Reviewing your progress Carry on with your worry management until you feel you are no longer struggling with your worry and anxiety. PGMR you can make part of your daily wellbeing.
Keep going with your worry management tools. There are spare worry lists in the back of the booklet. Once you have used the worry management techniques for about 4 weeks, it is a good time to review your progress and then decide if you want to continue with all the techniquea for longer, or you feel ready to move onto relapse management. PGMR: Keep up your PGMR practice each day, this is something that you may want to continue even after you feel better. For best results, PGMR should be practiced for at least three months. At first you may not notice any difference from the practice, but it will be working in the background to help you to release early warning signs of tension building up. It will also benefit your sleep and help to reduce worries. Worry Time: Carry on using worry time until you are having fewer worries to write on your list each day and they do not bother you as much anymore. When you find yourself able to refocus away from hypothetical worries easily is also a good sign of progress. Don’t forget to write down your worries and then refocus your attention on a task in the present when you write down a worry. People often find after the first week, that the time they thought they needed for the worry time itself is too long. This means that they can reduce this down to 20-30 minutes after the first week or two if this is the case. Remember, the worry time should still be spent purposefully worrying about the thoughts that you have collected throughout the day, until you are having fewer worries and less impact. A good sign that you have broken the cycle is fewer worries and worry time itself starting to feel more unpleasant, unecessary and not enjoyable than you feeling it is necessary anymore. Practical Problem Solving: Practical problem solving is a technique that you only need to use for practical worries that you are unsure of what action to take to resolve them. It is to break the cycle of procrastination. If you can manage a practical worry and know what action to take in the moment, you do not need to use the problem solving steps. You may find you use this less often, or that you are able to solve the problems that arise without it as the cycle begins to reverse. Look at whether your symptoms are improving. Go back to the vicious cycle you completed at the start • Are you worrying less, noticing fewer worries than before? • How are your physical symptoms of anxiety and behaviours? • What changes have you noticed?
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© Marie Chellingsworth (2020). The CBT Resource. 26
