If you can’t stop worrying, relax, or should you worry? Worry, at its core, is a natural human response that signals potential threat so as to motivate some form of preparation or action.
However, for a significant portion of the population, worry transcends functionality becoming a chronic, pervasive state that attaches itself to nearly every aspect of life. From the profoundly consequential to the utterly mundane.
When it gets to this persistent, excessive anxiety about events or outcomes including those that warrant little reason to expect a negative result, that should give you a reason to worry. Again, no pun intended. Think of this kind of worry as a generalized anxiety where your emotional volume is always set too high.
Although it may not be obvious to you, others may notice that you worry a lot. If you find yourself in a constant feeling of restlessness or being on edge, difficulty concentrating because the mind is perpetually distracted by internal narratives of disaster and physical manifestations such as persistent muscle tension, fatigue and sleep disturbances, you must take note.
The worrying itself is typically uncontrollable and intrusive.
For example, you may spend hours agonising over a brief or a casual email you received, dissecting every word choice, fearing it will be misinterpreted or worrying it will lead to disciplinary action even though the content was entirely innocuous.
That disproportionate reaction and emotional labor is applied uniformly across concerns, making the mental burden immense.
Worry is frequently triggered by ambiguity or uncertainty. Because the worrier views the future as an inherently unpredictable and therefore dangerous place, any situation lacking a guaranteed outcome be it a job interview, a child’s late arrival home or simply selecting a brand of coffee, yes, those can initiate a catastrophic thought spiral.
Current psychological understanding supported by models like the Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) theory suggests that these individuals struggle to accept that negative events might occur.
Instead of accepting the inherent uncertainty of life, they use excessive worry as a maladaptive cognitive strategy believing that by mentally rehearsing every bad outcome, they can somehow prevent it or, at least, be better prepared for the emotional fallout.
While it somewhat makes sense to react that way, it is not good for you or anyone around you. Thus, you need to find other ways around it.. The goal is not to eliminate worry entirely, as that is impossible, but to reduce its volume and control its duration.
A crucial step involves externalising the worry by setting aside a specific, limited amount of time each day. Research suggests that you set aside a ‘’worry window’’ to focus solely on those concerns. Outside of that time, the worrisome thoughts are mentally flagged and postponed. On top of that, you want to be intentional and mindful so as to help you anchor yourself to the present moment which will in turn interrupt the pattern of future-oriented, catastrophic thinking.
This approach helps regain control over your thoughts, training the brain that uncertainty is manageable and that worry is not a necessary precursor to safety.