Ep. 62: The Anxiety of Decision Making

Your Anxiety Toolkit - Anxiety & OCD Strategies for Everyday

Kimberley Quinlan, LMFT | Anxiety & OCD Specialist

Self-improvement, Education, Anxietymindfulnessmeditation, Mental Health, Health & Fitness

4.9 • 802 Ratings

🗓️ 16 August 2018

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Anxiety of Decision Making Is REAL and EXHAUSTING!

Anxiety of Decision Making CBT Mindfulness Uncertainty Perfectionism Obsessive Compulsive Disorder OCD Anxiety Eating Disorder BRFB's Your Anxiety Toolkit Kimberley Quinlan

Experiencing and managing anxiety is a hard and courageous task. And you guys know what I am going to say next. It is a beautiful day to do hard things! One activity that is made difficult by anxiety is the process of making decisions. Making decisions can be exhausting and brings up a lot for us.

When making decisions, we might be faced with anxiety about making the “right” decision. We might also be faced with the anxiety of making the decision that won't hurt others or impact others negatively. We might also be faced with anxiety that our decision will cause us to miss out on something better or more beneficial to our long term goals. This constitutes the anxiety of decision making. Basically, making decisions is the ULTIMATE exposure to uncertainty and tolerating discomfort. There is no way to make a decision without acknowledging and facing uncertainty. Here is a teaser from the episode. Even when you put the decision making aside, you are actually making a decision. Not making a decision is technically making a decision you didn’t even know existed. This weeks podcast is all about The Anxiety of Decision Making. We go over some of the themes that come up surrounding decision making such as Hyper-responsibility, Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) and Perfectionism. We also talk about how we must embrace uncertainty in our lives and accept that life doesn’t need to be perfect. This can be easier said than done, so we discuss some important mindfulness tools which can help us manage perfectionism, hyper-responsibility and Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) when it comes to decision making. We hope you enjoy this week's podcast episode or Your Anxiety Toolkit. Also guys, we are excited to share that ERP SCHOOL is going to be released VERY soon, so keep your eyes out. CBT School is also excited to share that our lovely friend Stuart Ralph is offering The OCD Summit, an online summit specifically for OCD therapists. The OCD Summit will be a 6-week webinar series where Stuart Ralph, host of The OCD Stories podcast, will interview some incredible scientists and clinicians in the OCD field, with you the therapist as the audience. Kimberley is honored to be selected to be one of the panelists for this exciting event. Registration will include 6 topics curated for your continued development as an OCD therapist, where you can ask questions and network with other therapists in the private FB group community. Click here to join.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is Your Anxiety Toolkit episode number 62.
0:10.6	Welcome to Your Anxiety Toolkit. I'm your host, Kimberly Quinlan. This podcast is fueled by three
0:17.6	main goals. The first goal is to provide you with some extra tools to help you
0:22.2	manage your anxiety. Second goal, to inspire you. Anxiety doesn't get to decide how you live your life.
0:30.0	And number three, and I leave the best for last, is to provide you with one big, fat virtual hug,
0:37.2	because experiencing anxiety ain't easy. If that sounds good to you,
0:41.3	let's go. Well, welcome back CBT school community and family. I am so thrilled to have you with me. I really do hope that you got to listen
0:57.8	to last week's episode with Tara Brock. Literally, best day of my life. No, that's not true. My best day of
1:05.6	my life was the day my kids were born and maybe my wedding, but this was really, really high up there and was
1:12.1	best day of my career. By far, I just really, really hope that you guys got a chance to
1:17.3	listen to her amazing words and, you know, experience and receive her absolute beautiful
1:23.7	compassion and wisdom. So do go and check that out if you didn't get a chance.
1:29.3	Today, in this week's episode, I wanted to touch on something that has been a recurring theme
1:35.7	in my clinical life and in my personal life. And I was just thinking that if I'm experiencing
1:43.1	in so many places, I'm probably guessing you might have had some struggle in this area too.
1:50.4	And this specific topic is around decision making. Now, I get it. Making decisions big or small can be really, really difficult.
2:04.1	But I think that the degree in difficulty is very much based on how heavily we wait or how much weight we put on ourselves to make the quote, unquote, right choice. And when we look at this idea
2:22.7	around making the right choice, for those of us who struggle with decision making, you're going
2:29.0	to start to see common themes that continually and increasingly make it difficult. And one of those themes I
2:38.0	notice is very much perfectionism. So you can imagine if you had to make a decision, but you've had
2:47.8	to make the perfect choice, well, you've just upped the ante, right? Your anxiety's just
2:55.7	gone up because the stakes are so high. And so what I often will do is I'll talk to clients around
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Kimberley Quinlan, LMFT | Anxiety & OCD Specialist, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Kimberley Quinlan, LMFT | Anxiety & OCD Specialist and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.