Managing Worry & GAD: Free Self-Help Video Course

Are you a worrier stuck in endless “What-ifs” and worst-case scenarios? Your mind constantly running through fears and uncertainties? Here are six proven techniques to reduce worry and GAD, along with one common strategy that just makes things worse.

The first is postponing worry. Whenever worries pop into our heads – “What if I can’t get this done on time?” “Will I lose my job?” “Why haven’t they texted me back?” “Are they ghosting me?” – instead of giving them attention and dwelling on them, we just write them down and set them aside and postpone thinking about them until a scheduled worry or thinking period later in the day. And then redirect our attention back to whatever we’re doing, knowing we’ll have time to look at the worry later to see if it’s important. But in the meantime, instead of worrying, we’re going to focus on the task at hand.

Then during our worry period or thinking period, we set aside a maximum of 30 minutes (and make sure we don’t do it right before bed) to review the list of worries we noted throughout the day and decide if any of them require attention. When we postpone thinking about our worries, they can seem less important when we revisit them, and we often find that a worry we had during the day isn’t worth thinking about anymore. There’s nothing to worry about, so we can just let it go.

Postponing worry helps us realize that worry isn’t uncontrollable and that we have the ability to set aside our worries in the moment and postpone thinking about them until a time that’s more convenient, and not be compelled to worry about something just because a thought happened to arise.

Now during our worry/thinking period, if we decide a worry does require our attention, we can start by problem-solving. Often worry feels like problem-solving, which is one of the reasons we do it so much. We think we’re being productive and trying to resolve something that’s making us anxious. But worry is different from problem-solving. It’s repetitive, unproductive thinking and that doesn’t lead to solutions.

So how can we tell the difference between unproductive worry and productive problem-solving? By asking ourselves:

• Is the problem I’m worrying about plausible or reasonable? A lot of the things we worry about have almost no chance of ever happening, so worrying about them isn’t productive.
• Is it something I have some control over? If we’re worrying about something we don’t have control over, then there’s no way we can problem-solve it.
• Is there something I can do about it now to help solve the problem? Often our worries are focused on future hypotheticals that we have no way of solving now because the problem hasn’t even happened yet.

Let’s look at some examples.

We’re worrying: “I’m going to fail my exam or mess up my presentation at work.” Doing poorly on an exam or presentation is plausible, and we have control over our preparation. So instead of worrying, we can study and prepare, review the material, and ask for help if needed. This is productive problem-solving, and continuing to worry about “What-ifs” is not productive at all.

“What if my partner leaves me?” While that’s something that’s always possible, worries like this are often based on fear rather than evidence. Is this something I have control over? Only partially. We can’t control another person’s feelings or decisions, but we can communicate openly and work on the relationship. So while there’s no solution that can ensure our partner never leaves us, we can reframe the problem to focus on maintaining a healthy relationship rather than worrying about future hypotheticals.

“What if I say something awkward at a social event and I never live it down?” While something like this isn’t really that plausible – even if we say or do something awkward or embarrassing, it’s unlikely anyone will remember or dwell on a small social misstep – so there’s nothing productive to be gain by worrying about it.

But what if we’ve done our problem-solving, where there was nothing we could do about the situation, and we’re still worrying? We can respond to our worries mindfully, noticing them and acknowledging them without getting caught up in them. And a simple way to do this is to label our thoughts. As a worry passes into our minds – “I’m going to bomb my presentation,” “I could lose my job over this,” “Why haven’t I heard from her?” “What if she got in an accident?” – we simply label it as “worrying,” “catastrophizing,” “what-ifs,” just giving a brief label that describes the nature of the thought rather than focusing on its content. This takes away some of the power our thoughts have over us and makes them easier to let go. And we can add the word “just” – “This is just a worry,” “This is just a what-if” – which helps us step back from our worries even more, making it less likely we get caught up in a cycle of worrying and easier to let our worries go.

When we feel anxious, we often look to others for reassurance. We might ask, “What if something bad happens?” “What should I do?” “Is it going to be okay?” At first, it feels comforting when someone tells us everything’s going to be fine, you don’t need to worry about this. But this relief is only temporary, and when it expires, we need more reassurance. And even if someone tells us everything is going to be okay, it doesn’t feel like enough. So we start asking more people for reassurance, we’re asking the same person over and over, or we start searching online for answers. But the anxiety never really goes away, and we’re teaching ourselves we can’t manage anxiety on our own.

So reassurance seeking is not an effective way to manage anxiety. Instead, we can learn to reassure ourselves by challenging our worries and responding with less anxious, more realistic ways of thinking. So if we’re waiting for an important text or email and start worrying, “Why haven’t they responded yet? Did I do something wrong? Are they ignoring me? I can’t stand waiting to hear back,” we might be able to modify these worries to something like, “It’s normal for people to take time to reply. It doesn’t mean I’ve done anything wrong. If I don’t hear back today, I can follow up tomorrow. In the meantime, I can put my phone away and distract myself with something else so I don’t keep obsessing.”

Or we’re starting a new project at work and start worrying, “What if I don’t meet expectations? If I fail at this, I’ll mess up my whole career.” We might modify these thoughts to something like, “I felt this way before when starting something new. It’s been challenging sometimes, but that’s normal and it’s always worked out. If I get stuck, I can ask for help, and it’s highly unlikely anything about this jeopardizes my career.”

Or we’re trying to make an important decision and keep worrying, “What if I regret this and it turns out to be a huge mistake?” We can try telling ourselves, “I’ve put enough thought into this that I know it’s a reasonable decision. There’s nothing more I can do now. There’s no way to predict exactly how the future is going to go, and if things don’t work out like I thought they would, I’ll find a way to deal with that then.”

Modifying our thoughts to reassure ourselves reduces anxiety and helps us worry less. And you’ll find a number of videos that describe strategies to do this in more detail in my free self-help for worry course.

When we worry, we focus on negative outcomes, often predicting worst-case scenarios. We expect things will go badly and we won’t be able to cope. But then once what we’re worried about passes, we rarely take the time to reflect on how accurate our worries really were. It’s helpful to use our worries as a learning tool with a mindset of “What can I learn from this experience that might help me in future situations?”

We start by writing down what we’re worried about – “I won’t know anyone there” – and what we expect or predict will happen – “I’ll feel shy, awkward, and embarrassed and just want to go home.” And then we go into the situation with an open mind, seeing how things actually go. And then once the situation has passed, we can look back and see whether or not our predictions came true. “That wasn’t as bad as I expected. I actually enjoyed myself. I was really nervous at first, but once I started talking to people, I relaxed more.”

Often than not, we’ll find things didn’t turn out as badly as we feared. This helps us build a clearer picture of how our worries measure up to reality and how often we trick ourselves into fearing things will be worse than they actually turn out. And then the next time we start to worry about something – “What if I embarrass myself tonight and never live it down?” – we can use this information to reassure ourselves, reminding ourselves that the last time we worried like this, things turned out better than expected. And this helps us modify our anxious thoughts about a situation and reduce how much we worry about it.

And intolerance of uncertainty – a fear or dread of the unknown – often contributes to worrying. We get really anxious in situations in which we can’t be sure of the outcome. “Why haven’t I heard back from my partner?” “What if my test results come back positive?” “What if I don’t get this job?” We can’t tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing, so we keep looking for answers, running through lists of hypotheticals, seeking reassurance, and so on. But those answers just aren’t there, and the harder we try to find them, the more we worry and the more anxious we get.

The alternative is to willingly experience the discomfort of not knowing and accept that uncertainty is an unavoidable part of life. Instead of getting stuck in a cycle of worry, we can tell ourselves, “It’s okay not to have all of the answers right now.” We acknowledge that uncertainty is uncomfortable, but since there’s nothing we can do to resolve it, we choose to sit with this discomfort rather than fighting it. It may feel overwhelmed at first, but as we accept the uncertainty, the discomfort gets less intense. And this helps us gain a sense of control – not by eliminating uncertainty, but by changing how we respond to it. “Let’s focus on what I can control. I can start preparing for the interview,” teaching us we can manage uncertainty and helping build our tolerance for it.

Now while all of these strategies can be really effective, sometimes it’s really difficult to implement them, especially if we’ve been worrying for a while and our mind is racing. In which case, it can help to temporarily distract ourselves to clear our minds with activities such as physical exercise, socializing or talking to a friend, engaging in Creative Outlets like drawing, painting, or playing an instrument, listening to music or a podcast, doing puzzles or games, or whatever helps us unwind and get our mind off our worries. And practices like mindfulness meditation – where just following our breathing for a while – can also help. And then once we’ve cleared our minds, the other strategies in this video can seem more manageable.

So postponing worry, problem-solving, mindfully letting go of worries or challenging them and reassuring ourselves by modifying our thoughts, learning from our worries, and learning to tolerate uncertainty better are all effective ways to reduce worrying.