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How worry management can help

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Spare worry lists

Spare worry lists

When you have excessive worry it can affect how you feel physically and what you do as a result. It can feel like you are always on edge. These symptoms can form a vicious cycle of worry and anxiety.

Worry management helps you to break into this vicious cycle. It will help you to feel more in control of your worrying, rather than feeling like it is controlling you. Worry management has a range of techniques recommended to help with GAD. The techniques in this will help you to break the cycle. To be able to manage the symptoms you experience and reduce the impact they have upon your life. They will help you to manage and reduce your worrying thoughts, to learn new ways to manage procrastination and deal with situations that feel uncertain, unpredictable or uncontrollable. The techniques can also help to improve your sleep and the other physical symptoms of GAD. After a few weeks, you should start to notice that your symptoms begin to improve. While everyone has their own personal experience of having worry and GAD, there are shared symptoms. Read through the diagram below which shows these typical symptoms:

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Physical symptoms

Tension in your muscles Feeling irritable or on edge Feeling tired Problems with your sleep Trouble concentrating Digestive upset Nausea Headaches

Behaviours

Worrying excessively Putting things off (procrastinating) Over preparing Avoiding things that are uncertain, unpredictable or uncontrollable Seeking reassurance

Altered thoughts

Lots of ‘what if’ type thoughts about things that may happen in the future and about worrying itself For example: ‘What if I get in trouble at work’ ‘What if my worrying keeps getting worse’.

Worry management uses a range of techniques to target the symptoms you are experiencing and to break the cycle of worry and anxiety. Each one will have a helpful impact on your symptoms in different ways. Using them will help you to take control of your worry and anxiety, rather than it controlling you. The techniques within the worry management process are: Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PGMR): PGMR increases the body’s awareness of early warning signs of tension in the muscles and helps to reduce the amount of tension you hold. It helps with the physical symptoms of worry and anxiety and can help to improve sleep. Over time, using PGMR each day reduces the frequency of worrying thoughts you experience, tension and physical symptoms and improves sleep. You can begin to use PGMR straight away. Worry Time: Worry time helps you to manage your worries more effectively, by giving you a time each day to worry and techniques to manage your worries outside of this time. This gives you back time in your day where you would normally be worrying. It helps to reduce your feelings of anxiety and uncertainty. Over time, worries will begin to impact upon you less and you will notice fewer of them. Refocusing your attention: Used alongside worry time, learning to refocus your attention on the present and away from the distraction of the worrying thoughts. It helps you to be more attached to the world around you and present in what is happening moment to moment. Along with worry time, it helps you to focus and experience and enjoy things, rather than being lost in an internal world of worrying thoughts and physical symptoms of anxiety. Practical Problem Solving: Practical problem solving targets your worries that are about practical, external things to you that you need to take action to resolve. It helps to break into the cycle of procrastination. This is a technique that is there if you need a bit more support with a practical problem to work through what action is best to take to resolve the practical issue at the time.

CBT is an active form of treatment. You need to put the worry management techniques into action in your daily life to benefit from them. If used as advised, people usually begin to see improvements within just a few short weeks. Support from a practitioner during this time can help you to make a weekly plan to use them and to overcome any barriers you may experience. You can also see useful hints and tips from Amelia and John throughout this guide and what they found when using them. CBT can really help you to improve how you are feeling, as it has done for many others.

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