Amelia Kate Richardson I remember sitting in my therapist’s office about seven years ago, clutching a notebook filled with ambitious goals I’d set for myself. She glanced at my list—”overcome all anxiety,” “never have another panic attack,” “be completely fearless”—and gently asked me a question that changed everything: “Amelia, are these goals helping you heal, or are they just giving your anxiety more ammunition?”
That moment was a turning point in my journey with generalized anxiety disorder. I’d been setting myself up for failure by creating goals that were not only unrealistic but actually fueled the very anxiety I was trying to overcome. If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve experienced something similar. Maybe you’ve set goals with the best intentions, only to watch anxiety sabotage them. Or perhaps you’re afraid to set any goals at all because the fear of failure feels overwhelming.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand through both my personal struggle with GAD and my work as a Christian counselor: setting realistic goals when you have generalized anxiety disorder isn’t about lowering your standards or giving up on your dreams. It’s about partnering with God’s grace to create a path forward that honors both your limitations and your potential. It’s about learning to set goals that work with your healing journey, not against it.
Understanding How GAD Affects Goal-Setting
Before we talk about how to set realistic goals, we need to acknowledge what you’re up against. Generalized anxiety disorder isn’t just “being a worrier.” It’s a constant companion that whispers worst-case scenarios and turns molehills into mountains. When GAD is along for the ride, goal-setting becomes complicated in ways people without anxiety might not understand.
Your anxious brain tends to do a few specific things that make traditional goal-setting approaches backfire. First, it catastrophizes outcomes. You’re not just thinking about missing a deadline—you’re imagining complete professional ruin, relationships crumbling, and your entire life falling apart. Second, GAD creates what I call “paralysis by perfection.” You set such high standards that starting feels impossible, so you don’t start at all. And third, anxiety loves to play the comparison game, making you measure your progress against people who aren’t dealing with what you’re dealing with.
I’ve learned that God doesn’t ask us to pretend our anxiety doesn’t exist when we’re pursuing His purposes for our lives. In 2 Corinthians 12:9, Paul shares God’s words: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Notice it doesn’t say “in the absence of weakness” or “once you’ve overcome all weakness.” God’s power shows up in our weakness, including the weakness that anxiety creates.
The Difference Between Realistic and Limiting Goals
Now, here’s where things get tricky, and I want to be really honest with you about this. There’s a fine line between setting realistic goals and selling yourself short. I’ve walked both sides of that line, and neither one leads to the abundant life Jesus talks about in John 10:10.
Realistic goals acknowledge your current capacity while still stretching you toward growth. They take into account that some days your anxiety will be a whisper and other days it’ll be a shout. They build in grace for the inevitable setbacks without making setbacks the expected outcome. Limiting goals, on the other hand, are built entirely around fear. They’re the goals you set when you’re trying to avoid anxiety rather than working through it.
Let me give you an example from my own life. A limiting goal would have been: “I’ll never take on any project that might make me anxious.” That’s just avoidance wearing a goal-shaped disguise. A realistic goal was: “I’ll take on one new client project this quarter, and I’ll schedule extra therapy sessions during that month to support myself through it.” See the difference? One shuts down growth entirely. The other acknowledges the challenge while creating a support structure.
The beautiful thing about our faith is that it reminds us we’re not alone in this process. Philippians 4:13 tells us “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me”—but notice it doesn’t say “I can do all things instantly, perfectly, and without any struggle.” Christ’s strength often looks like the grace to take one small step, then another, then another.
The PACE Framework for Anxiety-Friendly Goal Setting
Over the years, I’ve developed what I call the PACE framework for setting goals with GAD. It’s helped me enormously, and I’ve seen it help countless others who feel stuck between wanting to grow and feeling held back by anxiety. PACE stands for Personalized, Adjustable, Compassionate, and Evidence-based.
Personalized means your goals are yours alone. Not your mom’s goals for you. Not what you think you “should” want. Not what Instagram tells you successful people are doing. What do you genuinely want to move toward? And here’s the faith piece—what is God stirring in your heart specifically? When I stopped trying to have the same prayer life as my pastor or the same ministry involvement as my friend Sarah, I finally found goals that actually fit my life and brought me closer to God.
Adjustable acknowledges that anxiety isn’t linear. You need goals with breathing room. I’ve learned to set what I call “core goals” and “stretch goals.” My core goal is the baseline I’m committed to—like spending ten minutes in prayer three mornings a week. My stretch goal is doing it daily. Some weeks I hit the stretch goal. Some weeks the core goal is victory enough. Both are acceptable, and neither one is failure.
Compassionate means you’re setting goals from a place of self-kindness rather than self-criticism. This one is hard for those of us with GAD because anxiety often comes packaged with an inner critic that sounds like a drill sergeant. But here’s what I’ve discovered: harsh goals might work temporarily, but they eventually crumble under the weight of shame. Compassionate goals, grounded in the truth that you’re God’s beloved child regardless of your productivity, create sustainable change.
Evidence-based keeps you grounded in reality. This is where you look at actual data from your life rather than anxiety’s predictions. What have you accomplished before? When have you surprised yourself? What does your therapist say about your progress? Evidence helps counter the lies anxiety tells. It’s like keeping a “remember when” file that you can pull out when anxiety insists you’re incapable.
Breaking Down Goals into Anxiety-Manageable Steps
The biggest mistake I made early in my anxiety journey was setting these massive, vague goals and then wondering why I felt overwhelmed. “Get better at managing anxiety” isn’t a goal—it’s a wish. And wishes, as my counselor used to say, make great birthday cake moments but terrible road maps.
What’s helped me tremendously is breaking down any goal into what I call “low-anxiety actions”—steps so small that my anxiety can’t talk me out of them. If my goal is to build a more consistent prayer practice, I don’t start with “pray for an hour every morning.” That’s a setup for failure when anxiety is making it hard to get out of bed. Instead, I might start with “keep my Bible on my nightstand and read one verse before checking my phone.”
This approach mirrors how Jesus often worked with people. He didn’t demand immediate, complete transformation. He said things like “Follow me” (one step at a time) and “Take my yoke upon you” (a daily, manageable practice). He understood that real change happens in small, repeated actions more than in dramatic, unsustainable leaps.
Here’s a practical exercise I use with my clients: Take your goal and ask “What’s the smallest possible step toward this that I could do even on a high-anxiety day?” That becomes your baseline. Then identify what you might do on a medium-anxiety day and a low-anxiety day. This creates flexibility without abandoning the goal entirely.
Building in Support Systems and Accountability
One thing anxiety absolutely loves to do is isolate us. It tells us that asking for help is weakness, that we should be able to handle things ourselves, that burdening others with our struggles is selfish. I want to tell you clearly: those are lies, and they’ll sabotage your goals faster than almost anything else.
The truth is, we were never meant to do life alone. Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 reminds us that “two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up.” This isn’t just good theology—it’s practical wisdom for goal-setting with GAD.
When I finally started sharing my goals with my small group at church, something shifted. Not because they held me to rigid standards, but because they became witnesses to both my struggles and my progress. When anxiety convinced me I hadn’t made any progress, they could remind me where I’d started. When I needed to adjust a goal because it wasn’t working, they affirmed that wisdom rather than seeing it as failure.
Think about who in your life could provide this kind of support. It might be a therapist, a trusted friend, a mentor, or a faith community. The key is finding people who understand the difference between accountability and pressure. You need folks who will celebrate the small wins with you and extend grace during the setbacks.
Measuring Progress When Anxiety Clouds Perspective
Here’s something nobody warned me about when I started setting goals with GAD: anxiety is a terrible judge of progress. It will fixate on what’s not done and completely ignore what you’ve accomplished. It’ll compare your chapter three to someone else’s chapter twenty. It’ll move the goalposts the moment you get close to reaching them.
That’s why objective ways of measuring progress are crucial. I keep what I call a “grace journal” where I write down three specific things I did toward my goals each week—not feelings about my progress, but concrete actions. “Had coffee with Sarah even though I felt anxious” counts. “Prayed for five minutes on Tuesday morning” counts. These entries become evidence I can reference when anxiety tries to tell me I’m not moving forward.
I’ve also learned to celebrate what I call “process goals” instead of just outcome goals. An outcome goal might be “lead a small group Bible study.” A process goal is “attend small group consistently and share once per month.” Process goals acknowledge that with GAD, the journey matters as much as the destination. Sometimes the goal isn’t to eliminate anxiety but to do the thing despite anxiety—and that’s huge growth even if it doesn’t feel like it in the moment.
Remember the parable of the talents in Matthew 25? The servants weren’t judged by having equal outcomes—the one given five talents and the one given two talents both received the same commendation: “Well done, good and faithful servant.” They were evaluated based on what they did with what they’d been given. Your “what you’ve been given” includes managing GAD. Faithfulness looks different for you than for someone without anxiety, and that’s okay. God sees your effort and your heart.
Adjusting Goals Without Feeling Like a Failure
I need to say this clearly because it took me years to believe it: changing a goal is not the same as failing at a goal. In fact, the wisdom to recognize when something isn’t working and make adjustments is a sign of growth, not weakness.
Anxiety loves all-or-nothing thinking. Either you achieved the exact goal you set, or you’re a complete failure. But life—and healing—doesn’t work that way. Think about it: when you’re learning to trust God more deeply, you don’t wake up one day with perfect, unwavering faith. You have good days and hard days. You take steps forward and sometimes backward. Progress is messy and non-linear.
I’ve adjusted countless goals over the years. Sometimes I set something that was genuinely too ambitious for where I was in my healing. Sometimes circumstances changed in ways I couldn’t have predicted. And sometimes a goal that seemed right at the beginning revealed itself to be something anxiety had influenced rather than something I genuinely wanted.
The question isn’t whether you’ll need to adjust goals—you will. The question is whether you can extend yourself the same grace God extends to you. Lamentations 3:22-23 reminds us that God’s mercies are “new every morning.” Not “new once you’ve perfectly accomplished all your goals.” New every morning, regardless of yesterday’s outcomes.
Creating Goals That Honor Both Faith and Mental Health
One of the most healing realizations in my journey was understanding that caring for my mental health isn’t separate from my faith—it’s an expression of it. For too long, I’d created these false divisions where spiritual goals were “holy” and mental health goals were somehow less important. But here’s the truth: God cares about your whole self, anxiety and all.
Your goals can and should reflect this integrated approach. Maybe that means setting a goal to consistently attend therapy alongside a goal to deepen your prayer life. Maybe it’s committing to both taking your medication as prescribed and memorizing scripture that speaks to your fears. These aren’t competing priorities—they’re different expressions of the same commitment to becoming who God created you to be.
I think about how Jesus cared for people holistically. He didn’t just address their spiritual needs—he fed them when they were hungry, healed their physical ailments, and showed compassion for their emotional struggles. When we set goals that honor both our faith and our mental health needs, we’re following His example.
This might mean your goals include things like: establishing a bedtime routine that reduces morning anxiety, joining a church community while also maintaining boundaries that protect your mental health, or serving others in ways that don’t trigger your specific anxiety symptoms. All of these are valid, important, and honoring to God.
Moving Forward with Hope and Realistic Expectations
As I’m writing this, Bailey (my rescue dog) is snoring at my feet, and I’m on my third cup of coffee this morning. I share that detail because I want you to know that even now, years into my healing journey, I’m still a regular person managing GAD. I still have anxious days. I still have to adjust goals sometimes. I still need grace—from God, from others, and from myself.
But here’s what’s also true: the goals I’ve set and worked toward—even imperfectly—have led to a life I couldn’t have imagined when I was housebound with panic attacks. Not because I conquered anxiety once and for all, but because I learned to set goals that worked with my healing rather than against it. I learned to measure progress by how I’m growing, not by how I compare to others. I learned that God’s plans for me include my anxiety, not in spite of it.
You can do this. Not perfectly. Not without setbacks. Not without needing to adjust course sometimes. But you can set realistic goals with generalized anxiety disorder that move you toward the life and purpose God has for you. Start small. Build in support. Measure progress honestly. Extend yourself grace. And remember that the God who began a good work in you is faithful to complete it—in His timing, in His way, and with more compassion than you can imagine.
Your anxiety doesn’t disqualify you from having meaningful goals or experiencing God’s abundant life. It just means your path forward looks different than someone else’s—and different is okay. Actually, different is beautiful, because it’s uniquely yours, crafted by a God who loves you exactly as you are right now, anxiety and all.
What’s one small, realistic goal you could set for yourself today? Not someday. Not when your anxiety is better. Today. Start there. You’ve got this, friend. And more importantly, you’ve got a God who’s walking every step with you.
