DO you find yourself worrying about something and find it almost impossible to switch off your mind?

The experience of being held hostage is more common than you might expect. Those who worry to much are held hostage to their fears. Anxious children will do anything to avoid fearful situations and will ask anxiety-based questions over and over, regardless of the answers you provide.

Telling someone not to worry never seems to work. Anxiety seems to be like a weed you keep trying to kill, but somehow it pops back up in the same place and seems to grow faster than your flowers!

What is required is a basic understanding of how anxiety works and a willingness to diligently persist in new techniques.

I bought my usual one litre of semi-skimmed milk and placed it on the kitchen worktop ready to place in the fridge. The milk was all self-contained and I was free to unpack the rest of the shopping. Alas, I nudged the milk and it fell on the floor and spilt all over the kitchen floor. It was now hard to contain the milk making everything sticky. If I wasn’t careful I would transfer the stickiness to every room of the house. This is just like worry, once it’s out of the box, it’s hard to stop it affecting all aspects of your life.

Everyone experiences anxiety in life; it’s both natural and helpful. Right from birth, a human being is vulnerable to the dangers of the world. Babies require help for food, warmth, protection and for some, getting their lungs working. We quickly learn a technique to survive the dangers of life by a flight, fight or freeze reaction. I’m sure you can recall having to run away or fighting as a child in the play ground. Perhaps you’ve been in an interview and the questioned asked, caused you to freeze in your thinking, or as you were about to cross the road froze as you realised the on-coming car was about to hit you.

However, what if you become anxious when there is no danger, or become excessively worried when most people would just feel a little anxiety? It can be rather like your car alarm, which is great to have but a nuisance if it keeps going off when there is no real danger.

There are a variety of types of anxiety ranging from phobias to panic attacks, obsessive compulsive disorders to post traumatic stress disorder.

We might think the problem is in the head, but anxiety manifests itself in the whole body causing headaches, stomach ache, dizziness, nausea, sweating and tearfulness.

So how do we get a handle on worry? First, we have to take the power out of the anxiety. One way is to express the worry by either talking to yourself about it, writing it down or sharing it with another person. This begins to let us use logic about the situation, to see the wood from the trees. Logical thinking helps us to acknowledge that bad things don’t happen that often, that we have overcome previous issues and it should then help us make plans to solve current issues. If this isn’t effective, we need to think about how we defeat weeds. We have to stop food, water and light getting to a weed. Give yourself a ‘worry time’ every day to think about your worry so that you don’t have to think about it all day long. Keep reminding yourself that you can deal with your worry at your ‘worry time’. Using your imagination can help. Imagine putting your worry on a piece of paper and placing it into a locked box. This takes practice and a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) therapist/ hypnotherapist can help. The mind works on a ‘scatter brain’ approach. We have thousands and thousands of thoughts every day and most of them pop in and out of the head without a second thought. It’s the thoughts we grab and hold onto, that often causes problems. So we have to find a way of letting these thoughts ‘go’ allowing healthier thoughts to develop.

You might like to think of worry as a big bully that you need to stand up to and talk down. Give yourself a powerful sentence to say when the worry thought pops up such as, ‘that’s rubbish, get lost I’ve got better things to do and think about.’ Then make sure you occupy your mind with some other activity.

Another approach is to re-set the default button by having relaxation exercises and a special positive memory to think about. Use your senses of sight, smell and hearing to make the memory real. Bullies tend to pick on weak people, so we need to build our mental muscles to keep those weeds from germinating.

Dr Bill Merrington is a therapist and chartered psychologist working in the York district

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