To help reduce my anxiety, one of the things I have been working on is “not sweating the small stuff”. This is incredibly difficult for me, because not only do I have anxiety, but I also am have a complete Type A personlaity and a touch of OCD. I made mountains out of molehills constantly.
It is a work in progress and I try to keep things in perspective. I have a really beautiful bathroom with a double sink vanity. When I lived with my exhusband, my sink was the left and his was the right.
Now that I live alone, I still use the left hand sink just out of habit. Recently, the faucet started to leak. It was just an occasional drip, but then just kept getting worse. I tried to fix it today (I am pretty handy and my father worked in the plumbing industry for decades so I understand the basics) and somehow I made it worse! It started running steadily, when when the handle was off. Then I tinkered under the sink and made something under there leak. I was starting to feel anxious. One of my big triggers has always been something breaking in the house and not being able to fix it. It makes me feel so out of control and helpless. I have lived alone for a long time now and have tried to work on this, because something is ALWAYS broken when you have a house (lol truth!!)
I finally just needed to walk away from the leaking sink. I turned the cold water off underneath and told myself not to sweat the small stuff. I reminded myself logically that nothing in the house was getting flooded or ruined, that it is probably an easy fix for a plumber or if I do more research, AND in the meantime I have another sink right next to it that I can use.
This all seems so dumb and trivial as I am writing it out. I know so many people that have “real” problems and I also hear my therapist saying that my problems are real to me and not to compare myself to other people. I am just trying to keep things in perspective and not obsess over this.
Anxious ACOA 