Why do we worry? It’s an important question and – if you struggle with worry and anxiety – one we need to answer before thinking about how to help you. One way to think about worry is anticipating stressful, threatening, upsetting or even dangerous events that might occur in the future. This is known as ‘bridge-crossing’. Your brain knows there is a challenge up ahead, so crosses every possible bridge that might lie in your path, to try and help you manage the challenge as best you can.

You could also say that worry is a wired-in, evolutionary response to threats and dangers. Let’s say you were a hunter-gatherer, walking through long grass on the savannah, 10,000 years ago. The threat system in your brain would have been (rightly) highly sensitive and hypervigilant, using all your senses to scan for predators lurking in the grass. You might even have imagined a lion leaping out and how you would try and fight them off, or make your escape. In doing so, you would have visualised the whole scenario, as if playing a video in your mind’s eye.

That would have required a uniquely human capacity: the ability to use a kind of virtual-reality simulator in your brain to imagine the future – sensing it, visualising it and even living through it – to help protect you from potential threats. When you worry, you are using these high-tech neural capacities to anticipate bad stuff on the horizon and how to protect yourself.

More simply, we can also say that worry is a kind of problem-solving thinking, helping you anticipate upcoming problems and then helping you find solutions by running through a whole host of possible options, until you find one that could work.

How anxiety leads to worry

Another key thing to understand about worry is that it’s the cognitive response to the emotion of anxiety. It’s important to emphasise this, because people often get the two mixed up. They say, ‘I feel worried,’ when what they mean is, ‘I feel anxious and am worrying to try and deal with that.’ (I’m sure my clients get fed up with me reminding them of this, but it’s important, so I brave their eye-rolling and say it anyway.)

If we add to this puzzle the fact that anxiety is a threat-focused emotion, triggered by your brain as an alarm call to let you know a person or situation is threatening and you should do something – right now! – to deal with it, you can see why anxiety is designed to feel so bad; and how it’s intended to provoke some kind of urgent, problem-solving action. And we’re back to worry – the urgent, problem-solving action that your brain takes when you feel uncomfortably anxious.

Getting to know the worrier

Yet another way of thinking about worry (last one, I promise) involves understanding that your personality is made up of a number of different parts. I have written about this extensively in previous posts and pages on my site, so if you need to know more I will just point you to either this page on ‘modes’ in schema therapy or this one on internal family systems.

One of the most effective ways of managing unhelpful worry is to speak to the part of you that does the worrying when you’re feeling anxious (usually named the Worrier, for obvious reasons). Here’s a step-by-step guide to doing just that…

The practice

Having a dialogue with your worrier

You can try this in two ways. One way is to use these guidelines just to have an internal dialogue with your Worrier part – this can happen many times throughout the day, whenever you find yourself worrying about something. But if you have time – and especially when you’re starting out with this talking-to-parts approach – I recommend trying this longer method first.
Start by switching your phone to silent and carving 10 minutes out of your busy day. If you are plagued by constant worry, which as you know can be very stressful and unpleasant, you should be highly motivated to find the time.
Now take two chairs and place them so they are facing each other. One chair is for the Worrier, the other your Healthy Adult. First sit on the Worrier chair and let rip about something you have been worrying about recently. It could be a problem at work, with your partner or kids, losing weight, health issues, or more global stuff like the cost of living crisis or climate change. Any subject will do, as long as it has been bothering you lately.
Now be the Worrier. Just act as if you are this part of yourself and (here’s the slightly weird bit) imagine that you are sitting on the other chair. So, if this was me, as the Worrier I would say: ‘Dan, I’m really worried about this post you’re writing. Honestly, it doesn’t seem that great. What if nobody reads it? What if they all think it’s crap and unsubscribe? And what if this whole Heal Your Trauma thing just crashes and burns? You’re not working hard enough on it, this is not your best work, so I think you should just scrap it and start again.’
Spend a couple of minutes being the Worrier, telling James or Jenny (you) in the other chair all the things he/she needs to worry about right now.
Then switch to the Healthy Adult chair. Plant your feet, roll your shoulders back and lengthen your spine. Close your eyes and breathe deeply, in through your nose and out through your mouth. Let your belly rise and fall with each breath. Keep breathing until you feel a little calmer, then open your eyes and respond to the Worrier from your (calm, strong, wise, compassionate) Healthy Adult.
Using myself as an example again, I would say, ‘Worrier, I know you mean well and you’re just freaking out right now. But I am working hard on this post – I always do. My writing is really important to me, so I try to make every post informative and interesting. And even if a couple of people unsubscribe, that’s OK, it’s not the end of the world.
‘It’s good to work hard but not helpful to have my whole self-worth riding on one post, that doesn’t make sense. So it’s all good – you can just relax and let me handle it. Thanks again for looking out for me.’
Notice that on the Worrier chair I say ‘you’ and on the Healthy Adult chair it’s ‘I’. This is important, because I want you to own what you’re saying on the HA chair more, for obvious reasons.
Try this, many times, until you feel the Worrier start to calm down. Make sure the way you speak to this poor, frazzled part of you is friendly and kind. It’s not a bad, or mean part – it is trying to help. But the way it’s helping is not very helpful! So you just need to learn how to empathise with, then reassure the Worrier. As ever, practice makes perfect so repeat, repeat, repeat until this is working for you…

I very much hope that’s useful for you. And if you would like some help with your worry and anxiety, do come along to my new one-day workshop: Coping with Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer and More at Peace. This powerful, highly experiential workshop takes place from 10.30am-4.30pm on Saturday 10th September 2022. It costs just £99 for the full day, including refreshments – there are also a limited number of reduced-fee places available.

Coping with Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer and More at Peace will be held at the Gestalt Centre, a short walk from King’s Cross Station in central London. Don’t miss this chance to learn from and spend a day with me – places are limited, so find out more and book using the button below:

BOOK NOW

I look forward to seeing you in September or at one of my upcoming workshops.

Warm wishes,

Dan