If you’re like a large proportion of people, worry is a problem. You can’t stop it, you can’t control it, and no matter how many times you’re told to “just stop worrying,” it won’t go away. It’s a losing battle. Ask yourself this: What’s going to happen tomorrow? If it’s a weekday, maybe you’ll wake up at the usual time. Go to work. Traffic could be bad, so you might be a little bit late – Why not? It’s happened before. You could be in a serious car accident. It’s not impossible.

The Importance of Sleep: The book emphasizes the importance of getting enough sleep in managing worry and anxiety. Carbonell provides practical tips for improving sleep quality, such as establishing a consistent sleep schedule, avoiding caffeine and electronic screens before bedtime, and creating a relaxing bedtime routine. Now, as a woman in my early 30's, I still find I worry about insignificant things. But I also have a lot of fear and anxiety about things that likely will never actually happen. If you keep trying to stop something but that just makes it worse, it means your methods need examining. You need to stop trying to change the worry itself. Instead, try changing the relationship that you have with worry. Third and finally, develop a daily habit of mindfulness meditation. This process of passively observing thoughts is quite popular, with plenty of resources to get started. If you’ve never tried it before, here’s your first lesson. Stand in front of a mirror, and read the worry out loud, 25 times. Eat one of the Tic Tacs each time, to make your counting conscious and deliberate.The catastrophe clause could be any hypothetical scenario, so it just becomes a game of Mad Libs. When you ignore the “what if” clause and focus on whatever unlikely drama is filling the catastrophe clause, you have a steady stream of what feel like legitimate concerns. And so on. The thoughts or situations might be different, but the feeling is always the same: Worry. It’s best if you can do this out loud while watching yourself in front of a mirror. You might feel silly, but seeing and hearing yourself takes it out of your head and lets you get a more realistic perspective. It’s also helpful learning to postpone your worry to a time when it’s less inconvenient.

methods, which offer recovery to many. Unfortunately, only about a third of those who need anxiety help actually get You’ve already seen that shutting them out makes them worse, so give them the time to be heard. Don’t try to fix them, or change them, or argue with them – just let yourself worry. Who should read this book? People who worry too much, people who worry about their worrying, people who love people who worry, people who treat people who worry. To say that this book has changed my life would be too much, but it certainly did show me new horizons when dealing with my own anxieties. And it gave me a push to be braver to read more about this topic, which a year ago would have been a huge trigger for me.

I am a worrier, and I have been for most of my life. As a teenager, my mom always used to tell me 'not to make mountains out of mole hills' because my worries were often over insignificant things. Another thing is stop thinking about the "what if's" to a certain extent. Sometimes it's good to think of the possible what ifs but not alllll the time where it takes over your livelihood and you're constantly paranoid. The first option is that you interpret a worry as a legitimate and important warning. You take this seriously, so you look for ways to stop the thing from happening, reassure yourself that the thing won’t happen or try to protect yourself from the thing if and when it does happen. As with everything in your life, you have some sort of relationship with your worry. And just like anything else – work, alcohol, your partner – this relationship can be healthy or unhealthy. The book is brilliant and hugely quotable, not because the quotes are cool but because they are so very relatable.