All About Worrying and How to Get Off the Worry Train

by Peter Sacco

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Worrying can become a habit and damaging to health

Are you a worry wart – you worry about everything under the sun, moon and stars?

Do you wake up in the morning with worry being the first thing on your mind, worrying about the day before you have even set one foot on the ground? And does this worry stick with you throughout the course of the day, draining you and making you so tired?

Are you then so tired that you want to sleep but can’t because the night time version of your worrying mind now kicks in?

If so, welcome to the world of worry and you can officially consider yourself a worry wart!

Most people who worry do so based on past experiences.

They take one or a handful of past experiences which weren’t so good, even possibly tragic and they have a way of extrapolating them into one or more areas of their lives. What was once a “worry” isolated to career or family escalates into family, career, health, world events and the list goes on.

The reason worry becomes so big and bad is mental energy – where thoughts go energy flows!

If you are focusing much or most of your thoughts in a domain of worry, your energy will become negative and continually flow and collect momentum in a domain of worry.

In cognitive behavioral therapy, practitioners identify several precipitators or cognitive distortions that create and feed into worrying. I am going to mention two of the most common ones; magnification and selective abstraction.

In magnification, individuals literally blow things out of proportion.

They take a single, isolated event which has no bearing on what happened in the past and magnify it into becoming something larger or more important than it is. Say the individual makes one little mistake in the course of their day and they then start believing the mistake is huge, everyone will know about it and it will be costly in other areas of their lives.

Even though they have little or no evidence that anything will come of it, they continually feed into the notion that it is bad, horrible and their worries build around it.

In selective abstraction, a detail is taken out of context and only focused on, while everything else in the context is ignored completely.

It is basically a form of selective attention where individuals are really good at focusing their attention on the negative. As they focus more on the negative, the energy feeding it continues to grow and this overwhelms them.

Do any of these two cognitive distortions sound familiar?

I am sure too many people can relate to them. Let’s face it, it seems worrying is the norm in today’s society. People are led to believe that if they are not worrying, then they are not investing their thoughts and feelings into anything worthwhile.

Only you can stop yourself from worrying. I know… easier said than done!

Hypnosis, meditation and yoga are exceptional methods for controlling and minimizing worrying. The goal is to shift your focus from what you are worrying about and onto something that brings you peace, joy and pleasure.

I know some folks reading this might actually say that they derive some sense of pleasure from worrying, “When I am worrying, I know that I am alive because I have something to worry about.” Well, good luck with that! Here at Free At Last Hypnosis we leverage concepts discussed here as a resource during our in-office and online sessions for our stress and anxiety hypnosis management program which you can learn more about it here >>>

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES RELATED TO STOP WORRYING:

Why is it So Darn Hard to Cope with Stress? Ways to Reduce It >>>

Overcoming Impostor Syndrome – Proving You’re Not a Fraud >>>

How to Stop Self-Destructive Mind Reading >>>

Stop Overthinking So Much – How to Get Rid Of the Whys >>>

Library of Self-Hypnosis Downloads Products.

 
Peter Andrew Sacco Ph.D.
Staff Writer
Free At Last Hypnosis

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