The Worry Trick: How Your Brain Tricks You into Expecting the Worst and What You Can Do About It

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The Role of Thoughts: The book explains how our thoughts and beliefs can contribute to our worry and anxiety. Carbonell offers strategies for identifying and challenging negative thoughts and replacing them with more positive and realistic ones. Anxiety is a powerful force. It makes us question ourselves and our decisions, causes us to worry about the future, and fills our days with dread and emotional turbulence. Based in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), this book is designed to help you break the cycle of worry.

The Role of Physical Activity: The book highlights the physical and mental health benefits of regular physical activity, which can help reduce worry and anxiety. Carbonell provides practical tips for incorporating physical activity into our daily lives. What does the “what if” clause actually tell you? Say you’re thinking: “What if I’m in a car accident?” That’s not something you think at the moment that an accident happens. There’s no “what if” about it – it’s happening.This book moves along and has humor and a light touch, it is far from being academic and boring. That helps! Also, the insights are deep, especially the approach to interact directly with the worry, rather than try to get over it or cure it. You see, you can only worry about the future – about something that could happen, however unlikely. But the truth is, you don’t know what will happen in the future. And it’s incredibly difficult to prove that something won’t happen, no matter how hard you try. In fact, to the worrying mind, the more you try and fail, the more evidence there is that the bad thing could happen! Try this experiment. Write out one of your worries, in its most detailed, terrifying form. Keep it at around 25 words. Set aside 25 of those Tic Tacs that you bought to count your worries. To change your relationship with worry, you need to be one step ahead. Let’s start by breaking down these worry sentences. There’s a “what if” clause, followed by whatever terrible possibility wants to occupy your mind at the moment – let’s call this a catastrophe clause. If you feel that you have too much worry in your life and want to have less, you can probably learn to shrink the role of worry plays in your life.”

Now, as a woman in my early 30's, I still find I worry about insignificant things. But I also have a lot of fear and anxiety about things that likely will never actually happen. You know the feeling. You’re going about your day, as normal – you could be on the bus, or sitting down to dinner with your family. Maybe you’re lying in bed, trying to sleep. Suddenly a thought comes – unprompted and unwelcome. Obviously, this is easier said than done, especially if you’ve spent a long time going with the intuitive but unhelpful response of fighting with your worry. The catastrophe clause could be any hypothetical scenario, so it just becomes a game of Mad Libs. When you ignore the “what if” clause and focus on whatever unlikely drama is filling the catastrophe clause, you have a steady stream of what feel like legitimate concerns.The goal? You’ll no longer be in the bad habit of automatically ignoring or distracting yourself from your worries. When you’re not distracted, you can catch the “what if’s” and start seeing them for the game of “let’s pretend” that they really are. Take the time to humor your worries Questions to Consider If you were told that a neighbor never worries about his kids, would you think that was a good thing or a bad thing? Would you like to be known as someone who doesn’t worry about your kids? If your significant other said to you, “I don’t think you ever worry about me,” would you take it as a complaint or a compliment?” Ask yourself this: What’s going to happen tomorrow? If it’s a weekday, maybe you’ll wake up at the usual time. Go to work. Traffic could be bad, so you might be a little bit late – Why not? It’s happened before. You could be in a serious car accident. It’s not impossible. What are your options here? You could try arguing, but that’s just giving him what he wants – and what you don’t want. Ignoring him just makes him try harder. Hitting him is tempting, but probably not the best idea.

Emotions change, frequently, and often without obvious reason. Facts don’t change in the absence of new evidence. If your thought varies in this way, if it changes with your mood, then it doesn’t really indicate a present problem in the external world.” The book provides a comprehensive understanding of the psychological and neurological mechanisms underlying worry and anxiety. You'll have thoughts that tell you something bad could possibly happen sometime in the future. And that's true. Its always true, whether you have thoughts about it or not. Anything is possible, bad things sometimes do happen, and nobody knows the future.”Always keep in mind that exposure is practice with fear, and do nothing to oppose, avoid, or distract from the fear during exposure. Chronic worries don't get solved because there really isn't anything to solve. The worry just gets repeated until it's replaced by something else.”