When worry takes hold?

Worry can be a difficult emotion to experience, but something that we all experience at different intensities.  When we experience worry, it can be difficult to know how to cope with it.  The process of worry is that we experience a situation that triggers an anxious thought, which then triggers the feeling of anxiety, leading to anxious behavior.  For example, if you are worried about a social situation, that could trigger an anxious thought about socializing, giving you anxiety and leading you to pace side to side.  To help with your worry, one approach to controlling your body’s anxious reaction is to first go after the anxiety-producing thought.  When we can overpower the thought, it can help the reaction to be less powerful.  Using the same example from above, you could overpower the anxious thoughts of socializing so that hopefully, your body will not lead you to pace side to side. 

For some people, going after anxious thoughts can be really difficult. When that is the case, it can be helpful to go after the anxiety reaction in your body rather than the thought.  Relaxation techniques, mindfulness techniques, breathing techniques, among others, can be really helpful to help your body calm and ground itself in anxious moments.  When worry takes hold of you, these techniques can be really useful, especially if you use them.

When worry takes hold of you, it likes to make you feel like you can’t handle it. Therefore, it can be a powerful tool to fight that by keeping track of times in which worry made you feel that way, and you did make it through it alright.  Worry never feels good, but it can be helpful to pick up on big moments in your life that you survived.  Also, make sure to open up to others about your worries because a lot of times, worries can be so much more powerful when in secret.  This is more about quality than quantity, so do not think you have to tell a bunch of people, but more just a few quality people in your life that you know care.