Celebrate your achievements | @caroline-cavanagh | Anxiety Speacialist

1 Aug 2025 · 1 min

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1:25

In this monologue, anxiety therapist Caroline Cavanagh explains how anxiety is reinforced by repeated fear‑inducing experiences, leading to entrenched negative patterns. She emphasizes the therapeutic value of creating new, positive behaviours and shares a concrete habit she has adopted herself: recording a short video every Friday that lists her professional achievements. This weekly "achievements diary" is presented as a counterbalance to typical to‑do lists, which can feel negative, and is intended to build a habit that reinforces a sense of accomplishment and reduces anxiety over time.

Chapters

A lot of anxiety is built up through repeated behaviour. You do something, it was a bit fear-inducing, so the next time you come around to facing the same thing, the mind remembers it was scary last time, so it evokes that emotion in advance. And the more it happens, the more embedded it becomes, and patterns of behaviour arise. A lot of the work that I do with people is about creating new behaviours, new positive patterns, and to be honest, it takes a little bit of work. And one of the things that's really important to me in the work that I do as a therapist is to practice what I preach. And so I made a commitment to some clients recently to create a diary once a week. It was all around focusing on what you've achieved. We all do to-do lists, but they can be quite negative because the more you cross off, the more you tend to put on. And so one of the things that I ask people to do is an achievements list. What have you done successfully? And so my new habit is every Friday to record a video on the things that I've achieved as a therapist. And it's 10 to 6 on a Friday evening. I would much rather be actually doing something else at the moment, but I want to create a habit. So the more I do this, the easier it is going to become.