The 10 Best-Ever Anxiety Management Techniques by Margaret Wehrenberg

Author:Margaret Wehrenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W.W.Norton
Published: 2011-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

NINE

Technique #7: Contain Your Worry

Everybody worries, but people with generalized anxiety elevate worry to an art form. They take normal worries and develop them into monstrous impediments to clear thinking, enlarging them out of proportion to reality by excessive rumination. The anxious mind can find odd things to get stuck on, too: breaking laws, germs and contagion, poisoning, hurting others by accident. This exaggeration of normal worry might even achieve a state of paranoia or delusion, causing people to fear they are going crazy.

This kind of worry is hard to control; it becomes an anxiety disorder when a person is so preoccupied by it that it robs life of joy and interferes with attention to the details that enrich or inform life. When a person is no longer able to shrug off worry, it is time to take charge and learn how to manage it. No one can avoid worry altogether, but anyone can contain it. This technique acknowledges that at times people cannot just “stop worrying about it,” as their family and friends tell them to do. They instead have to learn strategies to contain their worries.

The strategies in this technique will not only provide immediate relief from worrying, but also change the likelihood of future worry by calming down the overactive limbic system that overreacts to indicators of trouble with excessive worry. As with all of the other techniques, the goal is to eliminate the frequency, intensity, and duration of anxiety symptoms to give the anxious brain a rest. Freed of anxiety symptoms, the anxious mind will recuperate from its agitation and generate less anxiety.

WHAT’S MAKING YOU SO WORRIED?

It’s that darned negative, limbic-generated worry getting stuck in the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACG)! The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is too tired to take charge, perhaps because of low serotonin levels that increase negativity, increase agitation, and decrease the energy to contain worry. Even when the brain is temporarily distracted, worry comes back to trouble you, like your tongue trying desperately to get rid of a raspberry seed in your molar. The PFC needs to do a manual override on that automatic process, which is what this technique is all about.

Psychotherapy is very useful when people worry like this, because worry seems so real to the people who are stuck. They lose sight of all the reasons why it is safe not to worry. Needing help getting out of their rut is not unlike needing a tow truck to get a perfectly running car out of a ditch. There is nothing wrong with the car except that it cannot steer or move forward when its wheels are just spinning. Once the car is freed from the rut, it can go back to handling the road well. Containing worry allows the brain to do its work without spinning its wheels.

Carrie was so good at worrying that she could take the slightest threat and spend a whole day on it. A college senior, Carrie was applying for jobs and needed to squeeze in interviews between work and classes.

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