Managing our Worries

One of the biggest issues we can face with worrying is that we can sometimes have a huge list of things that we’re worried about that feels enormous and completely overwhelming. We can feel stuck and frozen like a ‘deer in headlights’ and find ourselves putting things off and becoming more and more anxious about it all.

I’ve written previously about productive worry vs unproductive worry. What I’m going to introduce this time is a practical exercise for addressing worries. This was originally developed to help us either take action or let go of a worry and move on.

This is an exercise that you can either use in the moment when we become aware of a worry, or if we’re sitting down with a list of things that have been worrying us. I’m going to describe this from the perspective of sitting down with a list.

Taking each in turn, we ask ourselves “Can I do anything about this worry?” If the answer is “No” this is something that is out of our control (per Productive vs Unproductive Worry), and we need to let it go and focus on something else.

If the answer is “Yes”, brilliant, we can start to make a plan (What needs done? Is it something that can be done now? How are we going to do it?). If we can do it now, we do it! With that over and done with we can let the worry go and focus on something else. 

If it’s something we can’t do now, we decide exactly when we’ll do it. Write that down and stick do it. With that scheduled, we can let the worry go for now and focus on something else.

And so we continue down the list of worries and make good progress either planning when we will definitely sort something out, or deal with things there and then. 

This approach is described visually by ‘The Worry Tree’ (Butler and Hope, 2007) in which you can see the decision making flow as branches on the tree. The more we use this technique, the more it becomes second nature and this simple and practical technique can be a valuable weapon in helping us manage anxiety in the future.

If you would like to talk to me about problems with anxiety or other issues with your mental health, you can complete the online submission form or contact me directly at: mckellarCBT@gmail.com

(Instead of a photo of an animal in danger, I've used a picture of a deer visiting my garden and having a well deserved rest. You get the idea). :-)