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Challenging Worry


10 years ago 0 6252 logo logo logo logo logo logo logo logo logo logo 0
Worry seems to be a product of our environment and I feel that this may be why two similar people worry in different ways. They have different environments. Different reasons to worry. 
Take my environment. It is quiet here and I'm retired. We don't lock our vehicles or houses, everyone knows everyone. If I need help someone will be there. There is very little to worry over. Now worries little brother is a different storey. Caution is always present but is short lived compared to worry. I always have in the back of my mind What ifs. 
Caution is like a check list compared to worry. Worry is like a newspaper with the same storey on every page just wrote by different authors. 
Caution says that before I light the fire that I have a way to put it out. Caution says that I look for bears before I look at flowers. Caution says that I have a rain coat handy before I go out incase. 
So I get up and light the fire if I need one and take a coffee and go outside to look at the flowers. I don't even notice that I made all the cautious checks before doing this. I just do. 
Now worry would ruin this. I wouldn't go outside if I was worried that I'd have a chimney fire or it would rain or there would be a bear come along some time. Worry would really get in the way. How would I get anything done.
This could be why I have never been diagnosed as depressed. I don't worry. I observe and drop it. This leaves more time to experience things. And I do experience things, too much some times and then I get information overload and get real tired. Thinking can be tiring so thinking the same thing over and over must be doubly so. 
Caution is positive, worry is negative. Here we are again back to CBT. Here we are with two words that are similar but mean something different. Here we are with a need to change the way we think. Negative replaced with positive. The effect is the same but the damage is gone. Conditioning, and conditioning is best achieved with repetition because negative breeds negative and positive breeds positive. 
Worry is connected to not knowing so knowing is the way to take it to caution instead. When you can't know then acceptance is necessary till you can. In which case worry needs to be replaced with caution which is knowing you have done all you can. It tells you whether to go forward or not. Once the decision is made caution can be dropped. So like every thing else that needs a change of thought pattern CBT works for this too.

Davit
10 years ago 0 169 logo logo logo logo logo logo logo logo logo logo 0
I constantly worry myself about my health, when a new symptom or something pops up. I start to worry that its something bad.  I then try to challenge and prove I am wrong or right in my worry. and this makes my anxiety go lower.  Now I find that when I get stressed about the little things I get anxious, then I use my CBT again.  We notice that we have to use CBT because we've been there before.  A lot of people I know use CBT without even knowing it.  For ex. my sister feels a lump on her back, she says to herself, its nothing. I'm not going to worry about it. I'll just get it check out. Where if that was me, I'd worry so much about it I'll get panic attacks. 
 
I've noticed that I've probably been using CBT all my life without knowing....but because I've let anxiety take over my life last year, I notice I do it more.  It kind of sucks, but CBT is helping.  "You feel what you think".... was a good saying my friend once told me.  And I believe in that soooo much.  I just wish I wasn't as aware of my anxiety and my CBT, I wish it would come automatically so that my anxiety symptoms are forever gone. 
 
Worrying does hit me.  Especially when I'm alone, driving or nothin to do. I tend to think about my anxiety.  How do we put a stop on this?  Because I think if I were to get hypnotized into forgetting what happened to me, I would be okay.
 
 
10 years ago 0 11209 logo logo logo logo logo logo logo logo logo logo 0

There are a number of CBT techniques that are commonly used to help people challenge worry including: thought records, thought stopping, worry time, challenging the value of worry, problem solving, experiments to increase intolerance of uncertainty and cognitive exposure. Let’s take a look at them one at a time:

Cognitive Exposure: People who worry often try very hard not to worry. In fact, people can do all kinds of things to try to not worry. People try hard not to worry for all kinds of reasons including a belief that worrying about something makes it more likely that if they worry too much they will go crazy. Certainly many of the things that people worry about (finances, illness and death) can be very scary. However, by trying hard not to worry we can give our worries more power than they deserve. To see how this can happen, consider the following example. For the next two minutes, try as hard as you can to NOT think of a whit elephant. Do everything that you can to Not think of a white elephant. Take two minutes to do this experiment. We will be here when you are finished.

What happened?

Well, if you are like most people, the harder you tried not to think of a white elephant, the more you thought of a white elephant. What does this mean about you…or white elephants? Nothing! It just means like most people trying hard not to think of something makes you think of it even more. How do you not think of white elephants? How do you get them out of your head? Why, by thinking about them of course. If you are like most people, if you start daydreaming about white elephants, you will soon end up somewhere else all together.
 
So what does this experiment prove?  
What this experiment proves is that the more you try to NOT think of something, the more you will think of it. Now imagine that we ask you to NOT think of something but this time instead of a white elephant we ask you to not think of one of your worries. What should happen? That’s right, you should have a hard time getting the worry out of your head. In fact because it is one of your worries (not just a white elephant), you should have an even harder time NOT thinking about it. OK, so now what does this mean about you…or your worry…? The right answer is nothing! It just means that the harder you try not to think of something, the harder it is to get out of your head. And this is the tricky part where you can get into trouble. It is easy to believe that not being able to NOT think of a white elephant means nothing about you or the white elephant (If you have to read that last sentence a couple of times). On the other hand it is hard not to think that not being able to not think of a worry means something about you or the worry. Common beliefs that people have about not being able to get worries out of their mind are that “there must be something wrong with me,”I am losing control of my mind,” and “this worry must be important.” Maybe you can see how it is these beliefs about worries and worrying that lead to the most trouble of all.
 
 Have you tried this strategy? If so, please share your experiences.


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