Overcoming Worry and Generalised Anxiety Disorder by Mark Freeston

Overcoming Worry and Generalised Anxiety Disorder by Mark Freeston

Author:Mark Freeston
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472113948
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group


Hints for the flipside: What are the advantages and disadvantages of avoiding collecting information or looking into things before making a decision? How does making no preparations or plans influence the outcomes of your decisions? How does this help or hinder decision making? Does making quick decisions make you feel more certain?

Strategy 2: Scanning for uncertainty

Because worriers find uncertainty unbearable, understandably and without realizing it they are on the lookout for it nearly all the time. Think about someone who has a phobia of spiders: they tend to be on the alert, scanning for spiders because being surprised by them would be awful. As a consequence of living on high alert, even things that are not spiders, but look like them, can trigger their phobia – a knotted-up piece of wool blowing across a floor, for example. Psychologists call this hypervigilance. It functions to help us detect threats quickly (in this case uncertainty) in our environment; but it also turns things that are not threatening into threats. As a consequence of scanning, worriers are able to spot uncertainty quicker and pick up on it more often than others. It’s almost as if their minds zoom in on uncertainty and then magnify it, until it ‘fills the screen’. When this happens everything about a situation then feels uncertain. Let’s return to our case stories:

Alex was the twenty-three-year-old who was full of nervous energy. He listened to music on his MP3 player, but pulled the headphone off to make sure he had not missed anything. He checked his ticket for the number of the bus, even though he knew he was on the right one.



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