Expose the loop your anxiety hides inside to take back control

You notice the tightness first, the way your shoulders creep toward your ears when a vague subject line lands in your inbox. Before you know it, your thumb is on autopilot, refreshing messages, then the news, then the weather, anything to outrun the jitter. The coffee on your desk goes cold while the clock sprints. You tell yourself it’s preparation. It’s not. It’s a loop.

Take a pen and write one line from today: Trigger. Behavior. Result. The trigger is easy, a ping and a thought, “What if there’s bad news?” The behavior is familiar, you search for certainty by checking again. The result is subtle but real, a three-second exhale. Then it boomerangs into more tension. Map it once more from a different moment. You’ll see the same shape, like tracing the outline of a key you’ve been using in the dark.

A client once described how she would open the fridge every time she felt behind, take two bites standing up, then feel both soothed and stuck. She drew the loop on a sticky note and kept it by the fridge. After a week, the sticky note did more to change her evenings than any motivational quote. I might be wrong, but seeing cause and effect beats willpower when the day gets noisy.

Here’s why this simple map works. Your brain learns through reward-based loops: a trigger cues a behavior, and any relief—however brief—teaches your brain to repeat it. Mapping makes the relief visible and the cost obvious. You’re not shaming yourself, you’re revealing how a helpful survival system got trained by modern life. That awareness is the first gear of change, and it’s enough to start loosening the loop.

Before dinner, grab a scrap of paper and catch one fresh example. Name the specific trigger, then note what you did next and exactly what you got from it, even if it was only a tiny exhale. Circle that payoff so your brain understands why it returned to the behavior. Do a second quick map from another moment today to spot the pattern. Keep the two mini-maps somewhere visible tonight, like next to the sink or on your laptop. Let that little triangle of trigger, behavior, result remind you that you’re learning how your system works. Give it a try tonight.