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.
For more information about how to do exposure work visit the Panic
Center.
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