Anxiety Resources

Anxiety Canada, originally AnxietyBC, was a charitable organization co-founded by the late Dr. Peter McLean and Dr. Maureen Whittal. It operated as a charity offering free resources for anxiety, trauma, and OCD between 1999-2025. We had to unfortunately shut our doors secondary to a lack of funding. Providing free resources costs money and there wasn’t enough of it coming in to support the charity. Sadly, the charity ceased operation April 30, 2025. The website, anxietycanada.com, was operational until March 31, 2026.

What is contained in these Anxiety Canada resources are many of the downloadable PDFs that were originally housed on the Anxiety Canada website. Hopefully what remains will be helpful to you.

#OurAnxietyStories, a podcast series that was hosted by Anxiety Canada can be found at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ouranxietystories/id1486254144

Hosting of #ouranxietystories is paid through March 2027.

To the professional community: Thank you for the support and encouragement you offered Anxiety Canada for a quarter of a century. Hopefully these pages will continue to be helpful to you and to your clients and patients.

To the lived experience community: If you are visiting these pages for the first time or a returning visitor from Anxiety Canada, hopefully these resources will help you and/or your family member to live a broader and more enriching life despite having anxiety.

Maureen L. Whittal, PhD., ABPP, LPsych
Director, Vancouver CBT Centre
Co-founder Anxiety Canada

Helpful How To Documents for Parents

Applied Tension for Children and Teens

Most people feel a bit uneasy when they see blood or have to get a needle. For some people, however, seeing blood or needles causes them to feel light-headed or actually faint. It is rare to faint from anxiety unless you have this problem. Children or teens who faint when they get an injection or have blood drawn might benefit from learning a simple technique that will help them either prevent fainting altogether, or speed up the recovery time if they do faint.

Download this resource to learn about Applied Tension Technique and how to use it as a strategy to help prevent fainting and reduce anxiety.

Building Distress Tolerance

Children and teens often look to parents, teachers, and trusted adults for reassurance and help when they face anxiety. With the help of adults, they can learn how to face their fears and lean in to uncertainty.

Parents can use this resource to note how they are responding to their child’s needs. Key reminders include:

Is my way of “helping” actually “helpful?”
Has what I’ve been doing actually been working? If no, why am I continuing to use this strategy?
Are my own thoughts and feelings (and resulting distress) not allowing my child to experience distress? Is this removing their chance to building tolerance and coping skills? Can they build a skill if never allowed to practice using it?
Am I choosing short-term pain/distress relief instead of working towards long-term relief?

How To Teach Your Child Calm Breathing

Calm breathing is a technique that teaches children to slow down their breathing when feeling stressed or anxious.

It is an important tool to learn because when a child is feeling anxious, their breathing will change. When we are anxious, we tend to take short, quick, shallow breaths or even hyperventilate. This type of anxious breathing can make the feeling of anxiety worse. Doing calm breathing can help lower your child’s anxiety, and give them a sense of control.

Download this resource to learn how to use calm breathing as a portable tool that your child can use when feeling anxious, especially in situations when you are not there to help them through it.

Helping Your Child Sleep Alone or Away From Home

Many anxious children and teens feel a sense of security by sleeping close to their parents. Children and teens with separation anxiety may plead, beg, or have a tantrum to sleep in your bed. This can cause problems, not only for your child, but also for you. When anxious children and teens sleep in their parents’ bed, they’re not facing their fears and will continue to fear sleeping alone. The child does not learn how to calm themselves down, and they do not see that everything will be okay.

Many parents or caregivers are unsure of how to help their child feel more secure sleeping alone. Download this helpful resource to help you and your child work through anxiety related to sleeping alone.

How To Do Progressive Muscle Relaxation

Progressive Muscle Relaxation teaches you how to relax your muscles through a two step process. First, you systematically tense particular muscle groups in your body, such as your neck and shoulders. Next, you release the tension and notice how your muscles feel when you relax them. This exercise will help you to lower your overall tension and stress levels, and help you relax when you are feeling anxious. It can also help reduce physical problems such as stomach aches and headaches, as well as improve your sleep.

People with anxiety are often so tense throughout the day that they don’t even recognize what being relaxed feels like. Through practice you can learn to distinguish between the feelings of a tensed muscle and a completely relaxed muscle. Then, you can begin to “cue” this relaxed state at the first sign of the muscle tension that accompanies your feelings of anxiety. By tensing and releasing, you learn not only what relaxation feels like, but also to recognize when you are starting to get tense during the day.

Download this helpful resource to learn how to use progressive muscle relaxation as a tool for coping with anxiety.

How to Cope with Nightmares

Nightmares are a common childhood experience, but frequent bad dreams can disrupt sleep and increase anxiety—for both children and parents. While comforting your child in the moment is natural, some common reassurance strategies can unintentionally reinforce distress.

This resource explores evidence-based techniques to help children manage nightmares effectively. Learn how to:

✅ Provide comfort while fostering independence
✅ Use distraction, coping strategies, and positive reinforcement
✅ Address recurring nightmares and build resilience

Empower your child with the tools they need to feel confident at bedtime using the tips in this resource.

Helping Your Child Overcome Perfectionism

Perfectionism in children and teens can look like:

Tendency to become highly anxious, angry or upset about making mistakes
Chronic procrastination and difficulty completing tasks
Easily frustrated and gives up easily
Chronic fear of embarrassment or humiliation
Overly cautious and thorough in tasks (for example, spending 3 hours on homework that should take 20 minutes)
Tries to improve things by rewriting
Frequent catastrophic reactions or meltdowns when things don’t go perfectly or as expected Refusal to try new things and risk making mistakes

Use this helpful guide to help your child overcome perfectionism.

Realistic Thinking

We can all be bogged down by negative thinking from time to time, such as calling ourselves mean names (e.g., “idiot” or “loser”), thinking no one likes us, expecting something, terrible will happen, or believing that we can’t overcome something no matter how hard we try. This is normal. No one thinks positively all of the time, particularly when feeling anxious. When we are anxious, we tend to see the world as a threatening and dangerous place.

An effective strategy to manage your anxiety is to replace anxious, negative thinking with realistic thinking. Download this guide to help your child work through anxious thoughts and replace them with more helpful, realistic thinking.

My Fear Thermometer

A fear thermometer helps your child organize or rank the things and situations that make them feel anxious. The things/situations that make your child only a little worried are near a 1 on the thermometer. The things/situations that make your child the most worried are usually ranked near 10 on the thermometer.

Use this meter to facilitate discussions around fear with your child, which can then lead to working on creating a fear ladder together to overcome certain fears.

How To Address Test Anxiety

Exam anxiety can cause students to “go blank,” become frustrated, or doubt their intellectual abilities.

This test anxiety booklet helps students and parents better understand exam anxiety and offers methods to help students cope with test anxiety and succeed in their courses. Students should read this booklet carefully, consider which aspects of test anxiety applies to them, then identify coping strategies that may help address the anxiety.

The booklet includes the following:

Part 1: Identifying test anxiety

Part 2: Think about thinking

Realistic thinking for test anxiety
Thinking traps & test anxiety

Part 3: Coping with test anxiety

Realistic thinking & test anxiety form
Helpful realistic thinking tips
Dealing with physical tension to help test anxiety
Reducing test anxiety
Do’s and don’ts of dealing with test anxiety

Part 4: Tips for test success

Test preparation tips
Test taking tips

Part 5: How to study

Time management: Planning your success
How to study effectively

Ideally, parents would read this resource with their student and participate in the resulting discussion and identification of coping strategies. Remember that support from family members is always positive and will ultimately help students deal with their anxiety.

8 Parenting Strategies to Help Children Who Experience Needle Anxiety and Fear

Does your child fear needles? Learn how you can support them through their fear and anxiety around needles with these eight strategies for parents.

How To Address Excessive Reassurance Seeking

Children and teens look to parents, teachers, and trusted adults for information about the world around them. With the help of adults, they reach milestones and mature into adulthood. But some children and teens become reliant on reassurance and comfort from adults; they fear that expected outcomes will not occur for them and need more than simple reassurances, like “You’ve studied enough. You’ll do fine.”

Excessive reassurance seeking occurs when young people show dissatisfaction or frustration when you attempt to comfort them and/or seem to need unending examples, promises, and guarantees.

Giving reassurance over and over again is not only exhausting but also doesn’t work. Use this resource to learn more about what anxiety experts recommend. There are methods that can work for many families, including the “all-at-once method” and “the gradual method.”

What Am I Thinking?

Sometimes children need a visual to illustrate how they’re feeling or what they’re thinking. Children often do not recognize their anxiety for what it is, but you can help educate and empower them to identify and manage anxious thoughts and feelings.

This print-out resource can help illustrate the connection between their emotions and thoughts. Children can explore how feelings can follow directly from their thoughts.

Use our resources to help children identify and differentiate between their emotions and thoughts, which can sometimes be worrying thoughts.

Thoughts Affect Feelings Form

This worksheet is intended to help a child pay more attention to how anxiety impacts them physically: what their physical symptoms of anxiety are in their body. Many children experience stomachaches or feel uncomfortable and restless with anxiety, and this helps them identify how they specifically experience stress and anxiety, as many people feel it differently in their body.

Once we can identify how we feel anxiety, our anxiety awareness helps us cope and catch it earlier, leading us to make better choices for ourselves sooner.

Visual exercises can help illustrate big feelings, tough emotions, and challenging thoughts. Children often don’t understand what anxiety is, even if they are feeling it themselves; visualizations and other useful activities can help them learn.

This print-out form can help children understand their anxiety better. Use our many helpful resources to support children in identifying their tricky thoughts and big feelings.

The STOP Plan Handout

The STOP Plan Handout is a worksheet intended for pre-teens to connect thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Using the principles of cognitive behavioural therapy, this CBT worksheet can help young people reframe thoughts.

The intention is to identify when we are feeling anxious and increase our awareness of how we feel anxiety, then we link this to what we are thinking in the moment. Once we are aware of our anxiety, we can focus on coming up with different thoughts about the situation (different “appraisals”) that can help us feel less anxiety about it.

Help young people challenge their anxious thoughts and achieve balanced thinking with the STOP Plan worksheet. Thank you to Dr. Daniel Chorney on our Scientific Advisory Committee for providing context on this resource.

Hopping Down the Worry Path

This worksheet offers a basic introduction to the anxiety coping tool of exposure. It covers the concept of exposures for very young children and visualizes exposure as “bunny hops” where you hop towards your goal of overcoming your fear, taking small steps (“hops”) along the way. The worksheet is intended for young children, aged six and under.

Help children face fear and anxiety with this helpful handout, and use it in conjunction with our other downloadable resources: Facing Fears – Exposures and Fear Thermometer. Children can fill out their fears and learn that we fight our fears by facing them.

Realistic Thinking for Teens

Help your children manage anxiety with this realistic thinking resource.

Imagining the worst can help us prepare for real danger, but this way of thinking can be overly negative and unrealistic, especially when there is no danger.

One strategy to help your child manage anxiety is learning to replace “anxious” or “worried” thinking with realistic thinking. This involves helping your child learn to see things in a clear and fair way without being overly negative. These strategies are aimed at older children or teens because some of these ideas may be more difficult for younger children to understand. However, remember that learning to think realistically can be difficult at any age, so give your child some time to learn and practice these skills.

Read more below or download the resource to help a child think realistically. To help younger children, see Healthy Thinking for Younger Children.

Chester The Cat Feels Anxious! Identifying Anxiety in the Body

Help children identify anxiety in the body with this printable anxiety resource. Use this print-out on Chester the Cat to help communicate with a child who is experiencing physical anxiety symptoms. Children can learn about where Chester feels anxiety and identify if they’ve felt the same.

Children often do not recognize their anxiety for what it is, so education is key. Kids may think there is something wrong with them or misinterpret their physical symptoms as health issues. Use this resource to help teach a child about anxiety and how to recognize physical anxiety. This print-out page pairs well with our other resource, “How Do I Feel Anxiety in My Body.”

Using this resource, children can learn that an upset stomach and other physical anxiety symptoms are normal, and though uncomfortable, will not harm them. Assure children that anxiety is normal and they are safe.

How Do I Feel Anxiety in My Body

Printable anxiety resource for children: Use this print-out visual to help communicate with a child who is experiencing anxiety. Whether in a classroom setting or at home, children can circle where in their body they are feeling the physical symptoms of anxiety.

A child may feel body sensations caused by anxiety and feel as though they are freezing up.

Ask your child where in their body they are feeling anxiety, and let them know it’s normal to feel physical symptoms when we’re worried; we may feel our hearts beat faster or like we can’t breathe. We may feel hot and sweaty or shaky. We may also experience an upset stomach. Let your child know that these physical sensations may not feel good, but they cannot hurt us.

What to do if you’re anxious or worried about coronavirus (COVID-19) (Punjabi)

How to Talk to Children with worry about the COVID-19 pandemic: A COVID-19 resource in Punjabi.

Talking To Kids About COVID-19 (Punjabi)

How to Talk to Children about the COVID-19 pandemic: A COVID-19 resource in Punjabi.

Helpful How To Documents for Self-Help (Adults)

Self-Help Strategies for GAD

People with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) worry excessively and uncontrollably about daily life events and activities. They often experience uncomfortable physical symptoms, including fatigue and sore muscles, and they can also have trouble sleeping and concentrating.

Learn self-help strategies for GAD and other useful information on the disorder.

Managing Your OCD at Home

Learn helpful strategies to manage obsessive-compulsive disorder at home.

Identifying and Supporting Students with OCD in Schools

Learn how to identify and support students with OCD in schools.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a neuropsychiatric illness that often begins in childhood and has significant impact on family, academic, occupational, and social functioning. Children and youth with OCD have obsessions or unwanted and upsetting thoughts, images or ideas that get stuck in their heads.

In order to ease their anxiety or to make the obsessions temporarily go away, they perform compulsions or ritualistic behaviours and routines over and over again. Obsessions and compulsions tend to be time consuming (more than 1 hour/day) and cause significant distress or interfere with students’ daily functioning at home and/or at school.

The information provided below is intended for educational and informational purposes only and should not substitute the opinion of mental health professionals.

Self-Help Strategies for Panic Disorder

Learn self-help strategies for Panic Disorder, an anxiety disorder characterized by repeated episodes of intense fear accompanied by physical symptoms that may include chest pain, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, dizziness, or abdominal distress.

Panic attacks are the body’s “fight-flight-freeze” response kicking in. This response gets our body ready to defend itself (for instance, our heart beats faster to pump blood to our muscles so we have the energy to run away or fight off danger). However, sometimes our body reacts when there is no real danger.

Panic attacks are harmless, although they can feel very uncomfortable or scary. Because panic attacks are the body’s “alarm system,” they are not designed to harm you. Panic attacks are also brief (typically lasting only 5 to 10 minutes at peak intensity), although they sometimes feel like they go on forever. Because panic attacks take up a lot of energy in the body, they quickly run out of gas. This is why they don’t last very long. Read more in the PDF below.

Self-Help Strategies for PTSD

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition triggered by experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event(s). Symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about the event. Learn about self-help strategies for PTSD, including calm breathing and other tools for anxiety management.

Self-Help Strategies for Social Anxiety

Learn Self-Help Tips for Social Anxiety with this informative PDF.

In this PDF, you will learn to cope with social anxiety using the following steps:

Step 1: Understand Anxiety
Understanding that anxiety is normal and has a purpose, to prepare us for danger, is the first step. The goal isn’t to eliminate it but to manage it. Realize that anxiety can sometimes mislead us into feeling danger where there isn’t any.

Step 2: Grasp Social Anxiety
Social anxiety is common and occurs when you fear judgment in social situations. It becomes problematic when it impairs your daily life. Knowing you’re not alone in this is essential. Fortunately, there are ways to manage social fears.

Step 3: Build Your Toolbox
For social anxiety disorder, your toolbox includes:

Observing Your Social Anxiety: Recognize situations causing anxiety and the physical symptoms involved by keeping a journal.
Learning to Relax: Techniques like calm breathing and muscle relaxation can reduce physical anxiety symptoms.
Realistic Thinking: Identify and challenge negative thoughts about social situations.
Facing Fears: Gradually confronting situations that trigger your social anxiety, beginning with less intimidating scenarios.
Meeting New People: Plan ways to expand your social network by participating in activities or groups where you can meet others.
Improving Social Skills: Enhance your communication skills if needed.

Step 4: Maintain Progress
Remember that managing anxiety is an ongoing process. Continue practicing these tools, even when you’re feeling better. Don’t be discouraged if you revert to old behaviors during stressful times; it’s normal. Coping with anxiety is a lifelong journey.

See a more detailed breakdown of these steps in the PDF below.

Managing Your Phobia

Is a specific phobia interfering with your life?

Phobias can make a person feel an intense and irrational fear about a specific situation, person, place, or object.

People who deal with a phobia often change the way they live to avoid what they find scary. The fear they feel exceeds any real danger from the thing that scares them. Phobias can stop them from doing things normally and might even cause panic attacks.

Thankfully, there are many ways to manage and overcome specific phobias. Learn how to manage your phobia with concrete steps using this self-help PDF.

Applied Tension Technique

Many people get a bit queasy at the sight of blood or needles, but for a rare few, it triggers fainting or near-fainting. This can be due to a sudden drop in heart rate or blood pressure. Anxious moments typically cause an increase in these, making actual fainting from anxiety unusual. However, a small minority may experience a sudden drop in blood pressure when faced with blood or needles, resulting in fainting. This response is called the vasovagal response.

Fortunately, there’s a way to prevent this: The Applied Tension Technique involves tensing muscles, which raises your blood pressure, making fainting less likely. To do it, sit comfortably, tense your arm, leg, and trunk muscles for 10-15 seconds, feel the warmth in your head, then relax for 20-30 seconds. Repeat five times. Practice is key for this technique to be effective, and you should practice for at least a week before using it in exposure exercises with blood or needles. Learn more about the Applied Tension Technique to prevent anxiety with this downloadable PDF.

Calm Breathing (Diaphragmatic Breathing)

Learn About Calm Breathing and How To Do It!

Some tips to get started:

Find a Comfortable Spot: Locate a cozy place to sit. Plant your feet firmly on the ground and ensure they’re comfortable. Close your eyes gently, or lower your gaze to the floor ahead. Relax your shoulders by allowing them to drop away from your ears and ease into a comfortable posture.

Focus on Your Breath: Pay attention to your natural breathing rhythm. Let it flow without any force or change.

Position Your Hands: Rest your hands lightly on your belly, with the fingertips of each hand lightly touching.

Inhale Slowly: Inhale gently through your nose. Feel your belly expand as you fill your lower lungs with air. There’s no need to take a deep breath; just allow it to be natural.

Exhale Gradually: Exhale slowly through your mouth. Notice your belly receding toward your spine as you release the breath. Imagine your belly as a balloon: fill it with air and then observe it deflate.

Practice Controlled Breathing: Inhale smoothly through your nose for a count of 1, 2, 3, 4, and hold. Then exhale through your mouth for 1, 2, 3, 4, and hold.

Repeat: Continue this pattern of slow breathing five more times. Feel the tension in your body gradually dissipate.

Learn more about calm breathing below.

Challenging Negative Thinking

Learn how to challenge negative thoughts to overcome and ‘boss back’ anxiety.

Use copies of the Helpful Thinking Form to regularly write down thoughts that make you anxious. Use the Challenging Negative Thinking handout to help you replace your anxious thoughts with more realistic ones.

Here’s an example to help you challenge your negative thinking:

If you have an important interview tomorrow and have been feeling quite anxious about it, you may think: “I’m going to mess up on the interview tomorrow.”

To challenge this thought, you can ask yourself the following questions:

Am I falling into a thinking trap?
Yes, I have fallen into the trap of fortune-telling, predicting that things will turn out badly before the event even takes place. But I still feel like I’ll definitely mess up.
Am I basing my judgment on the way I “feel” instead of the “facts”?
I might feel like I’m going to mess up, but there is no evidence to support it. I’m very qualified for the position. I have had interviews in the past and generally they have gone well.
Am I 100% sure that I will mess up?
No, but what if I mess up this time?
Well, what’s the worst that could happen? If the worst did happen, what could I do to cope with it?
The worst that could happen is that I don’t get a job I really wanted. It’ll be disappointing but it won’t be the end of the world. I can always ask for feedback to see whether there is anything I can do to improve my chances of getting another position similar to this one.

Questions to ask yourself to help challenge your negative thoughts or self-talk:

Am I falling into a thinking trap, e.g., catastrophizing or overestimating danger?
What is the evidence that this thought is true? What is the evidence that this it is not true?
Have I confused a thought with a fact?
What would I tell a friend if he/she had the same thought?
What would a friend say about my thought?
Am I 100% sure that ___________will happen?
How many times has __________happened before?
Is __________so important that my future depends on it?
What is the worst that could happen?
If it did happen, what could I do to cope with or handle it?
Is my judgment based on the way I feel instead of facts?
Am I confusing “possibility” with “certainty”? It may be possible, but is it likely?
Is this a hassle or a horror?

Effective Communication – Improving Your Social Skills

Strengthening your relationships can significantly reduce stress and anxiety, especially if you’re socially anxious. Building a support network of friends can act as a buffer against anxiety and low mood. However, if you’re avoiding social situations due to anxiety, you miss the chance to boost your confidence and develop communication skills.

Effective communication skills are vital for forming and maintaining friendships and a strong support system. Communication skills are learned through practice, including nonverbal communication, conversation skills, and assertiveness. Use this PDF to learn more about effective communication and improving your social skills.

Examples of Fear Ladders

When building a fear ladder and listing situations, places, or things that scare you and ranking them from the least scary to the scariest, you can create different fear ladders with lots of different steps for each of your goals (like talking to a classmate or doing a presentation). See some examples of fear ladders below for inspiration.

Exposure Exercises for Panic Disorder

Exposure therapy is a type of therapy in which you gradually engage in exposure to the things, situations, and/or activities that you fear. Here are some examples of exposure exercises specifically for panic disorder.

Facing Fears Form

Facing Fears – Exposure

An important step in managing anxiety involves facing feared situations, places or objects. It is normal to want to avoid the things you fear. However, avoidance prevents you from learning that the things you fear are not as dangerous as you think. The process of facing fears is called EXPOSURE. Exposure involves gradually and repeatedly going into feared situations until you feel less anxious. Exposure is not dangerous and will not make the fear worse. And after a while, your anxiety will naturally lessen.

Starting with situations that are less scary, you work your way up to facing things that cause you a great deal of anxiety. Over time, you build up confidence in those situations and may even come to enjoy them. This process often happens naturally. A person who is afraid of the water takes swimming lessons every week and practices putting their feet and legs in the water, then the whole body and, finally, diving underwater. People with a fear of water can learn to love swimming. The same process occurs when people learn to ride a bike, skate, or drive a car.

Fear Ladder Form

A Fear Ladder is a list of things that provoke fear or discomfort and situations you’d typically try to steer clear of. This list acts as a roadmap, helping determine what you should gradually confront and when you need help in conquering your fears.

Friends and Family Can Help

You can help a loved one with anxiety with this useful resource that outlines helpful (and unhelpful) things to say and do.

Anyone supporting a person in their life impacted by anxiety or an anxiety disorder should remember that, although it is important to face fears, it is best to do it gradually at a pace comfortable to the person trying to improve their anxiety symptoms. You can help them in a way that works for them. Learn strategies for friends and family to help those who are struggling with anxiety.

Guide For Goal Setting

Learn how to effectively set goals to help improve your quality of life and mental health using this downloadable PDF.

To set effective goals, follow these steps:

Identify Your Goals: Think about what you want to achieve in the short-term (weeks or months), medium-term (six months to a year), and long-term (lifetime) in various areas of your life. Make your goals realistic, specific, and relevant to personal growth.

Break Goals into Smaller Steps: Many goals can be divided into smaller, more manageable tasks. This is particularly useful for medium and long-term goals. For instance, if you aim to make new friends at work, start by asking a coworker about their weekend plans.

Identify Obstacles: Recognize any obstacles that might hinder your goal achievement. For example, if your goal is to go to the gym, an obstacle might be arranging childcare. Identify these barriers early.

Schedule Your Goals: Clearly define what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. Use a planner or calendar to help you stay organized. Flexibility is essential in case of unexpected hindrances.

Take Action: Start taking the necessary steps to accomplish your goals. Don’t wait for motivation to appear before acting; action often precedes motivation. Reward yourself for your achievements as motivation follows accomplishment. If you encounter difficulties, revise your goals, considering their realism and specificity.

Remember to start small, be patient, and avoid an “all or nothing” mindset. Focus on gradual progress and celebrate the goals you do achieve. Read a more detailed overview of Goal Setting below.

Tips For Healthy Living

Learn tips for healthy living to help manage anxiety.

Healthy living plays a crucial role in managing anxiety. Developing a healthy lifestyle doesn’t aim to eliminate anxiety (as it serves an adaptive purpose) but helps you function at your best. Here are tips for building a healthier lifestyle:

Set a Routine: Establish a daily routine for meals, work, relaxation, and bedtime, providing predictability and aiding anxiety management.

Stay Active: Regular exercise, even starting small with activities you enjoy, can significantly impact emotional and physical health, helping to manage stress and anxiety.

Eat Healthy: Consume balanced, consistent meals, reduce salt and sugar intake, and increase fruits, vegetables, and water.

Get a Good Night’s Sleep: Aim for 7-8 hours of sleep per night, but recognize individual sleep needs. Learn more about getting a good night’s sleep here.

Establish Social Supports: Maintain a supportive social network by fostering connections and having at least one good friend to confide in. Learn more about building a support network here.

Learn to Relax: Practice deep relaxation techniques like calm breathing and progressive muscle relaxation to reduce overall tension and stress.

Manage Your Time: Effectively schedule activities using a day planner, balancing responsibilities with relaxation and fun.

Solve Problems: Identify and address stressors by tackling problems methodically. Seek guidance on solving daily life issues.

Read additional tips in the helpful PDF below.

Remember to start small, set goals, be patient, and make gradual changes to your lifestyle for long-term benefits in managing anxiety.

How To Effectively Manage Obsessions

To effectively manage obsessions, it’s crucial to challenge unhelpful interpretations and replace them with more balanced ones. This process is especially valuable for individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), who tend to interpret unwanted thoughts as meaningful and dangerous. Here’s how to do it:

Identify Your Obsessions: Start by tracking your obsessions and the interpretations you give them over a week. This involves recording the situation, the obsessive thoughts, your emotional reactions, and the meanings or interpretations you attach to these thoughts.

Manage Obsessions with Tools:

Tool #1 – Know the Facts: Recognize that having unwanted thoughts is normal and doesn’t make you a bad person. Remind yourself that these thoughts are distressing but harmless.
Tool #2 – Realistic Thinking: Challenge thinking traps by identifying and challenging negative thought patterns. Strive for more realistic thinking.
Tool #3 – Challenge Unhelpful Interpretations: Ask specific questions to challenge and replace unhelpful interpretations, considering the evidence, advantages, and disadvantages of your thoughts.
Tool #4 – Specific Strategies: Use strategies like calculating the probability of danger, creating a responsibility pie to distribute accountability, placing yourself on a continuum to gain perspective, and conducting surveys to challenge the need for certainty.

By working through these tools and questioning your interpretations, you can develop more balanced and realistic perspectives on your obsessions. Keep in mind that this process may be challenging at first, but with practice, it becomes more manageable and effective.

Remember: It’s essential to persist, resist compulsions, and focus on more balanced interpretations to reduce the impact of obsessions, especially for individuals with OCD.

Read a more detailed breakdown of these tips in the helpful PDF below.

How To Do Progressive Muscle Relaxation

Download this helpful resource to learn how to use progressive muscle relaxation as a tool for coping with anxiety.

Obsession Challenging Form

Obsession Interpretation Form

Obsessive Fear Monitoring Form

OCD Support Groups Across Canada

This resource list is for parents, caregivers, and families of individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The following organizations offer opportunities to connect with others who share similar experiences, gain practical advice, and find a sense of community. Please note that the Canadian OCD Foundation does not endorse these resources or guarantee outcomes. The information provided is self-reported and for informational purposes only.

Finding The Right Treatment for OCD in Canada

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is one of the most misunderstood and stigmatized mental health conditions.

People with OCD experience obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are unwanted thoughts or images that make you feel distressed or anxious. If you don’t do anything about these thoughts, you’ll likely feel like something terrible will happen — you’ll crash a car, burn down your house, or harm others.

To relieve these feelings and prevent bad things from happening, those of us with OCD perform compulsive actions or get stuck inside a mental loop.

If you think you have OCD or have been diagnosed, the challenge is finding the best treatments and therapists.

How To Overcome Perfectionism

Perfectionism involves a tendency to set standards that are so high that they either cannot be met or are only met with great difficulty. Perfectionists tend to believe that anything short of perfection is horrible and that even minor imperfections will lead to catastrophe or greatly disappointing others.

Making mistakes isn’t meant to be so scary. Trying to be perfect is also likely to make you feel stressed and maybe even disappointed with yourself much of time because you are not able to meet your standards easily or at all. Over time, you may even start to believe that you are not as capable as others.

It’s worthwhile to consider loosening up your standards a bit to ease the stress and anxiety you may feel from trying so hard to be perfect.

With this helpful, how-to PDF, you can learn the steps to help you overcome perfectionism. The resource covers how to recognize perfectionism and high standards. It also highlights the importance of realistic thinking and looking at the big picture, as well as addressing the root of your perfectionism and identifying how high standards get in the way of your daily life.

Perfectionism affects how one thinks, behaves, and feels. If you have difficulties with perfectionism, the following examples may be familiar to you:

Feeling depressed, frustrated, anxious, and even angry, especially if you constantly criticize yourself for not doing a good enough job after spending a lot of time and effort on a task.
Black-and-white thinking (e.g., “Anything less than perfection is a failure”)
Catastrophic thinking (e.g., “If I make a mistake in front of my coworkers, I won’t be able to survive the humiliation”)
Probability overestimation (e.g., “My boss will think I am lazy if I take a couple of sick days”)
Should statements (e.g., “I should never come across as nervous or anxious”)
Chronic procrastination, difficulty completing tasks, or giving up easily
Overly cautious and thorough in tasks (e.g., spending 3 hours on a task that takes others 20 minutes to complete)
Excessive checking (e.g., spending 30 minutes looking over a brief email to your boss for possible spelling mistakes)
Constantly trying to improve things by re-doing them (e.g., rewriting a work document several times to make it “perfect”)
Agonizing over small details (e.g., what movie to rent)
Making elaborate “to-do” lists (e.g., when to get up, brush teeth, shower, etc.)
Avoiding trying new things and risking making mistakes

Use this resource to find helpful tips to overcome perfectionism, ask for help when you need it, set realistic goals, and reward yourself.

How To Solve Daily Life Problems

Learn how to problem solve like a pro!

Everyone has problems in their life. For the most part, we are able to quickly solve them without much trouble at all. We either come up with a quick solution or use a strategy that worked in the past. Problems become more difficult when there is no obvious solution and strategies that you have tried in the past don’t work. These types of problems cause a great deal of stress and anxiety, and they require a new and different strategy.

Learn the steps to solving your daily life problems, including:

Defining the problem
Goal-setting for the problem
Thinking up solutions
Deciding on a solution
Executing on the solution

Realistic Thinking Form

Use copies of this form to track the thoughts that make you anxious. Use the Challenging Negative Thinking form to help you replace anxious thoughts with more realistic ones.

Negative thoughts are normal and happen to all of us from time to time, but when we are anxious they are likely to happen more often and do more harm. It is important to pay attention to and learn to evaluate these negative thoughts. An effective strategy to manage your anxiety is to replace anxious, negative thinking with helpful or realistic thinking.

Helpful thinking means looking at all aspects of a situation (the positive, the negative, and the neutral) before drawing conclusions so we can see things realistically.

PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR SELF-TALK
Thoughts are the things that we say to ourselves without speaking out loud (self-talk). We all have our own way of thinking about things, and how we think has a big effect on how we feel. When we think that something bad will happen, we feel anxious.

IDENTIFY THOUGHTS THAT LEAD TO FEELINGS OF ANXIETY
It can take some time and practice to identify the specific thoughts that make you anxious, so pay attention to your shifts in anxiety, no matter how small. When you notice yourself getting more anxious, that is the time to ask yourself:

“What am I thinking right now?”
“What is making me feel anxious?”
“What am I worried will happen?”

EVALUATE AND CHALLENGE YOUR “ANXIOUS” THINKING
Often, our thoughts are just guesses and not actual facts, so it is helpful to challenge your anxious thoughts that can make you feel like something bad will definitely happen, even when it is highly unlikely.

Sometimes, our anxiety is the result of falling into thinking traps. Thinking traps are unfair or overly negative ways of seeing things. Use the Thinking Traps Form to help you identify which traps you might have fallen into.

Questions to help you challenge your anxious thoughts:

Am I falling into a thinking trap (e.g., catastrophizing or overestimating danger)?
What is the evidence that this thought is true? What is the evidence that this thought is not true?
What would I tell a friend if he/she had the same thought?
Am I 100% sure that ___________will happen?
If it did happen, what can I do to cope with or handle it?
Is my judgment based on the way I feel instead of facts?

An example of challenging negative thinking: If you have an important interview tomorrow and have been feeling quite anxious about it, you may think: “I’m going to mess up on the interview tomorrow.” To challenge this thought, you can ask yourself, Am I falling into a thinking trap? Yes, I have fallen into the trap of fortune-telling, predicting that things will turn out badly before the event even takes place. But I still feel like I’ll definitely mess up. Am I basing my judgment on the way I “feel” instead of the “facts”? I feel like I’m going to mess up, but there is no evidence to support that. I’m qualified for the position. I have had interviews in the past and generally they have gone well.

Realistic Thinking

How To Prevent A Relapse

If you have already done the work needed to reduce your anxiety symptoms, you may fear a relapse in symptoms. A relapse is a complete return to all of your old ways of thinking and behaving when you are anxious. People who have a relapse are usually doing the same things that they did before they learned some new strategies for managing anxiety.

Once your symptoms are reduced and you are feeling better, you want to make sure that you hold on to these positive changes in the long-term. People can slip back into old habits and can lose the improvements they’ve made in their life.

Good news: There are ways to prevent relapse and get control over lapses!

This resource covers the following, and more: What is the difference between a lapse and a relapse?

Understanding Sleep Biology

Struggling with sleep? Poor sleep can impact anxiety, mood, and overall health, but simply being told to “get more sleep” isn’t helpful. Our new resource explores sleep biology, explains how sleep drive and circadian rhythm work, and offers science-backed tips to improve sleep quality naturally.

Learn how to:

Optimize sleep drive by maintaining a consistent wake time and avoiding naps
Regulate your circadian rhythm with morning sunlight and dim evening lighting
Reduce wakefulness by managing caffeine, screen time, and stress before bed

Discover how to work with your body’s natural sleep cycle for better rest and improved mental well-being. This resource on sleep by Dr. Kyle Burns answers the following questions:

What is sleep biology and the science of sleep?

What is sleep drive, circadian rhythm, and wakefulness, and how can knowing more about these terms help us achieve better sleep?

How much sleep do you need?

What are best practices for good sleep hygiene?

Sleep Diary

A sleep diary is like a journal for your sleep habits. It helps you track things like when you go to bed, when you wake up, and if you wake up during the night. Plus, it can note naps, sleep quality, and other factors that impact your sleep. A sleep diary can help you spot patterns and problems with your sleep.

To keep one, use your sleep diary every day. If your sleep isn’t great and you’re using a diary, your doctor can use the info to help assess your health.

Getting A Good Night’s Sleep

Getting a good night’s sleep can improve your mental well-being and help you to better manage your anxiety.

Sleep problems can be the result of various conditions or medical problems. Therefore, it is important to discuss your sleep problems with your doctor.

Learn more about strategies to improve your sleep, including:

Creating a comfortable sleep environment
How to relax
The benefit of having a snack before bed
Getting physical
Setting a bedtime routine
Establishing a fixed wake time
Sleeping only when sleepy
Getting out of bed if you can’t fall asleep after 20 to 30 minutes
Challenging sleep worry that makes it even harder to sleep
Avoiding caffeine
Avoiding alcohol
No smoking before bed
Skipping naps
Natural light

This PDF also covers that the keys to success include starting small, consistency, patience, and charting your progress to combat sleep anxiety and become a better sleeper.

Thinking Traps

Identifying your thinking traps is a great first step to start managing anxiety.

Some people have lots of anxious thoughts about the future. Some focus more on what other people are thinking. Some fear danger and hyperfocus on staying safe. Others seem to always imagine the worst possible scenario!

Whatever thinking traps you tend to fall into, the first important step is to recognize your personal traps.

How To Tolerate Uncertainty

Dealing with uncertainty is an unavoidable part of daily life. Because we can’t see the future, we can never be certain about what exactly is going to happen day to day. Research has found that people vary in their ability to tolerate uncertainty. Some people are okay with having a lot of uncertainty in their lives, and other people cannot stand even a small amount of uncertainty. Anxious people, particularly those adults who worry excessively, are more likely to be very intolerant of uncertainty. They will often try to plan and prepare for everything as a way of avoiding or eliminating uncertainty.

So, what’s wrong with being intolerant of uncertainty? Obviously, it is normal, and even common, for most people to be a bit uncomfortable with uncertainty. We prefer to know that the restaurant we are going to serves food that we like, that at the party we were invited to there will be people we know, and that our boss tells us exactly what he thinks about our work performance. This knowledge feels more comfortable to us than not knowing anything about the restaurant we are going to, being unsure about who will be at the party, and not knowing whether our boss thinks we are doing a good or a bad job.

This free, downloadable PDF guide explores how intolerance of uncertainty fuels excessive worry and outlines practical, evidence-based strategies to help you build resilience. Learn how to reduce reassurance-seeking, procrastination, and avoidance while gradually increasing your ability to tolerate the unknown with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) techniques.

Unhelpful Interpretations of Obsessions

When it comes to anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, there are helpful and unhelpful ways to interpret obsessions and compulsions.

Some Unhelpful Interpretations of Obsessions include: Thought-action fusion, Inflated responsibility, Overestimation of threat, Mental control failure, Perfectionism, and Intolerance of uncertainty. Find examples of each in the PDF below.

What is Anxiety?

What is anxiety?

Most people do not recognize their anxiety for what it is, and instead think there is something “wrong” with them.

Some people are preoccupied with the physical symptoms of anxiety (e.g., stomach aches, increased heart rate, shortness of breath, etc.). Others don’t understand what is happening to them, making them even more anxious and self-conscious. The first step to successfully managing anxiety is to learn to understand and recognize it. Learn more about anxiety and why anxiety education is important with this informative PDF.

What is CBT?

Learn about the principles of CBT, or Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, a psychological treatment that was developed through scientific research.

Research has shown that CBT is one of the most effective treatments for managing anxiety. The good news is that although it is best done with a trained CBT therapist, you can apply CBT principles at home to manage your own anxiety and conquer your fears.

CBT involves learning new skills to manage your symptoms. It teaches you new ways of thinking and behaving that can help you get control over your anxiety long-term. Use this downloadable resource to learn the principles important to understanding CBT.

Worry Diary

Anxious thoughts are usually extreme, unbalanced, and overly negative, but they can feel true, especially if it feels familiar to you (maybe because you have told it to yourself thousands of times).

To challenge these thoughts, let your anxious thoughts come and go, then challenge your thoughts and come up with more helpful self-talk. Ignoring or dismissing your anxious thoughts may feel helpful in the moment, but in reality, this method of approaching anxiety can make you feel worse. Sure, you can postpone them for a bit, but the thoughts tend to come back and present even more persistent.

To challenge thoughts and take the first step in your anxiety management journey, start to pay attention to what you say to yourself. This can be difficult because thoughts can be so fleeting and automatic. Lots of people find it helpful to practice writing down their thoughts in a Worry Diary.

Worry Diary exercise: For two weeks, write down your worries as they pop up. By writing them down, you don’t have to “keep track” of your worries in your head anymore. You may find that a lot of worries don’t seem so powerful a few hours later, and especially after a good night’s sleep.

How To Write A Worry Script

Learn how to write a Worry Script for hypothetical worries.

When you’re troubled by hypothetical scenarios that you can’t act on in the moment, like fearing your baby might fall seriously ill in the future, it’s essential to face those fears differently. Instead of merely listing your worries, create a worry script. In this script, you’ll vividly describe your worry as if it’s happening right now, evoking the emotions tied to it. For example, if you fear a medical emergency, your script might detail the fear of the illness or injury, the rush to the hospital, and the challenges of recovery.

Writing a worry script might feel uncomfortable initially, but research indicates it can effectively reduce anxiety and worries over time. This technique allows you to confront your fears and visualize potential outcomes more clearly, rather than leaving them vague and unsettling.

7 Strategies for Dealing with Needle Fear and Anxiety

Learn strategies to help face fear of needles.

The Overlap Between Anxiety and Eating Disorders

Did you know that anxiety disorders and eating disorders can overlap?

Anxiety and eating disorders often exhibit a significant overlap, with each condition influencing the other. Anxiety can trigger and exacerbate eating disorders due to the intense fear or anxiety surrounding body image and food. Conversely, individuals with eating disorders frequently experience heightened anxiety, which can result from the emotional distress linked to disordered eating patterns and distorted body image. The overlap between anxiety and eating disorders emphasizes the importance of addressing both aspects in treatment to achieve comprehensive recovery and mental well-being.

Learn more about the overlap between anxiety and eating disorders in this PDF.

Strategies for Stress Following Traumatic Situations

Strategies to USE when facing acute stress response following traumatic situations (English & Ukrainian versions)

Helping Children and Teens with War-Related Stress (and Other Traumatic Events)

Children caught in a war zone may experience or witness horrible events, including death, injury, bombing, food insecurity, violence, urgent relocation, and separation from family, friends, and loved ones.

These frightening events can cause a range of responses. Some are normal and expected, especially right after an upsetting event. If these responses continue beyond a month, it may be a sign of a child needing more help.

Download this resource to learn about the signs of traumatic stress and anxiety in children and strategies to help children exposed to war or other traumatic events

How to Talk to Children and Adolescents About War

This is a helpful resource for parents, caregivers and teachers about how to talk to children and adolescents about war. Often, when children are confronted with upsetting sights, sounds, or content, parents engage in avoidance, hiding or protecting their children from whatever may be upsetting to them. Parents and caregivers often do what it takes to lessen or remove the source of upset in the quickest way possible.

Unfortunately, avoidance is not a helpful long-term solution to protect youth. At some point, children or adolescents will witness or experience a troubling event or come across information they find upsetting or shocking. Even though it may be tempting to continue to use avoidance, it is important to help your child or teen learn how to cope.

Download this resource to help facilitate a conversation and safe space to talk about war-related trauma and anxiety triggered by traumatic events.

Helping Children and Teens with War-Related Stress

Download this resource to learn about the signs of traumatic stress and anxiety in children and strategies to help children exposed to war or other traumatic events.

Anxiety Canada Resources

Helpful How To Documents for Parents

Helpful How To Documents for Self-Help (Adults)

Strategies for Stress Following Traumatic Situations