How to overcome your worries.

• Author: Leahy, Robert L.
• Position: Psychology

"... Since most worries never come true, worries often are forced to admit, 'I can't recall what I was worried about."

EVERYONE SEEMS to worry, yet chronic worriers--those who worry all the time--wait almost 10 years to seek out psychotherapy; that is if they ever decide to go. Moreover, they have been heating bad advice all the while: You have to think more positively, they are told. You should believe in yourself. Why are you punishing yourself? Do you want to suffer? Just stop worrying. This is like saying to someone who is anorexic, "Why don't you have a pastry?" The chance that this advice will work is about zero.

So, what are the rules for being a worrier?

* If something bad can happen, then it is your responsibility to worry about it.

* Do not accept any uncertainty--you need to know for sure.

* Treat all of your negative thoughts as if they are tree.

* Anything bad that could happen is a reflection of who you are as a person.

* Failure is unacceptable.

* Get rid of any negative feelings immediately.

* Treat everything like an emergency.

Now that you know the roles, you can worry every single day of your life about something that probably will never happen. Congratulations, you are on the royal road to misery.

Worriers believe that they need to worry in order to be prepared for--or to avoid--the bad things that are going to happen to them. There is a lot of excellent research on the nature of worry as well as how to get control of it. What follows are seven steps to conquer those worries:

Distinguish productive from unproductive worry. Ask yourself, "what is the advantage that I hope to get in worrying?" Worriers believe that simply having a thought--"I might fail"--means that they should wont about it. They think that worry will prepare, motivate, and keep them from ever being surprised.

If I am going to fly from New York to Rome, productive worry involves action that I can take now. For instance, I can purchase my airline ticket and reserve a hotel room. Unproductive worry involves all the what-ifs that I cannot do anything about: What if my scheduled talk does not go well? What if I get lost in Rome?

Accept reality and commit to change. Research shows that worriers cannot tolerate uncertainty, treating it as if it was a sure negative. Ironically, 85% of the things that worriers worry about turn out to have a positive outcome, and even when the outcome is negative, 79% of the time worriers end up saying, 'I handled that better than...