Managing more than one plan at a time can be challenging and requires structure and planning to be successful. Here are a few tips that may help you with this!
Collaboration:
It’s usually best for you and your child to make the decision to start on a new plan together! Talk with your child about their current plan of action and see how they are feeling about it. What does your child think? Do they feel ready to tackle a new fear or work towards a new goal? Do they feel like they need to keep their focus on their current plan? Reflect on your child’s progress with them and make the decision together!
Organization:
Just like usual, use the Weekly Practice Plan worksheet to schedule exposure activity practices for the week. Instead of scheduling activities from just one plan of action, you and your child will now create a weekly schedule that has exposure activities from all of their plans.
Have your child give each of their plans a name so that you can easily tell them apart.
When they make their weekly schedules, your child can use different colors for each plan of action to tell them apart. That way when they write out exposure activities for the week, it will be easy to see which plan of action each activity is from. Or instead of colors, they could use different pictures or symbols. Here are some examples from Sophia (View PDF)
Try organizing worksheets and activity logs based on which plan of action they are for. You could keep all worksheets and logs from the same plan of action together in a folder. This could be a digital folder on your computer or a physical folder.
Prioritization:
Some fears may require more immediate attention than others. Help your child determine which plan of action to prioritize at certain times. For example, George has been working on two different plans: one for his fear of germs, and another for his anxiety about making new friends. Since George will be starting at a new school soon and feels a bit better about germs now, he may want to pay more attention to his new plan. This means that he will be practicing activities for his anxiety about making new friends more often than activities for his fear of germs.
Ensure that your child balances their activities throughout the week so that they don’t become overwhelmed. They don’t need to practice activities from all of their plans every day. Alternating between plans can be a helpful way to prevent burnout or overwhelm. Your child can switch up which plan they focus on from day to day or week to week, and they can also schedule rest days. However, it is also important to watch your child’s progress and make sure they are working on an activity roughly every day.
You don’t want to work on too many plans at the same time, as this can be unhelpful. We recommend working on no more than three plans at a time.
Flexibility:
Keep in mind that progress is not linear most of the time! Adjustments to your child’s plans and to their weekly schedules are completely normal and expected.
Some exposure activities may take longer to complete than you expect them too. Be open to changing the weekly schedule if needed. If your child cannot get to every single activity on their schedule, that’s okay! Help them to not feel discouraged by this.
If unexpected events come up, or if your child runs out of time for an activity, that’s also okay! Help your child adjust their weekly schedule when they run into these issues and try to set aside another time for them to practice activities.
If your child begins to feel overwhelmed, it may be necessary to slow down one plan or temporarily pause one to focus on another.
Encouragement & Motivation:
Small improvements are still improvements! Celebrate small victories with points or motivation boosters. However, it is also important to ensure that motivation boosters remain helpful and reasonable, as they can lose their effectiveness if they are too frequent. Make sure motivation boosters remain proportional to exposure activities and are balanced across your child’s different plans. Ask your child what is still motivating for them or what would help support them after doing something difficult.
Sometimes, tackling one fear can build up your child’s confidence and give them the motivation to tackle another one. It’s also possible that your child may make more progress on one plan than another, which is normal. Don’t let this discourage your child or stop them from working through the hard phases of each of their plans. Remember that setbacks can be excellent opportunities for teaching and reflection.
Have patience and grace while your child works on more than one plan. Nobody can do everything, so don’t put too much pressure on them to accomplish it all.
Reflection:
Continue to monitor progress for each plan. This is not only important for keeping up with what your child is doing and reflecting on lessons learned, but it can also be a good reminder of the accomplishments you both have made so far! You can revisit Module 5 and Module 7 to refresh your memory on reflection questions and exposure activity tracking.
Managing Multiple Plans - Example
Now, let’s check in with Sophia to see how she manages two plans of action at once.
At some point, it might be a good idea to start on a new plan of action. Earlier in LUNA, you watched Sophia create her first plan of action to help her overcome social anxiety, or her fear of others judging her. Sophia has spent a lot of time focusing on just this one fear and she has made a lot of progress! She has learned about all the ways that she avoided social interactions, and she has used her plan of action to slowly face her social fears instead.
Sophia is now comfortable having a conversation with someone she doesn’t talk to often. She is also able to give a presentation in front of her family without getting super anxious. Sophia’s plan has helped her realize she is capable of a lot more than she thought she was. But she still has some work to do before she reaches her final goal: Giving a presentation in front of her history class at school. She still wants to get more comfortable with uncertainty- such as not knowing if someone is judging her or what they are thinking about her.
Sophia has been keeping track of her anxiety intensity levels during her exposure activities. During her last few practices, her anxiety levels have gotten lower and lower. Sophia finally feels ready to use her new confidence and skills to start working on a new plan of action. She has always wanted to work on her anxiety around routine changes, so this will be the second plan that she creates.
Sophia will now work on two plans at the same time- one for social anxiety, and one for her fear of routine changes.
After creating her new plan, Sophia needs to figure out when she will practice her exposure activities. She makes her weekly schedule and writes down activities from both of her plans. Sophia knows that working on more than one fear at a time can be challenging, so she is prepared to use a few tips to help her out.
First, Sophia names her two plans: “Social Anxiety” and “Routine Changes”. When she makes her schedule, she uses different symbols to represent each plan to easily tell them apart.
Sophia doesn’t want to get overwhelmed, so she tries not to focus on both fears every day. She only schedules activities from both plans on the same day, if they are lower on the anxiety intensity scale for her. When there are other challenging things going on in her life, such as a math test, Sophia gives herself a break from her exposure activities. During break days or rest days, Sophia tries to reflect on what she has accomplished to see if she can learn anything new about her fears.
Sophia’s mom supports her by making sure she stays organized and by helping her make changes to her schedule if something unexpected comes up. With all these tips and her mom’s support, Sophia is ready to start the week and take on both of her fears.