The Living Your Values Exercise

One of my favorite therapy exercises is to sort out values in a visual way.  We rarely get the opportunity to step back and ask ourselves, are we actually prioritizing what matters most to us?

First, I ask clients to sort about 100 value cards into the three categories: Matters the Most to Me, Matters Some to Me, and Doesn’t Matter to Me.  Then, we pick the top five from Matters Most and discuss how their lives embody these ideals.    

Next, I ask my clients to choose the five cards that are most valued by their Anxiety.  

Some people are stumped.  Others immediately pull out an assortment that almost never correlates with their core values.  Often, anxiety over-values: order, excellence, career, safety, health, and perfection.  

Many of us are not living out our values to the fullest, but rather, we are prioritizing our anxiety’s values.  

Part of OCD Treatment at Kairos Wellness Collective involves externalizing our OCD and Anxiety voice and realizing that it is operating with separate principles from our core selves.  

The reason why anxiety gets so much power is that it is much easier in the short term to appease our anxious tendencies with compulsions.  We are putting out the little fires lit by our anxiety and practicing distress-avoidance in the short term.  However, in the long term, we are more likely to be unsatisfied and experience depression, because we are not prioritizing our core values.