More About How To Handle Productive Thoughts During The Worry-Hour

Here continues a summary of my posts on how to recover as quickly as possible from more serious stress and exhaustion symptoms.

As mentioned earlier, in my daily work with people who have sought help for stress and exhaustion problems, I have been able to distinguish 3 building blocks of stress management:

1. Adjust your stress level

2. Manage your stress sources

3. Use healthy routines

This post continues with the second building block, 2 Manage your stress sources, here in relation to stressful thoughts, such as anxiety and rumination, as it is crucial to learn to steer one’s thoughts in order to reduce the stress level and create conditions for recovery.

Last weeks’ posts have contained the main principles of how to make a worry-hour work with the aim to steer one’s thinking.

This post continues with what you can do during the worry-hour in order to make worrying thoughts more manageable.

Use traditional problem solving for productive / useful thoughts:

Think about possible solutions, including activities that need to be taken by you, and weigh them against each other to get a prioritized action plan.

There are 2 very important BUTs when it comes to productive thoughts:

1 Productive thoughts / themes can only be analyzed productively if you are under 8 in stress level because only then you have access to your brain’s problem-solving ability.

If your stress or emotional level is over 8 – do the techniques previously suggested to get down to a level where you again can listen and talk to yourself.

2 Thoughts can only be productive until you have decided on an action. After that, they are unproductive again until you have received new information or other developments have occurred over time.

More about what to do during the worrying hour next week.