I've developed a plan for my self-triggered anxiety over the next four years. (I'm the queen of "what-ifs.")

And as many of you know, if your anxiety is up, your thinking skills are down, making everything worse.

So I'm focusing on what's under my control. Caring for myself, my home family, and my work family, which is about 50 other school personnel and our students. I work in Special Ed, and a lot of our kiddos also experience anxiety, so I'm going to double down on teaching them how to get the anxiety under control by getting organized. If they're doing word problems, I'm going to show them how to slow down, make sure they understand the problem, and if not _why_. I watched them just take their midyear standardized tests, and saw eyes glazing over at the avalanche of text sweeping them away. It looked scary, and it felt like they didn't know what to do, so they panic-poked at a multiple choice answer and went through the same cycle another forty or so times.

But now I'm going to work with them on how to close read, find what's important, and zero in on any words they don't know, because if they don't know it, they automatically assume they can't do anything about it. This is not necessarily true. If they finish evaluating the problem with the checklist I'm giving them, and still genuinely think they can't do it because no one ever taught them how to find the volume of a rectangular prism, then it's now reasonable to say, "I don't have all the information I need to do this," rule out some bad answer options, pick the best guess, and move on with life. Yes, I need to give them reading and math skills, but without skills to lower anxiety, sharpen thinking, and get themselves organized then I am literally sending them out into the world armed with a phonics chart and the twos times table.

So that's my healthy plan to manage my anxiety, by helping my kiddos manage theirs. I'll step up and call congress critters over larger stuff, but by and large my focus is on the kids at school. Anyone else have a plan to tackle their anxiety?