Retraining Your Brain
Most of the worriers I treat need to retrain their minds and learn new mental skills. It's like training your muscles to learn the pattern of a golf or tennis swing, so that the correct swing becomes automatic. You can train your brain to learn effective ways of dealing with situations that arise again and again, such as financial worries or fears of failure.
There is a window of opportunity that lasts about a minute, during which you can sever the tentacle of a toxic worry before it grips you totally. Your brain has not yet gone into spasm. That is the time to defuse worry.
Talk to yourself in a useful way. Most worriers talk to themselves in half-phrases of imagined doom, little punches and jabs of negativity. Try to erase those old, automatic patterns by deliberately distracting yourself. Whistle or sing. Snap your fingers. Insert a positive thought. One positive thought at a time can gradually shift the balance of your thinking from negative to positive.
Monitor your automatic thoughts whenever you get bad news or perceive danger of some sort. It's helpful to write them down. Often you can see immediately how wildly exaggerated they actually are. Then examine these thoughts for errors in logic. Create alternative hypotheses that are more logical.
You may find that these automatic thoughts and errors in logic grow out of the fundamental way you look at life and at yourself, your self-schema. Do you fear that the deck of life is irretrievably stacked against you? Are you afraid that nobody will ever find you attractive? Whatever your self-schema might be, you can change consciously. Over time, self-questioning begins to replace reflexive self-flagellation.
Become creative in finding ways of quenching worry. Allison Barnes would blow into the palms of her hands sometimes before going into a meeting and say she had just "blown off" her worries. She bought an ugly-looking toad figurine, which she kept in her purse ready to deposit on a shelf whenever she needed a reminder that her worries could be put aside. You have to be willing to play along and suspend your disbelief for this method to work, but if you are willing it can work very well.
Worry paralyzes the sufferer and prevents him from taking action. My brain-training program teaches you to make concrete plans, eliminating unnecessary worry before it occurs. I call this program EPR: evaluate, plan, remediate. Evaluate a possible problem rationally, set up a plan to take care of it, then act on the plan. Turn worry into action. I recommend that worriers make a list of three—and only three—changes they want to make in their life. They might be as simple as making a dentist appointment or consolidating their credit cards. Persist until all three tasks are done. Then make a new list of three, and only three, changes you want to make in your life. After six months to a year, you will have dramatically changed your life for the better. And you will worry less, because you will be safer. Structure reduces risk.
There is a window of opportunity that lasts about a minute, during which you can sever the tentacle of a toxic worry before it grips you totally. Your brain has not yet gone into spasm. That is the time to defuse worry.
Talk to yourself in a useful way. Most worriers talk to themselves in half-phrases of imagined doom, little punches and jabs of negativity. Try to erase those old, automatic patterns by deliberately distracting yourself. Whistle or sing. Snap your fingers. Insert a positive thought. One positive thought at a time can gradually shift the balance of your thinking from negative to positive.
Monitor your automatic thoughts whenever you get bad news or perceive danger of some sort. It's helpful to write them down. Often you can see immediately how wildly exaggerated they actually are. Then examine these thoughts for errors in logic. Create alternative hypotheses that are more logical.
You may find that these automatic thoughts and errors in logic grow out of the fundamental way you look at life and at yourself, your self-schema. Do you fear that the deck of life is irretrievably stacked against you? Are you afraid that nobody will ever find you attractive? Whatever your self-schema might be, you can change consciously. Over time, self-questioning begins to replace reflexive self-flagellation.
Become creative in finding ways of quenching worry. Allison Barnes would blow into the palms of her hands sometimes before going into a meeting and say she had just "blown off" her worries. She bought an ugly-looking toad figurine, which she kept in her purse ready to deposit on a shelf whenever she needed a reminder that her worries could be put aside. You have to be willing to play along and suspend your disbelief for this method to work, but if you are willing it can work very well.
Worry paralyzes the sufferer and prevents him from taking action. My brain-training program teaches you to make concrete plans, eliminating unnecessary worry before it occurs. I call this program EPR: evaluate, plan, remediate. Evaluate a possible problem rationally, set up a plan to take care of it, then act on the plan. Turn worry into action. I recommend that worriers make a list of three—and only three—changes they want to make in their life. They might be as simple as making a dentist appointment or consolidating their credit cards. Persist until all three tasks are done. Then make a new list of three, and only three, changes you want to make in your life. After six months to a year, you will have dramatically changed your life for the better. And you will worry less, because you will be safer. Structure reduces risk.
This entry was posted by Mandy, on
Wednesday, May 13, 2009.
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