety is getting worse the older I get, I've got major anxiety about getting it all done. I read a website the other day that gave tips for people to help coach themselves through anxiety, and I found it very useful. Here's the 5 suggestions it listed: 

1. Talk It Out

One of the fastest ways to get your anxiety out of you is to simply share it with another person. Everybody should have one person that they can share their entire heart and mind with. {I do this with Josh--He's my rock!!}

2. Write It Out

One way to get the energy and thoughts that keep you stuck and swimming in overwhelm and pressure is to get the thoughts out by writing the anxiety out of you. {YES!! This may be why I love blogging so much and why it's so therapeutic for me.}

3. Think It Out

Much of our pressures day in and day out will come from our repetitive thoughts that don’t serve us or that aren’t even accurate, but they feel incredibly real. Our negative thoughts create negative feelings and those feelings over time are what constitute our pressurized world. One of the fastest ways to change the thought is to redirect it from a negative thought to a positive thought. {This is definitely true--I have a lot of negative thoughts constantly in my mind, and I need to work on changing that.}

4. Chunk It Out

Sometimes the reason anxiety is so consistently upon us might be because of our brain's ability to blow certain situations out of proportion. Anxiety makes us feel like some things are way too big to handle. One way to change the scope of the things that stress you out is by re-framing the problem in a more achievable way. Instead of feeling overwhelmed that you have to do everything that needs to get done all at once, chunk your stresses down into bite-sized pieced that seem more manageable. {I find myself doing this often, and it definitely helps.}

5. Turn It Out

Usually when feeling overwhelmed and overextended, our tendency is to withdraw into our own little shell and maybe hide from everyone else. Instead of letting our anxiety get the best of us, we need to use our nervous energy to get out of ourselves and redirect the energy toward the service of others. {I know I have this tendency, which is why I've tried to make a goal the past few years to encourage myself to do more service.}

So...in order to devote more time to my schooling, accomplish the tasks that I need to, and keep my anxiety under control, I've decided that I will devote just one day a week for blogging: Sunday afternoons. And in order to stay up-to-date on my blogging about our family and not get super behind (which would cause me even more stress because of how much I am devoted to blogging), I will be posting about the entire week's events rather than doing posts about individual events like I used to. So in 2016, I will be posting a weekly synopsis about our family life on a weekly basis! I've been frantically back-blogging so that I could start the new year off without already being way behind, and I've finally caught up to January's happenings, so I will be starting the weekly update tomorrow! Here's to a year of growth, change, and commitment (and here's to chunking it out and writing it out to help make that happen with less anxiety!)!