today i'm going to be talking about a model for understanding worry and one foundational tool to
help better manage worry hi everyone today what i'm going to be talking about is a model for
better understanding worry and a key foundational skill that you have to have in order to learn
and use worry management skills but before i get into that just a couple of disclaimers to go over
i am a registered psychologist in british columbia canada and this video is for informational
purposes only it is not intended as a replacement or substitute for advice from your doctor or
mental health professional now with those two things out of the way let's start talking about
a model of worry everybody experiences worry so when i talk about worry management i'm
not really talking about a worry cure what i'm talking about is helping people who worry a lot
be able to better manage their worries so they're not worrying as much
because the reality is everybody worries it's just a matter of how much do people worry so you can
think of it kind of like falling on a continuum where one end of the continuum are people who
don't really worry very much at all they still worry but just not that much and it's
not particularly problematic or interfering for them then on the other end of the continuum are
people who worry a lot and if a person worries excessively enough and if their
worry is chronic enough they can meet criteria for what we call generalized anxiety disorder
but regardless of whether or not a person meets criteria for generalized anxiety disorder
or they are a person who worries excessively or they're a person who worries
a little bit the same worry management skills that i'm going to be talking about apply to
all different types of worry and all different intensities of worry the worry
experience for people usually starts with a trigger some sort of trigger situation
leads them to begin worrying now triggers can be pretty much anything so triggers can be internal
they can be thoughts that i have thinking about an argument that i had with my wife
they can be physical sensations i wake up in the morning i've got a really bad headache triggers
can be external my cell phone rings i check the call display and it's worth calling and
i think to myself why is work calling what's going on is something wrong so pretty much
anything can act as a trigger and the trigger then leads to what i call the what if question
now the what if question is kind of the foundation of worry now the thing about worry is it usually
doesn't just start and stop at one what if question so for example the trigger is uh i wake
up in the morning and i've got a bad headache and i think to myself what if this is a brain tumor
what usually happens is that worry either loops itself over and over and over again so i worry
and i keep thinking to myself about what if i have a brain tumor what's going on what if i
have a brain tumor or it leads to a chaining or spiraling of additional what-if thoughts that
ends up in this negative scenario building of what might happen and it's that chaining
and spiraling of what-if thoughts that's what we call worry and so when a person is worrying
think about how that makes you feel for example so when you're worrying what's the emotion that you
associate with the worry that emotion is typically anxiety so this is an important point to note that
worry and anxiety are not the same thing so worry is this collection of what if thoughts
anxiety is the emotion that results from the collection of these what-if thoughts
so now think about this process and imagine if you worried a lot and you're going through this
process day after day after day trigger what if we're anxiety trigger what if
we're anxiety trigger what if we're anxiety how are you feeling by the end of the day
now most of the time when i ask my clients that they'll usually say
two things one they feel exhausted now exhausted on multiple levels exhausted
mentally because their mind will not shut off right they just keep worrying they just keep
thinking their mind will not stop thinking about something and so mentally that can be exhausting
but it can also be physically exhausting as well so you're going through all of these negative
thoughts in your mind and it's normal for sort of the muscles to tense up and to just feel an
increased physical tension um it can lead to problems with sleep because it's difficult
to sleep when you're worrying so much and so it's common for people to feel kind of
exhausted and worn out by their worries both mentally and physically and the second outcome
of this sort of constant worry process is a feeling or a perception of being demoralized
demoralization and what i mean by that is that it's hard to really look forward to anything
when you worry a lot so it's hard to get really excited or enthused about something because when
you think about all the positive things that can happen what also happens is that you then begin
to start thinking about all the negative things that could happen so it's hard to really look
forward to anything because you're always thinking about all of the negative things that can occur
and so the outcome of this worry process is a feeling of being demoralized and exhausted
and think about it the more demoralized and exhausted you feel
what do you think that's going to do to the frequency of what-if thoughts
it's going to increase them and so you get into this self-feeding cycle of worry where you have
a trigger leading to the what if worry anxiety feeling demoralized and exhausted which just means
you're prone to creating more what-if questions in response to triggers
so that's kind of the the basic engine of worry this is kind of how worry works and as i'm going
as i go along uh with this video series and talk about other factors that contribute to worry
we're going to be building on this model but it's important to understand this is kind of the the
core engine of worry so with that understanding in mind it leads to the first key worry management
skill that i'm going to be talking about now this is a foundational skill it's hard to do
any of the other worry management skills i'm going to be talking about if you don't do this skill
and the first worry management skill is worry awareness training essentially becoming more aware
of what it is that you worry about and having a better understanding of your worry experience now
when i'm working with my clients and i bring this up a lot of times people will say hey i already
know what it is that i'm worrying about i don't need to get better at thinking about my worries
what i find for a lot of my clients is that they they kind of know what the big worries are
but they don't really have a great sense of their entire worry experience and for a lot of my
clients they are such highly efficient worriers that they're not even aware of everything that
they're worrying about that they worry almost automatically to a point that they're not even
aware they don't even know what it is that they worry and so it's not uncommon for people who
come to see me to say i don't really feel like i'm worrying but i have a lot of free floating anxiety
now usually when i hear the term free floating anxiety it's a cue for me that this is probably
someone who is a highly efficient worrier and that they're worrying but just don't realize it yet
and that's where worry awareness training comes in
so worry awareness training really what it is at its core is excavating your worries dusting them
off and really beginning to examine them so that you can have a new understanding
and a better understanding of what your worry experience is actually like getting a better
understanding of that worry fingerprint your unique worry experience that's unique to you
so how do you do worry awareness training the key tool i use with my clients is called the worry
diary and what i'm going to be doing is putting a link to a worry diary that you can download
in the description of the video below so please feel free to download that and take a look at it
so the idea of a worry diary is that you don't keep track of every single worry that you have
rather what you're doing is you're taking a sampling of your worries so what i get
my clients to do is to complete a worry diary three times a day for one to two weeks
and the idea is to have some set times every day that you're going to pull out your worry diary
and write down what it is that you're worrying about at that time so i encourage people to
set an alarm so an alarm in the morning in the afternoon and sometime in the evening
when the alarm goes off you pull out the worry diary and you complete an entry in the worry diary
so with the worry diary the first column is the time and day so the date time that you're
completing the worry diary the next column is the situation what's going on what's the context
that you're worrying in this can map onto the trigger that we talked about before
after that you write down what is it that you're worrying about
what are the what if thoughts that you're having in that moment
after you've completed the what ifs and wrote written down what you're worrying
about you make a rating of your anxiety on a scale from zero to ten where zero is no anxiety at all
ten is extreme anxiety so you make a numerical rating of how anxious am i in this moment
and then the last column of the worry relates to what i talked about in a previous video when
i talked about a definition of worry and types of worry and that relates to is this a type 1 worry
or is this a type 2 worry now type 1 worries are worries about actual current problems type
2 worries are worries about future or potential problems and so you take a look at what it is
that you're worrying about and you make a rating is this type one is this type two
now sometimes a worry can be a bit of a mix of both so it starts out as a type one worry
and it spirals into a type 2 worry if that's the case you can write down both so
you complete this worry diary if you do this worry diary for a week or two what it's going to give
you is a rich amount of data about your worry experience that you may have never had before
are there days or times that you tend to worry more than other days and times are
there certain situations or triggers that tend to trigger your worry more
are there certain worries that come up over and over and over again kind of like your greatest
hits of worry are there certain worries that are associated with higher levels of anxiety
so for example it's not uncommon for people to be well aware of the worries that are causing them
levels eight nine and ten in terms of anxiety but when they do the worry diary they realize
wow there's a whole bunch of worries that are causing me anxiety about three and four
that i was never actually aware of and those worries can contribute to just that background
hum of anxiety and nervousness and those may be worries that a person's never thought about before
this worry diary can also help you get a sense of are my worries more type 1 worries do i have more
type 2 worries do i have kind of an equal mix of type 1 and type 2 worries this is all information
that people typically don't have about their worry experience and by getting this information
it provides you with a lot of background that you're going to be able to use then
when we start talking about other worry management skills but none of the other worry management
skills i'm going to be talking about are effective if you don't know what it is that you're worrying
about and that's the key and that's the foundational skill of worry awareness training
so i hope you've found that helpful and useful
i will be posting more videos in this series on worry management i would love to hear
your thoughts and ideas and questions so please feel free to leave some comments down below also
if you have ideas for topics of videos that you'd like me to make please let me know i'm
happy to hear about what people are interested in and i'll do my best to do those videos
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be notified when i post a new video so that's it for today thank you for
making it all the way to the end of this video and i will see you in the next one