Creating Calm The 3A Toolkit Approach to Managing Stress and Anxiety ADULT EDITION
PART ONE: THE ESSENTIALS
Welcome to the Creating Calm: 3A Toolkit for Managing Stress and Anxiety (Adult Edition) workbook! This workbook will explore the nature of anxiety, including helpful information about how your brain and body are involved in how you experience anxiety. You will also learn about the 3A Toolkit approach to managing stress and anxiety. This includes walking through the three sections of the 3A Toolkit: Awareness, Assign a Label, and Action. Finally, you will build your own personal 3A Toolkit to help you best manage your anxiety. I look forward to taking this journey with you as you develop your own personal toolkit for managing stress and anxiety. Even more important, I’m excited for you to feel like you are making choices in your life instead of letting stress and anxiety make the choices for you. Just imagine what will be different. There are three parts to this workbook. Part One: The Essentials includes information and strategies that are important for everyone who is dealing with stress and anxiety. The workbook starts with an overview of the nature of stress and anxiety. The is followed by a discussion of what is called “Your Foundation”. These are common factors that boost overall mental health and are important for increasing your wellbeing and giving you the resources you need to continue to tackle stress and anxiety. Next, an overview of the 3A Toolkit approach for managing stress and anxiety is provided. This is followed by a more thorough explanation of strategies to regulate your body’s response to stress and anxiety as well as strategies to address your thinking. The final two chapters in Part One: The Essentials takes you through a critical process of reflection that will boost your chances of successfully managing anxiety, the Debrief. In The Debrief, you will learn how to draw from past experiences of being anxious and use these as opportunities to apply what you are learning in this workbook and modify your perception of how you manage your anxiety. This important process helps you to understand and transform previous anxious experiences as well as prepare for how to manage present and future stress and anxiety. The final chapter in Part One: The Essentials will help you address the issue of avoidance, which is all too
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