Use the Worry-Hour To Make Less Room For Anxiety & Stress

In Cognitive behavioural therapy, CBT, the common view is that anxiety is triggered by anxiety inducing thoughts concerning various fears.

Today’s post continues on the 3d step in traditional CBT, which is about creating an alternative response to your thoughts in previous exercises, which in turn likely can create less anxiety and other, more positive and/or less intense feelings as well as other more adaptive behavioural responses.

Worry and rumination create stress hormones as well as psychological pain.

It is important to assign worrying/rumination a scheduled hour per day, only one hour! for non-urgent worrisome thoughts since these two behaviours paired together often can escalate into intense suffering.

Try this: Take control of your worry and anxiety by scheduling a specific worry-hour.

It has to be the same time every day (alternatively during the same daily activity like going back or forth to work) to ensure discipline.

There are several reasons for this. Less than one hour of rumination and worrying means that one does not meet the criteria for obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD.

Also, the brain has an overall healthy function – to make you survive. The brain also wants to solve the problems you encounter. One way of doing this is to look out for dangers and surprises. However, if one has experienced scary dangers and surprises, this mechanism can become intensified and automated leading to rumination and obsessive worrying.

More about the worry-hour next week.

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