Reduce Your Worry

I wanted to write about this topic because worry is such a common struggle that I see in my practice. Worry can be helpful, it can motivate us to act, it can let us know what is important to us, it can help us to plan. However, too much worry can lead to fatigue, feeling that we cannot solve problems and difficulties with sleep. It is also a large component of generalized anxiety.

One of the main contributors to worry is what we call cognitive avoidance. Cognitive avoidance is the idea that we are avoiding our present moment emotional experience by thinking. It is a mechanism that occurs in which when we are experiencing physical/emotional distress in response to a threat, we start to think to move away from the pain/discomfort. This process makes total sense from an evolutionary perspective; when we are aware of a threat, we need to problem solve ways to avoid the threat now and in the future (Zeigarnik, 1927). For some, the physiological activation in the body itself is the threat, thus inducing worry and overthinking.

The difficulty however, with this process, is that many of these threats are not imminent. We do not always need to problem solve or think of ways to get out of these situations. Sometimes, we have even already solved the problem, and then we continue to do so over and over.  

The other difficulty with this process is that we must be able to process our experience, sadness for instance, emotionally, in order for it to pass. What this means is that we need to FEEL, in order to let go.  When we avoid the experience cognitively - so going into problem solving, thinking, worrying - we are actually blocking the emotional experiencing and processing  (Vrana, Cuthbert & Lang, 1986).

So, cognitive avoidance is actually making worry worse. 

What you need to take a look at in your own life is: 

What emotional and physiological experience am I avoiding by overthinking?

What is worse, thinking thinking thinking? Or being with the experience in front of me and allowing it to pass?

What can be done in order to reduce worry and decrease cognitive avoidance?

1- rewiring the routes in the brain with meditations which focus on coming back to the physical sensations/emotions. We want to be able to tolerate physical discomfort without always having to avoid it.

2- noticing when we start to go into worry about unsolvable situations and coming back to the trigger/what is going on in the present.

3- therapy can help you to learn these new ways of experiencing emotions. .