Tired of worrying so much?

[Daniel E.]

Tired of Worrying So Much?
By Robert L. Leahy, PhD
HealYourLife.com

You’re probably more ambivalent than you think about getting rid of worry. On the one hand, it’s wearing you down, ruining your daily enjoyment of life, interfering with your relationships, keeping you up at night, and making you depressed. But on the other hand, you may be harboring a very powerful secret belief—secret even from yourself—that your worry will protect you and help you solve problems.

Your habit of worrying is simply the way your mind has learned to think about everything. It’s kind of a free-floating anxiety that attaches itself to whatever comes along. To overcome it, you need to teach your mind others ways of thinking (or not thinking) about things.

Here are 13 steps that have proved effective for those who worry too much.

1. Build Your Motivation: Write down a list of your worrying pros and cons. Seeing them on paper may change the way you feel about them. When you look at the two lists, this should supply you with excellent motivation to move on.
2. Challenge Your Thinking: Decide just how rational you think your worries are. Deciding that they’re irrational won’t stop them from happening. But it may lessen the urgency with which you respond.
3. Set Aside Worry Time: Assign a specific 20-minute period (not before bedtime) daily. Sit down in a chair and write down your specific worries. Keep a worry record and try to predict your next week’s worry. Many of your predictions will prove to be false.
4. Validate Your Emotions: Your rational mind can help you figure out how to meet your needs—but without your emotions to guide it, it’s a rudderless ship. The more you’re able to feel your emotions, the less you need to keep them at bay through worrying.
5. Accept Limited Control: One of the most powerful hidden beliefs behind worrying is that you have the power to control everything in your life. The fact is, hardly anything in our lives goes as planned. Accept that you cannot know everything—and let it go.
6. Accept Uncertainty: Most of us are keenly aware that nothing in the world is certain. Remember, uncertainly doesn’t mean terrible results. Eighty-five percent of the things that people worry about have a positive outcome.
7. Let Go of Your Urgency: Somehow a belief has lodged in your consciousness that you cannot rest until you know what the future holds now. But there’s no way to find out what’s going to happen except by waiting to see.
8. Try to Go Crazy: Like most worriers, you worry that your worries will so overwhelm you that you will lose control and go insane. Try this exercise: Come up with the most extreme examples and try to go insane. You will see how far-fetched these worries are.
9. Practice Your Worst Fears: Facing your worst fears and practicing them can help you overcome your worries. If you can face your worst fear you won’t need to worry about it to avoid it.
10. Do What You Are Avoiding: Face your anxieties rather than avoid them. You’ll learn that it is possible to worry about a task and yet do it anyway. And this will free you in a thousand ways.
11. Practice Relaxation: Worry always involves tension. This tension is in the body as well as the mind: when the mind perceives danger, the body prepares for combat or flight. Try tensing and relaxing your muscles. It’s a good practice in letting go.
12. Practice Mindfulness: One way to counter the debilitating effects of worry is to calm the mind. Mindfulness is the practice of stepping out of your thoughts and into the present moment. This can be done through meditation.
13. Observe Your Thoughts: People who worry all the time are accustomed to regarding their thoughts as reflections of reality. When we watch our thoughts mindfully, we distance ourselves from them, rather than identifying with them.

Remember, becoming anxiety-free will not happen overnight. But with practice, you will begin to develop new habits for relaxation, acceptance, thinking, and dealing with your senses of urgency, uncertainly, control, and risk. Make progress a little bit each day.

Robert L. Leahy, Ph.D. is recognized worldwide as one of the most respected writers and speakers on cognitive therapy. His most recent books include Anxiety Free: Unravel Your Fears Before They Unravel You and Beat the Blues Before They Beat You: How to Overcome Depression.