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Challenging Worry

13 years ago 0 +0 / -0 6252

Dizzy

I am going to disagree with your group. Now they may have meant it different than I perceived it.

I was taught not to suppress any emotions and if you think on it you will see why.

I was taught to feel the emotion and then let it go or it will nag at you all day and the more you suppress it the more it will be in your face giving you that all day fuzzy unreal feeling.

Take the anger at your brother. Feel it, look at it decide it is not a good thing, change the emotion to sad, look at it realize you can't do anything about it and let it go. Do something distracting if you have to but by trying to avoid it, it will just follow you around, some times for days getting stronger. This is what I do with it and it works for me.

I was a perfectionist and had the anger at myself and disappointment in others that you do.

It was a battle to get rid of but I did it by feeling the emotion and dropping it. It takes a lot of convincing of oneself. Thought exposure works here.

Let me know what you think. I enjoy your posts

Here for you.

Davit

13 years ago 0 +0 / -0 223

Hi Dizzy,

I think you are headed in the right direction. It is however an interesting question: Do you keep with CBT and exposure therapy or, work on relaxation techniques to deal with these situations in a way that will not cause this uneasiness.

I think the answer may be working on both as alternative relaxation techniques will help deal with similar situations in the short term and exposure work may help in the long run.

Members, what do you think is the best way to deal with Dizzy's situation? Please share.

Jason, Bilingual Health Educator

13 years ago 0 +0 / -0 118

Hi Ashley

I have question about worry. I am in a group that says that we should try to avoid anger as much as possible because as you have indicated in your sessions they say that anger and other emotions can bring on the same symptoms of fear. To be quite honest with you the symptoms bother me the most. If a was to have a panic attack and experienced extreme fear with no repercussion for the rest of my day I would not care at all about the attack.

A short story I offered my brother something that would help him a great deal on Tuesday, and he has not got back to me with answer and today’s Sunday. It keeps pooping into my mind in different variations on the same theme. I have instantly analyzed the thought and determined that what is bothering me is his lack of response when I went out of my way to help him. I determined that this is anger in me that he does not respect me. In the group I am in, we have a saying, that people do things that annoy us, not to annoy us. Instantly I am with a secure thought, do I think he is purposely trying to ignore to me to bother me, obviously the answer is no. I could go through an entire thought record of the 10 question and come up with an alternative view however; I do not think it would be substantially different from the one that I just gave.

Another thing I noticed is (I have all my panic attacks in the morning) is that I would get up and I would start ruminating about a song. I believe that this is a defensive device to avoid how I am feeling at the time. Also when I am working and I am in a worked up state, I start playing music in my head while I am working at the same time, couple this with the confusion and sense of unreality I have all the time I think this is another avoidance response. Something David said that rings true for me now is there is a fine line between avoidance and distraction. Therefore, I have been practicing yoga every morning to stop the constant music in my head, and I have made great strides towards this goal. I think that to me it is in a sense of cognitive exposure to the way, I am feeling and that I have to accept the way I am currently feeling and not try to change it except for relaxation, positive thinking, and no avoidance.

On the other hand, my CBT told me that I pay too much attention to my unreality state. This is where it affects me the most I find it hard to concentrate and when I am doing something new, it takes more brainpower to complete the task. According to my CBT, I should ignore it, according to me and maybe you if I pay attention and not avoid it I will become bored with the sensation. Perhaps if I did not analyze it at all and thought that, it was neither bad nor good then I have reduced it to a triviality, and I would get rid of it quicker than trying to expose myself to it. I think my exposure work is on the sensation because the attacks I get when I rate them on a fear scale is very low, but it is the sensations of unreality all day that bother me.

One final thing is that I get very anxious about making mistakes. I do not accept them in myself and I do not accept mistakes in others. I have realized that that making a mistake causes me distress, but stems from trying to be a perfectionist. I realized that the reason I worry about making a mistake is I hold other people up to I high standard, and that intern when I do this it sets up for sensitivity to my own mistake. I have been trying to reduce this worry by not expecting perfection in others or me.

Am I headed in the right direction or is this just rhetorical question that if I think I am headed in the right direction then I am and if I think that I am not then I have to do what I think will get me back on track.

Dizzy

13 years ago 0 +0 / -0 538

Hi Ashley,

This post is going to be shorter..

I really like this idea, and now I see the difference between "Worry time" and "Worry Exposure"...I'm going to try to write a story about my latest worry. I'l let you know how it goes.

thanks ,

Juanita

13 years ago 0 +0 / -0 1071

Hi Ashley,

I find that 99% of the things I worry about never come to pass and I've wasted time and energy. I had a very bad year (a few years back) and I was under constant strain from it and it turned out amazingly well and I remember thinking I wished I had not wasted all of that time being unhappy.

If I'm hearing you clearly worry time sounds a lot like journaling which is excellent. I find that sometimes there are so many thoughts in your head, if you just write them down, they somehow transfer to paper and are not in your head anymore and it's easier to sleep or stop worrying.

Good topic.

13 years ago 0 +0 / -0 11214

So, what can you do?

Well, the first thing you can do is challenge your beliefs about your worries and what it means to worry. Perhaps most importantly, worrying about something a lot does not mean that it is important and worrying a lot doesn’t mean you are going to lose control. What it probably means is that you are trying very hard to push something out of your mind and as a result you are thinking about it more and more…The more you try to avoid thinking about something the more you think about it.
One way to think about this is to understand that people have weird thoughts and worries all of the time. 99% of people will admit to strange worries and thoughts. Common thoughts include thoughts about sex and harm to self or others. However, most people dismiss these common thoughts as…junk! In contrast, people who worry a lot often don’t see their worries as being “junk.” They see their worries as meaning something important about the worry or themselves. Think about it like this…

Everybody dreams. Some people dream more than others but everybody has a had a dream and everybody has had a weird dream. You can think lots of things about dreams. Some people think that dreams are important and mean something about themselves and the future. They spend a lot of time thinking about their dreams and trying to understand what their dreams are “telling” them. Other people see dreams as “junk.” Dreams can be interesting and amusing or scary and disturbing but at the end of the day they are mostly junk. You can think of worries in the same way. Maybe they mean something important but they are probably just junk.

Another way to think about worries is to think of them as the “spam of the mind.” If you have an email account, you know what spam is. Spam arrives in your mailbox and is often designed to look “important!” but it’s just spam. But lets get back to avoidance.

If avoiding thinking about something leads to thinking about more and more, the solution is to NOT avoid thinking about it. Remember, the solution to the “white bear” problem is to not avoid thinking about white bears. Once you start thinking about them, they kind of fade away. Similarly, the solution to the worry problem I to not avoid your worries but to spend time thinking about them one by one.

Cognitive exposure to worries can look a lot like Worry Time but here area couple of important differences. First, Worry Time is used as a technique to delay worry to a specific time everyday. However, during Worry Time you can worry about anything and everything you want. In contrast, during cognitive exposure you set a time of one half hour or an hour to worry about one thing really well. Basically what you do is write down your worry in as much detail as possible. Write down the story of the worst thing that can happen. Pretend you are writing a short story with a bad ending. Write down the story in as much detail as possible. Add sights and sounds and smells to make it as real as possible. One important rule is that there cannot be a happy ending. Another rule is that the story should take 5 minutes or more to read out loud. Then either tape the story and listen to it over and over again or read it out loud over and over. The idea is that you read or listen to the same story over and over again for one half hour to one hour every day until your anxiety while reading the story goes down. Then you move on to the next worry. Now that you have been introduced to some of the CBT techniques for challenging your worry, we would like to introduce you to some relaxation techniques that will help you cope with the physical symptoms of generalized anxiety.

Ashley, Health Educator

Here to help :)

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