Does worry ever rob you of your precious time?

If it does then you're not alone.

In this short video (less than 3 minutes) I'll share an effective strategy to keep that worry monster at bay.

If you prefer to read rather than watch I'll post a transcript below.

Transcript

This is an auto generated transcript so please excuse typos and grammatical errors.

Would it be useful to you to have a repeatable strategy of how to deal with worry, and if it would, keep watching.

First of all, let's define what a worry is. Quite simply a worry is a persistent and unpleasant thought about something that you can't do anything about, or at least you can't do anything about right now.

So step one is to ask yourself, is there anything that I can do right now to help this situation?

And if the answer to that is yes, then it's not a worry, it's something that you need to take care of, so go take care of it, worry over.

If the answer is no, but the thought remains, then it is a genuine worry.

Step two is ask yourself, is worrying helping the situation, and if the answer that is no, then you've got something that you can't do anything about, and you know that worry is not helping the situation, so the answer is very simple. Stop thinking about it.

And that might sound flippant, and I promise it's not meant to. It is very simple, but I also know from personal experience that it's not always easy because simple and easy are not always the same thing.

Just try this for a second. Think about a dog. You've got one right? Yeah. Now think about a car. Got that too? Now think about a snowman. So congratulations because you've just controlled your thoughts. You chose a particular thought and that's how you do it.

When you find yourself worrying, it's as simple as thinking about something else instead.

Now preparation is key here because when you're in full on worry mode it can be very difficult to switch out of it. If it's something that you worry about a lot you can prepare for by thinking when that worry shows up what I'm going to think about instead? What's going to be the kind of the opposite of what I've been worried about?

Or you could just have some general strategies maybe thinking about you know let me think about this holiday that's coming up for me.

What do I know about the place I'm going to? What do I want to do while I'm there? What do I want to eat while I'm there?

And each thought leads to a different thought, so that perhaps leads on to, what's the best holiday I've ever had?

What made it the best? And out of that whole holiday, what was the best moment of the holiday?

Or maybe I could think about music?

What's my favourite album of all time? Why that one? What's my favourite song? Why does that song move me more than all of the others on that album?

So, in a nutshell, your brain is a thinking machine and it will think. You can't stop it, but you can either give it something to think about or you can leave it to come up with the topic itself.

If you decide to leave it to its own devices, it's possible that you might not like the outcome.

Now it can take a bit of practice to do this, but it is your choice.

You can either think about something you've chosen to think about or you can sit there worrying.

One of these is going to give you a dopamine here and the other is going to raise your blood pressure, so hopefully it's not a difficult choice.