INTRODUCTION
Readers ask yourself this question: if you felt your worrying couldn't harm you or wasn't dangerous, how much would your worrying bother you? Chances are, you wouldn't feel as bad if you thought your worrying was harmless, as opposed to thinking your worrying is harmful. So in this entry we will look at changing your beliefs that:
"Worrying will make you go crazy"
"If i keep worrying I will have a nervous breakdown"
"I'll get sick if i don't stop worrying"
"Worrying will damage my body"
"I'll go nits if I keep worrying"
"Worrying will make me ill"
CHANGING YOUR BELIEF
As in the previous blog entry, before we start changing your belief that worrying is dangerous and harmful, we need to know how much you believe it?
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
If you do not think you hold this belief at all, still work through this entry just to be sure, but chances are you can move on quickly from this entry to the next.
To change your belief that your worrying is dangerous, you need to do something you are already familiar with from blog entry 3. That is, challenge or dispute your belief. This means dissecting the belief that your worry will cause you physical or mental harm, by evaluating if it is really accurate and true, and examining what evidence you base your belief on. In this way you will be like a detective, trying to get to the facts of whether worrying really is dangerous to you.
Often people experiment with this belief too, just as you did in the last blog entry. Such an experiment might involve pushing your worrying to the 'max'. This means trying your hardest to lose control of your worrying. Typically people predict that trying to push their worrying to the limit ill be awful, and that something terrible will happen. Often people are surprised that nothing bad actually happens and they experience their worry as harmless. However, it is recommended that this approach be used with the guidance of a mental health professional, and so is not used in this blog.
Now that you have challenged your belief that worrying is dangerous/harmful:
Rate again how much you believe your worrying is dangerous/harmful?
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90%
If there is some weakening (however small) of your belief that your worrying is dangerous compared to
what it was at the start of this blog, congratulate yourself. If there's no change yet, thats okay
Remember, changing your beliefs takes time and persistence. Just going over the evidence for and against your belief once may not be enough. You need to practice this strategy until the evidence for your belief is weak and the evidence against your belief is strong. A good gauge of when you have done enough work on this belief may be when your belief is relatively weak - say about only 20%.
SUMMARY
SUMMARY
- Negative beliefs regarding worrying being dangerous make your worrying worse.
- To change these beliefs you can challenge them - look at the evidence for and against the beliefs
- In order to change your belief that worrying will cause you harm, you need to persist until the evidence for your belief is weak and the evidence against your belief is strong.
- Once you have achieved this ask yourself: What does this all say about my worrying?
- It should show you that your worrying is, in fact, harmless
