Our anxious or unhelpful thoughts can trick us into thinking bad things are going to happen and can get in the way of us doing fun things or other things that we need to do! These thoughts stink! Unhelpful thoughts are the result of thinking errors. There are two types of thinking errors that generally cause anxiety:
- Probability: Overestimating how likely it is that something bad will happen (for example, “the dog will bite me if I pet him”)
- Consequences: Overestimating how bad it will be if something bad does happen (for example, “if I am bitten by the dog I will go to the hospital” or "it will be the worst thing ever if I am bitten")
Practicing steps in your mission plan can be like an experiment to test if our unhelpful thoughts were right or wrong. Keeping track of your practice activities can also help show you that doing something you used to think was super scary and going to lead to something bad happening really wasn’t that bad – maybe it was even fun!
There is one more thing to keep track of in your practice log this week after you practice a step of your mission plan - did you learn anything new? By filling this last column out, you will be able to look back at your anxious or unhelpful thoughts and see if they are right or wrong.
Here is Sally’s updated Mission Plan Practice Log as an example. You will see that most of the time the mission plan practice goes better than she thinks it will. It does not always work perfectly, like in her third example where she asks Rita for a pencil, but she is proud of herself for trying and is ready to keep practicing anyways:
Here is your new Mission Plan Practice Log to fill out this week. Whenever you complete a step this week, you or your parent should fill it in to keep track of all the awesome things you do (and the rewards to get for them)! Remember to reflect on how your practice went and what you learned from it in the last column.
| Date | Mission Plan Practice Activity | Reward | Anxiety Dial Rating 0-10 or Easy | Medium | Hard |
Did you learn anything new? For example: did it go better than you thought it would? Was it easier than you expected? Did it get easier the more you did it? Did you get to do anything fun because of it? |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before | During | After | ||||
Ready for a new mission plan?
If you would like to focus on your first mission plan, great idea! Keep going!
However, if you feel you are ready to work on another fear, try to create a new mission plan on it. Talk to your parent and create one by looking at Module 4 again.
