In this post I am going to look at a method to manage your worries if you find that they are disrupting your ability to rest and enjoy yourself.
It is common for worries to interrupt our ability to stay present with the rest of our lives. You may find that you are struggling to enjoy your free time or that you are staying awake at night ruminating over your worries. When your worries are allowed too much of your time they can become overwhelming. The more time that they take up the bigger and more insurmountable they can seem, and the more ingrained the habit will be.
I watched this lecture given by Harvard Psychology Professor, Seven Pinker. Towards the end he talks about the difference between thoughts in your head and thoughts that you have written down. Thoughts in your head are made up of a web of nodes, with each node being some concept. The nodes are associated in all sorts of ways e.g. “driving my car” can be linked with a node for “fun”, or “convenience”, as well as “polluting”, or “traffic”.
These thought webs can be large and nebulous and can start to form associations with all sorts of nightmare concepts like “alone”, or “homeless”. Our attention struggles to take in more than a few nodes at a time, and our hardwired negativity bias can funnel us in all the wrong directions if we let it stray too far. Have a go at seeing how many related ideas you can sustain in awareness at the same time. I am struggling to hold more than two, which means the others fall out of awareness readily. This is why worrying can be like a carousel, always presenting you with similar ideas in succession, roving around the web of nodes without ever presenting you with a clear whole. However, it does present you with clear emotions, like fear and dismay.
By comparison thoughts that have been written down become constrained. You have taken the important related nodes and encoded them in a linear piece of writing. The process of encoding can help to see the thought more clearly. You can often write the same thought in several different ways, so try to choose a style that keeps the worry realistic rather than overblown e.g. “My debt of £4000 is going to take a long time to pay off” might sound more realistic and surmountable than “My debt is enormous and I’ll never pay it off”.
It is also important to remember that worrying is useful. We don’t carry many traits that don’t have a strongly selected evolutionary advantage. With the power of worrying we can identify potential problems ahead of time and deal with them effectively. But, as most of us know, worry can overtake us and become seriously dysfunctional and bad for our health.
This is why it is good to make time for dealing with worries more effectively. Schedule a time each day to get things down on paper. The real strength of this strategy is that if you know that you are going to sit down with a pen and paper and actually work on these issues then you can tell yourself this in the middle of the night when you can’t get to sleep. “Tomorrow at 10am I am going to spend 10 minutes working on my worries. Until then I don’t need to think about them”. This is a practice, not a magic bullet. If your tendency to worry is well ingrained then the thoughts will come back, so you have to rinse and repeat. Be patient and be kind to yourself. Things will improve with practice.
To divert your mind from worrying It will help if you have learned some mindfulness, or grounding exercises, or if you have generated a mental safe place to visit. These all deserve a post of their own, but in brief, you can concentrate on present moment sensations in a non-judgemental way; or try naming 5 things you can see, 4 things you can feel, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste; or you can imagine yourself in a relaxing, safe-feeling place. My place is a beach surrounded by boulders, backing onto a pine forest. It is warm and humid and slightly raining. The waves are booming as they break, and the sea is greenish-grey. I can hear gulls crying and I can smell the salt and the pine litter. Alternatively you can get stuck into a physical activity (I use juggling), or read an enjoyable book or do a jigsaw.
When your chosen time to deal with your worries arrives, write them down. Then separate them into things that you can control and things that you cannot control. Spend a moment to appreciate that you cannot be expected to control every outcome in your life. Some things are just impossible to control no matter how upsetting that can be. In this way you can extend some compassion towards yourself. Life can throw you lots of difficulties and you will cope with them better if you are not burned out by worry. If some of these matters really give you trouble e.g. the impending climate catastrophe has a lot of people worrying, or you may be worrying about your own death or that of another, talk to someone about it. More on that later. Now cross out all of the things you cannot control.
Take the list of things you can control and rank them in order of importance. You may notice that the stuff lower down on the list just doesn’t look that important now that you have written it down. If that is the case then cross them out. Now assess what can be done about the other things on the list. If you don’t have much time then stick to the most important worry, the rest can wait until tomorrow. Work out what you need to do. Do you need to seek help? Will you need to be patient? Acknowledge these things. Set a time to do what needs to be done in manageable chunks. If it is something that you have been putting off then try to work out why. Again, it might be wise to talk to someone if this is a persistent problem.
Before you finish the exercise make sure that you focus on something positive too. Seeing as you already have a pen and paper to hand you can write down some things that you are grateful for, or that you are looking forward to, or maybe write some kind words to yourself. Now put away your work until the allotted time tomorrow and, until then, do your best to set your worries aside.
When you return to this exercise the next day it may be useful to start from the beginning again. This gives you a chance to refresh the ideas about what you can and cannot control, and it can give space for the natural development of ideas as you pay attention to them in a constructive way.
I hope that you find this article interesting and of use, and I wish you all the very best in dealing with your worries.
Will.
Will Farmer Counselling 