How to Stop Worrying
Worrying doesn’t prevent things from happening, it just means you suffer twice if they do. Here are three strategies to help you stop worrying.
Ellen Hendriksen, PhD
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How to Stop Worrying
IN THIS ARTICLE YOU’LL DISCOVER
- Why we worry and how worrying can seem like the good guy
- Why constant low-level stress is exhausting emotionally and physically
- Three strategies for how to stop worrying
Worry makes us miserable and uncomfortable, but many worriers claim it keeps them prepared and safe from harm. And in a way, it does, but not in the way you’d think. Is it possible to stop worrying? What if worry is part of who you are?
You know you’re a worrier if you live by Mad Eye Moody’s exhortation for “constant vigilance!” Or if you identify with the heroes of Disney’s oddly recurring theme of anxious fish: Flounder from The Little Mermaid or Marlin from Finding Nemo. Or if you relate to Fear from Inside Out. But that one’s almost too easy.
Regardless of which worrier you relate to, you’re in good company. One-third of Americans will struggle with an anxiety disorder in their lifetime. That’s over 100 million of us.
For something so common, worry is somewhat of an enigma. Sometimes worry can seem like the good guy—we credit it with helping us to get motivated, stay on top of things, and have a plan B and C and D ready to go. Indeed, for those of us wired to worry, anxiety is familiar and oddly reassuring.
But more often, anxiety is the bad guy. We can’t turn off our brain. We lie awake long after it’s time to wind down, get stuck in our heads when we should be in the moment, and overthink everything from our career path to whether or not we should pay thirty cents extra for an organic onion.
Worry is also exhausting. Worry’s partner in crime is physical tension—show me someone who worries and I’ll show you someone with back pain, GI problems, a clenched jaw, or chronic headaches.
If that isn’t enough, the way we cope with worry can exacerbate the problem: stress eating, bugging our partner for reassurance, frantic attempts to distract ourselves. Even our healthy coping can get hijacked by worry: “Am I doing meditation right?” “Does this pacing count as exercise?”
So why on earth do we bother? Why does your mother-in-law fret about everything? Why does your boyfriend freak out over nothing? Why do we worry so much?
Why We Worry
No one would call worrying a hobby, but it’s definitely an activity. An invisible activity, but something we do nonetheless. It’s hard to get stuff done if we’re worrying. You might do it instead of sleeping, or you might do it instead of being present in the moment.
So why do we put so much time into it? Well, worry serves a very important purpose. It allows us to avoid our negative feelings.
Worry is the rock that goes skipping over the surface of Lake Catastrophe rather than sinking into the depths.
Do you know someone who, when criticized, gets angry instead of hurt? Or someone who, when they hear bad news, feels guilty instead of sad? It’s common to swap one negative emotion for another one that’s easier to deal with. As unpleasant as anxiety is, it’s often preferable to feeling other negative emotions like grief, shame, sadness, or despair.
A slightly different interpretation comes from a study in the journal Behavior Therapy, which posits that worriers are hypersensitive to jolts of negative emotion. Worry acts as a buffer. It shrinks the jarring and excruciating gap worriers have to bridge between feeling good and feeling bad, but it also keeps them in a state of constant negativity
Rather than feel good and be blindsided with uncomfortable negative emotion when the other shoe inevitably drops, worriers can stay in a prepared state of low-level distress. It’s protective, even if it’s uncomfortable.
In other words, worry is the rock that goes skipping over the surface of Lake Catastrophe rather than sinking into the depths.
With that, how can we stop worrying? Here are three tools of varying power. First, I’ll give you a can opener. Next, I’ll give you a cordless drill. And then we’ll end with a big old chainsaw.
Tip #1 – Make time to worry.
Even though this is the least intensive of the three tips, this tool serves a great function. Simply set aside part of your day for worrying.
Think of worry as a goldfish that grows as big as the tank you put it in. By limiting the amount of time you allow yourself to worry, your worries stay small rather than taking up your whole day. So, pick a time—maybe your afternoon commute, or the three o’clock slump, or right after dinner—as your worry time. Keep your tank small so your worry can’t grow.
The point of worry time isn’t to suppress worries and never have them. The point is to contain the worry so it doesn’t contaminate your life like an oil spill.
When worries bubble up outside of your designated time, ask yourself, “Can I do something about this right now?” If you can, take action. If you start to worry that you forgot to pay your credit card bill, pay it. If you just fought with your partner and you’re worried you hurt their feelings, apologize.
But if you start to worry that you’ll die alone, or that your kid could be hurt at school, or that you’re going to end up with dementia, there’s nothing you can actively do in the moment. So punt it. Kick those thoughts to your worry time. Chances are, when worry time rolls around, you’ll have forgotten about those disruptive thoughts, or at the very least, they will have lost their urgency. Think of delaying worrying as the best kind of procrastination—you assign yourself a task to do later, but that task usually disappears on its own.
And if it sticks around? Go ahead and worry about it for a few minutes. The point of worry time isn’t to suppress worries and never have them. The point is to contain the worry so it doesn’t contaminate your life like an oil spill.
Tip #2: Experiment with acting confident and decisive.
We all have that friend who goes through life rolling with the punches. Any way the wind blows, they bend without breaking.
Now, that friend may have some of their own problems—they miss out because they didn’t plan ahead, their spontaneity can sometimes bleed over into impulsivity, and people get mad because they can forget to follow through on promises.
But anxiety isn’t one of their problems.
So when you’re sick of feeling anxious—you’ve sunk eight hours into researching which slow cooker to buy, you won’t let yourself hit “send” on that job application even though you’ve checked it for typos fifteen times, or you’re worried your partner is dead because you haven’t heard from them for four hours, ask yourself what that friend would do.
And then, try it on for size. Do what your non-anxious friend would do. It will feel wrong at first, but here’s the benefit. Experimenting with non-anxious behavior forces you to try on a more flexible way of thinking and acting.
And, once you’ve road tested researching slow cookers for only ten minutes, checked your job application over just twice, and texted your partner only after you haven’t heard from them all day, you realize your worry wasn’t keeping you safe after all. You were safe all along.
Tip #3: Lean into the worst case scenario.
Here’s the chainsaw I promised you. This tool is not for the faint of heart, but it gets the job done. Time to go deep.
A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Try this. To break yourself out of the shallow, verbal, “what if” realm of worry, actually imagine the worst-case scenario. Picture whatever you fear vividly, in great detail, as if it were the worst scene in your personal horror movie.
Go big. If you’re worried you’ll end up alone, picture yourself alone in a depressing apartment on Christmas with no one to call. If you’re worried you’ll end up a failure, picture yourself living under a bridge. If you’re worried about health or safety, don’t necessarily picture the car accident or the moment you’re diagnosed with cancer; instead, picture the worst-case scenario of the grief and loss that follows.
You know you’ve found the right image if it brings a tear to your eye. Once you’ve found it, picture it in your mind’s eye as vividly as possible and sit for five minutes with the big yucky emotions it brings up. Set a timer so you’re not tempted to throw in the towel. Then do it again. And again. The next day, rinse and repeat. Do it until it gets boring.
You know you’ve found the right image if it brings a tear to your eye. Once you’ve found it, picture it in your mind’s eye as vividly as possible and sit for five minutes with the big yucky emotions it brings up.
Because it will. As horrifying as the exercise is at the outset—after all, who wants to picture themselves sad, alone, filled with regret, grieving, or having failed?—only the first couple times really sear your soul. After that, one of two things will happen. Either your brain will realize your horror movie would never actually happen—you’d take action before things got that far—or your brain will get bored with the repetition that never comes to fruition.
Psychologists call this imagery exposure. It’s a doozy, and best done with a trained mental health professional, not because it’s dangerous—it’s not—but because it’s helpful to have someone to help you troubleshoot and keep you on task.
So to wrap it all up, we worry because we’d rather feel bad than worse. But if we roll back the worry, we realize feeling bad wasn’t keeping us safe after all. And maybe, just maybe, it’s okay to let ourselves feel good. In other words, don’t worry, be happy.
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About the Author
Dr. Ellen Hendriksen was the host of the Savvy Psychologist podcast from 2014 to 2019. She is a clinical psychologist at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders (CARD). She earned her Ph.D. at UCLA and completed her training at Harvard Medical School. Her scientifically-based, zero-judgment approach is regularly featured in Psychology Today, Scientific American, The Huffington Post, and many other media outlets. Her debut book, HOW TO BE YOURSELF: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety, was published in March 2018.