PART ONE: THE ESSENTIALS

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

common with anxiety. You will have the opportunity to examine behaviours that may be keeping you stuck in an anxious experience and create new and healthier patterns.

For many people, and for a variety of different reasons, challenges with managing stress and anxiety can be pervasive and persistent and really hard to change. This may be because of how long you have been struggling with anxiety, this may be because you have had some really bad experiences in your life, and it may be because you are also dealing with several other challenges at the same time as being anxious. If you relate to this, then Part Two: The Extras of this workbook is for you. Part Two: The Extras provides an additional focus on relationships, emotion, and memory as important areas to focus on for your wellbeing. While not everyone will need to draw from the information and strategies in Part Two: The Extras to manage your anxiety, you will still benefit from reading through these chapters.

Finally, Part Three: What’s Next contains helpful information for everyone in terms of looking forward to the road ahead. You will have worked very hard to get to this point. This final section will help you to keep the positive changes going.

I am really looking forward to accompanying you as you tackle this important process of learning to manage stress and anxiety. More importantly, I am excited for you to gain confidence in your own ability to manage your stress and anxiety. Just imagine how differently you will feel, think, and act when your anxiety is taking up less of your internal space!