WORRY CONTROL

1
WORRY CONTROL!!!

• How to know when to be concerned or feel youre
  quite normal!!

2
What Is Natural With Worrying?

• Everyone worries about lifes circumstances
• We worry about many things
• Our children and loved ones
• Being passed over for a promotion at work
• Have to deal with illness
• Paying the bills each month
• Passing that all important test in this class!!

3
So When Is Worrying a Time to Be Concerned?

• When our worrying becomes all consuming
• When making choices and decisions is based on
  fears, rather than logic or reason

4
You Have a Serious Problem With Worry If You

• Are chronically anxious about future dangers or
  threats
• Consistently make negative predictions about the
  future
• Often overestimate the seriousness of bad things
  happening
• Cant stop repeating the same worries over and
  over
• Escape worry by distracting yourself of avoiding
  certain situations
• Find it difficult to use worry constructively to
  produce solutions to problems

5
What Distinguishes Healthy Worrying From
Unhealthy Worrying?

• The determining factor is whether your main focus
  is on catastrophic thinking or problem solving
• Unhealthy worry leads you to continually examine
  an endless list of all potentially negative what
  if outcomes of a situation
• Healthy worry is focused on effective problem
  solving

6
So How Does Healthy Worry Happen?

• You brainstorm for alternative solutions to the
  problem
• Evaluate possible outcomes
• Make a decision
• Develop action steps
• Form a timetable for things to be done
• Any thoughts about possible problems, pain, or
  catastrophe is a signal to start the search for a
  solution

7
How Much Time Does It Take to Master Worry
Control ?

• If you have mastered the benefits of deep
  breathing or progressive muscle relaxation,
  usually one to two weeks will bring positive
  results
• During this time you can .
• Begin to learn to accurately assess your risks
• Schedule and honor worry appointments
• Engage in worry exposure
• Learn to reduce worry behavior

8
Four Steps to Managing Your Worry

• Relaxation
• Utilizing deep breathing and PMR will help keep
  your overall physical stress under control
• Choose a specific time of the day to do your
  relaxation exercises
• Risk assessment
• Learn to predict outcomes of actions

9
Four Steps to Managing Your Worry

• Schedule worry time and exposure
• Allow yourself a specific time each day to worry
• Make an appointment for yourself to do nothing
  but this at the assigned time
• After mastering worry time, utilize the time to
  concentrate on and extinguish your worries
• Flooding
• Worry exposure is effective because it focuses
  your worrying

10
Four Steps to Managing Your Worry

• Worry-behavior prevention
• Certain habits or rituals are associated with
  your worries
• Worry behavior most often involves .
• Checking (to see if something is bad)
• Avoidance (to stay away from something that makes
  you nervous)
• Utilizing lucky charms
• Most often these behaviors and rituals reinforce
  your worry rather than prevent bad things from
  happening

11
What Are the Steps Involved With Worry Exposure?

• List your worries
• Rank your worries
• Relax
• Visualize a worry
• Rate your peak anxiety from 0 to 100
• Imagine alternative outcomes
• Rerate your anxiety
• Repeat steps 3 through 7 with the same worry
  until your peak anxiety is 25 or less

12
How Does Worry-behavior Prevention Work?

• Record your worry behavior
• Pick the easiest behavior to stop and predict
  consequences of stopping it
• Stop the easiest behavior and/or replace it with
  a new behavior
• Assess your anxiety before and after
• Repeat steps 2 through 4 with the next easiest
  behavior