Listening to Worries Can Actually Make You Less Anxious

Explore and evaluate worries using a writing technique that leaves you calmer.

Key points

• Listen to your worries; do not shut them out. Admit whatever is true.

• At the same time, do not automatically believe a worry. See if the worry stands up to questioning.

• In a two-column table with rows, write worries in the left column and evaluate them in the right column.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply tell your brain not to worry? Unfortunately, that doesn’t work.

So, let’s quickly review three skills that do work, then learn a powerful written approach to explore worries without getting more anxious.

Man running at the beach

Skill #1: Worry Time

If an upsetting worry keeps popping into your mind over and over, regain mental peace by scheduling a daily worry time. "9 Steps to Keep Worry From Hijacking Your Brain" explains how to do this and why it works.

Skill #2: The Three A’s of Adaptive Worry

Even the most upsetting worries are well-intentioned. The primitive “reacting brain” amygdala triggers worry to alert you to threat and danger. Sometimes worry is adaptive and helpful.

Learn the "3 Ways to Tell if Worry Is Helpful." Helpful worries are accurate, motivate you to take appropriate action, and then go away.

Skill #3: False Alarm Warning Signs

Because the brain’s threat response system is automatic, it can send false alarms. Spot the”5 Signs that Worry Is Not Helpful.”

Be skeptical if worry says:

1. “What if…?”: focuses only on what could go wrong.

   
   

2. “Are you sure?”: wants guaranteed safety or total certainty.

   
   

3. “Danger is likely; you can’t cope”: overestimates the likelihood of danger and underestimates your resilience and ability to cope.

   
   

4. “This time is different!”: disregards the fact that past worries were wrong.

   
   

5. “Keep reacting to lessons from the past”: ignores that your life has changed.

Make Worry Your Ally, Not Your Enemy

You don’t control what worries enter your mind. You do control how you respond to these worries.

Since worry is trying to be helpful, start by really listening to what worry is saying.

Are you worried about your grades, job, career, or finances? Your relationship or lack of one? Your health, climate change, the future? Your parents, children, or grandchildren? What else?

Now use writing to explore and question these worries. Create a table with two columns and several rows.

Label the left column “Worries, Fears, Distressing Thoughts.” In this column, write only one worry per row.

Putting worries into writing slows the worry process so you don’t spiral. Write specifically what worry says is going to happen.

Label the right column “Facts, Evidence, Logic, Perspective.” In this column, objectively evaluate what the worry is telling you. Is worry alerting you to an unsolved problem—or sending a false alarm?

Write the answers to questions like: What does worry predict will happen? How often has it predicted this? How often has what it predicted actually happened?

Be Curious—But Not Credulous

Listen carefully and attentively, but do not automatically believe what each worry says. Compare it against the facts.

Write what you would tell a friend, child, or mentee who said what the worry says. Put things in perspective.

Question and evaluate each worry in an unbiased, unemotional, objective way. If what the worry says is true, your experience and logic will agree.

For example, if you wrote in the left column “I’m worried I’ll get a bad grade on this test” and you wrote in the right column “I haven’t studied, I don’t understand the material, and I got D’s on the past two tests,” facts support the worry.

On the other hand, if you wrote in the right column, “I'm worried I'll get a bad grade on this test. Worry always says I’ll get a bad grade. It said it for the last 60 tests I took in 12 classes. I’ve never gotten less than a B,” the facts do not support the worry.

Fears vs. Facts Dialogue Writing

I call this two-column writing “fears vs. facts dialogue writing."

Creating dialogue tables engages both levels of your brain: the lower, more primitive, amygdala “reacting brain” that produces the worries, anxiety, and fear and the higher, smarter, more developed cerebral cortex “thinking brain” that can question and evaluate worries and fears.

The dialogue table is the most flexible and powerful tool I know for worry and fears.

By creating a partnership allowing both parts of the brain to “talk” to each other through writing, you listen to your worries without fearing or fighting them. You neither believe worries without proof, nor dismiss worries without thought.

In the posts that follow, I will share real-life examples of dialogue tables, tips on effectively uncovering worry’s hidden assumptions, and tricks to discover whether a worry is true, partly true, or plausible but false.

Elizabeth McMahon, Ph.D. -Blog