Ways to Manage Worry Instead of it Managing You – Part TWO

By: Daniel Baum

I am glad you are back. Let’s continue our journey together to explore ways to manage your worrying. In part two of my blog, “Worry! Ways to Manage Worry Instead of it Managing You”, I am going to present to you some general recommendations and thoughts about dealing with worry.

As I explained in part one of this blog, it’s a biological fact the worry is innate and is a necessary defense against danger or making dangerous decisions.  But what can we do to prevent toxic worrying in our lives?  How can we use worry like any other emotion and have it help us to move towards what we want or need?

There are certain facts of life that are the core of the human experience. The obvious reason people worry is that there is a lot to worry about.

It is Hallowell’s fundamental belief, as is mine that some of the strongest weapons to decrease worry or anxiety might include:

  • Love
  • A passionate connection to an individual
  • A connection to a deity (as you may personally define it)
  • Some kind of spiritual connection (as you may express it).
  • A type of personal cause or ideals that hold out and support the possibility of sustaining us no matter what the outcome of our daily lives may be

This spiritual or religious perspective, depending on your own personal views, is not going to stop a person from worrying. This framework can help us to better manage and even utilize worry.

As a starting point for dealing with worry Hallowell states, “We have to acknowledge that suffering is an inherent part of life. Yet, it is your own philosophy of life that you hold through your own life experience that will shape the way or how easily you cope with your own day to day worries. As well as the tools you gain along the way to help you to manage, not control, how much and when you worry”.

One of the secrets to not moving into toxic worry is time, or more specifically our own awareness of time.  Let’s look at our own awareness of
our personal historical time and how it affects us when and how we feel fear in the present. Our imagination plays tricks with time.  It may derive more from an imagined peril than from any actual danger.  One way we become worried is that we take our past failings and bring them into the present.  We believe that since our past choices produced bad outcomes, it will happen again.  Fear that what happened in the past will happen again only intensifies and increases our fear and worry, so the worry takes on a snowball effect.

Our worrying increases also because we do not manage our external time. In our modern age, many people feel that things are moving too quickly so that humans do not have the time to think through what is right for them. Therefore, we worry and then make a hasty decision that in the long run we do not feel good about.  Also, today we have to balance so many things that we worry we cannot keep up with our lives. How many times have we said how we would like to go back to earlier times when things were simpler and less complicated?  With this tremendous information age, advertisement and the media prey on our fears and help to increase our feeling of worry.

Any combination or all of these general tools listed above can help you to begin to manage your worry in a healthy way.

 Lastly, as I discussed in part one of my blog, Worry! Ways to Manage Worry Instead of it Managing You I will leave you with this acronym made up of the word, worry.

I hope this acronym will help remind you about what I discussed with you in part two of my blog entitled, general recommendations and thoughts about dealing with worry

Most importantly, I hope it will give you a concrete tool to help you manage your worrying as you move through your day.

Wait

One minute

Relax

Refocus

Yourself

Remember don’t worry, too much, be happy.

In the final part of my three-part blog, “Worry! Ways to Manage Worry Instead of it Managing You”, I will give you some specific strategies to manage your worrying on day to day basis. I am looking forward to continuing our journey together to help you manage your worrying.

Reference and extra help:

  1. Edward M. Hallowell, M.D., “Worry, Hope and Help for a Common Condition,” Random House Publishing Group, Copyright 1997
  2. Dr. Hallowell also recommends that self -help groups can be a great addition together with professional mental health professionals to help people manage their worrying. I recommend that you attend a self- help group called Emotions Anonymous. Their website is: http://emotionsanonymous.org/. Just go to the website you will find a wealth of information. On the website press on the tab, “Find a Meeting,” and you will find meetings all over the world including in Israel.

*Please feel free to contact me directly; your feedback about my blog is greatly appreciated. Cell Phone:  011-972-54-5819591; E-mail: [email protected]; Web-Site:  www.growingchange.co.il

Daniel Baum, M.S.W. I am trained psychotherapist with over 32 years of experience. At my clinic, “Growing Change,”   I specialize in treating men and women who suffer from different types of addictions as well as other emotional and psychological problems.