STRESS MANAGEMENT: Get Rid of Your Worries Once and For All

"Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry. Worry never fixes anything.”

Worries Never Work.

NEVER...Worries waste your valuable time and energy; worries drain you.

Worry is the thinking component of anxiety. Worry is your mind thinking ahead into the future to anticipate possible threats. Worry also occurs a when you’re second-guessing yourself about something that’s already happened.

Even if worries are a natural characteristic of human nature they are also one of the most well-known stressors.

Stress is very harmful for your body. When you are constantly worrying you activate your stress reaction (‘fight and flight’ reaction) and put your body on a constant state of alarm which is designed to get you to recognize a threat to your survival. The body responds to stress (worry) by releasing complex hormonal cascade of over 30 stress hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol. As a result increasing your heart rate, blood pressure, breathing pace, muscle tension, and inflammation, and dumping fuel (stores glucose and fat) into your blood steam.

Cyclic and neverending worries lead to the serious wreck of the nervous system, phobias, obtrusiveness neurosis, anxiety, fear and stress.Stress has been linked to all the leading causes of death, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, accidents and suicide. Almost 90 % of all visits to primary health care providers are due to stress-related problems.

Lets take a closer look how chronic worries affect you.

• Keeps your mind focused on looking for problems, difficulties or disasters
• Leads to poor concentration
• Focuses your attention onto yourself and your own concerns
• Makes it more difficult to make decisions
• Makes you tend to predict the worst, due to negative thinking habits
• Makes you more problem-focused as opposed to solution-focused

• Makes you less efficient
• Interferes with your performance
• Makes you self-reliant
• Makes you less confidently

• Makes you feel confused
• Makes you feel apprehensive or afraid
• Makes you feel out of control
• Makes you feel that you can’t cope

There are many ways we can get rid of worries.

I want to show some simple techniques you could start applying right now.

1.Start with never criticizing yourself

2.'Box' your worries

3. Plan in some ‘worry time’

4. Reframing

Start with being gentle with yourself, approve of yourself and keep encouraging yourself. ‘You can heal your life’ states Louise Hay in her book You Can Heal Your Life.

Imagine putting all our worries, one by one, into a box and closing the lid – or encase them in a bubble and watch them float out of sight.

The more strongly you imagine this the more effective it will be.

Practice it regularly. If you are worried about forgetting something important, write it down before trying to forget about it.

If you are overwhelmed by your worries, set aside a regular half hour every day to worry.

If you start to worry at other times, postpone the worry to the ‘worry time’ and focus on what you are doing.

When the worry time comes around, deal with each worry in turn, tackling it as a problem to solve.

This strategy affects the worry in two ways: it builds a wall around the process and stops it from spreading and it turns the worry into something more constructive.

This is another strategy for getting bad events into perspective.

One way to reframe events is to reevaluate them as 'disappointing', 'concerning', or 'uncomfortable' rather than 'awful' or 'unbearable'.

Another way is to see that even negative events almost always have a positive side to them, listing all the positives you can think of.

"Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining"...while refraiming your worry try to find that silver lining.

About the Author

Dr.Inese Millere is a Holistic Stress Management coach and consultant who assists women in leadership in creating stress management and work life balance strategies, and healthy lifestyle routines.

If you'd like to talk about coaching with me, please contact me directly at info@action4balance.com with a brief description of your situation.