When worry thinking is in gear, anxiety is near. Most of this is parasitic where ungrounded apprehensions drain time and resources and offer nothing valuable in return. Tackle your parasitic worries starting now, and you can avoid much needless anxiety (needless worry + adrenaline-driven arousal = parasitic anxiety).
When you are prone to worry, you are likely to turn possibilities into calamities. Your child is five-minutes late. You sweat as you think she was kidnapped by a serial killer. At the end of a busy day of worrying, you lay awake lamenting the mistakes of the day and terrorizing yourself about the horrors that you anticipate for tomorrow.
Worries and anxieties are inevitable. However, many are adaptive. While driving through a dangerous neighborhood, you hear your car engine skip. Your car runs well enough and you have a cell phone to call for help. Still, you are concerned and feel tense. Your normally punctual friend is late. You can only guess about the delay. Your apprehension shows that you care for your friend's welfare, but you don't jump to hasty conclusions. This is Shangri-La compared to a habit of handwringing and calamity thinking about events that practically never take place. Let's see what you can do to get to this Shangri-La.
Worry Withers Will
You can defuse parasitic worries with confident composure. This is a state of mind where you recognize that you can directly command only yourself. You resolve to do so. When you are in charge of yourself, you believe you can better influence the controllable events that take place around you. You act to do so.
It is in your mind where you command yourself to change your worry scripts into thoughts that better serve your enlightened interests. Here are three sample ways to build confident composure using parasitic worries and anxieties as the trigger for self-development:
1. Get clear on the evidence. Compare facts with speculations. Ask yourself, what are the facts I can rely on? Is it possible to suspend judgment until I get them?
2. Break the reward for worry cycle. When you worry about low probability events, and nothing bad happens, you are likely to feel relief. Relief rewards worry thinking. Change the pattern. Think of positive and probable alternatives. Instead of magnifying a possibility that a friend's lateness is due to an accident, consider that your friend got caught in traffic or just forget the meeting.
3. Remind yourself to cope. Don't rely exclusively on your memory to cope. Instead, create a wallet-sized card where you remind yourself to: (1) subdue worry by refusing to make a magical jump from a possible calamity to a probable disaster; (2) break out of the "could be trap" where because you think something could happen it will happen; (3) decline to participate in the if-then trap, where if something bad happens, then you won't be able to cope. Instead, consider what you can do to give yourself the best chance under the worst of conditions. If you can handle the worst, you can cope better with lesser stressors.
Anxiety Controls the Mind that Springs it
Catastrophic thinking is taking a bad situation and making it worse in your mind. If you are prone to worry about potential catastrophes, you take an imaginary disaster and make it worse. You have a headache and agonize over the possibility of a brain tumor.
Let's turn the tables on catastrophic thinking by doing the opposite. When feasible, neutralize these thoughts with humorous exaggerations.
Because you believe you'll look like a fool if you make a mistake on an upcoming presentation, you feel anxious. Turn this intolerance for error into a humorous exaggeration. Imagine a New York Times reporter writing a story about a test error you made. Perhaps you mispronounced a word. Whatever the error, you are the headline story. Imagine that 20 years later someone recognizes you, laughs, and says "Aren't you the person who made the Times headline for mucking up the pronunciation of malapropism?" (Remind yourself that are not poking fun at yourself. Rather you are poking fun at a parasitic thought.)
Listen to you inner voice. Do you hear a familiar refrain where you view yourself as too weak to cope effectively enough? Use recognizing this thinking as an opportunity to add to your confident composure with three reality acceptances:
1. Accept---not like---your stress sensations and you have no negative feelings to fear.
2. Accept that you can't be 100% sure that your worrisome predictions are correct.
3. Accept uncertainty as a necessary part of living.
If you have the power to think about your thinking, to consider alternative possibilities, and to accept reality, you are not powerless to act against worry, anxiety, and worse.
Procrastination Petrifies Positive Purpose
Procrastinate on addressing your parasitic worries and anxieties, and you keep going over the same painful ground.
Most will duck situations they link to discomfort, making discomfort the primary reason for procrastination. Take a different twist on this issue. Look at managing discomfort as a way to expand confident composure.
In the room of procrastination, discomfort anxiety is one of the biggest invisible elephants. You worry too much about flubbing a public speech, and this triggers anxiety. You have a commitment anxiety over the possibility of being tied down with an imperfect mate. In either case, you don't want to make a big mistake. So you delay and wait until a solution falls from the sky to free you from this burden. The big mistake is that of avoiding your parasitic anxieties and fears.
Addressing a parasitic worry-anxiety-procrastination connection takes a circular solution: (1) you attack procrastination that blocks resolving your parasitic worry and anxiety thinking; (2) you attack procrastination barriers on the path to cope with situations where you experience a parasitic strain; (3) you refuse to discomfort dodge; instead you expose yourself to situations that can evoke parasitic fears so that you can learn to cope. (Exposure is a gold standard for overcoming fictional fears.)
For more information on breaking a procrastination-anxiety connection, see: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/science-and-sensibility/201003/stop-procrastinating-and-overcome-your-anxieties-and-fears
For in depth information on overcoming worry, anxiety, and worse, see: The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Anxiety:
http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Behavioral-Workbook-Anxiety-Step-/dp/1572245727/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1303951353&sr=1-1
See Dr. Elliot Cohen's blog on his latest book, The Dutiful Worrier:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-would-aristotle-do/201104/are-you-dutiful-worrier
Dr. Bill Knaus
