Learn more about personaldevelopment with this collection
How to focus on the present moment
How to improve relationships through mindful communication
How to reduce stress and anxiety through mindfulness
What Worry Is
Worry is an attempt to solve an issue that has an uncertain, and possibly negative, outcome.
An important point here is that worry is a combination of cognition and affect, a process that engages both our intelligence and our emotions — and the problem with trying to interrupt it is twofold.
147
3.33K reads
Cognitive And Emotional Elements Of Worry
- Intellectually, worry causes us to involuntarily repeat unpleasant and unproductive thoughts, thoughts that do not contribute to effective problem-solving but cyclically feed on themselves. And trying to silence a recurring thought is a lost cause, thanks to a cognitive glitch known as the "thought suppression paradox."
- Emotionally, worry is most directly related to fear; more specifically, what affect theorists define as the "affect" of fear, an evolved set of automatic psychological and physical functions that emerge to guide our behavior when we are confronted with anxiety. Unfortunately, affect is not always appropriate or helpful.
111
693 reads
Telling Yourself Not To Worry
An argument with a worry is an argument you can't win: when you tell yourself not to worry, you aren't going to silence it — you're engaging the worry in conversation, inviting it to explain itself further.
Worry causes anxious, repetitive thoughts — but if you concentrate on stopping those thoughts, you are actually directly contributing to them. Worry develops from and perpetuates a state of fear — but forcing yourself to suppress a negative emotion can instead magnify it, or activate other negative affects like anger or despair.
107
623 reads
Working Around Worry
Since we cannot stop worrying through conscious effort, the best course of action is to concentrate on working around it.
- Accept worry, acknowledge the stressors and limitations it has imposed on us, and focus pragmatically on achieving the best possible outcomes under the circumstances.
- Instead of trying to stop worry, treat it like a headache, or a sprained ankle: it may hurt, and it's going to mess up your day, but no matter what you do, it's not going away immediately, and fixating on it will probably make it worse.
128
639 reads
CURATED BY
More like this
3 ideas
5 Reasons We Worry, and 5 Ways to Worry Less
psychologytoday.com
2 ideas
Why We Worry All the Time - Mindful
mindful.org
3 ideas
Read & Learn
20x Faster
without
deepstash
with
deepstash
with
deepstash
Access to 200,000+ ideas
—
Access to the mobile app
—
Unlimited idea saving & library
—
—
Unlimited history
—
—
Unlimited listening to ideas
—
—
Downloading & offline access
—
—
Personalized recommendations
—
—
Supercharge your mind with one idea per day
Enter your email and spend 1 minute every day to learn something new.
I agree to receive email updates