(How To) Keep Calm And Carry On

Continuing our previous topic about worries, here are some tips to handle our worries and carry on with our tasks. You can check out my older posts for more tips and guidance about handling your worries. If you feel your worry is overwhelming and you need help, feel free to contact me or your mental health provider to guide you through the challenging times.

Why do we worry? Feeling worried or anxious is normal, it is the way our brain is wired to keep us safe. Our brain’s main goal is to sustain our survival, and not to make us happy. We have to work on being happy ourselves ;).

There are valid worries and excessive worries. Knowing the difference will help us tremendously on how to respond to our worries. A valid worry is when there are factual imminent risks to our well being. An excessive worry is consuming, it causes intolerable physical symptoms, rules your life and dictates your important decisions.

Excessive Worries come when you: exaggerate risk and underestimate your ability to overcome it. Try to do these tips to overcome your excessive worries.

1. Stop the worry flow by taking long controlled breathing, or try other tricks on my previous post here. Stopping the flow is necessary to prevent our worries from spiraling too far, and to let our thinking mind take control again. This step also works to calm down any body sensations we feel that accompanies the worries.

2. Get a more balanced info: Am I focusing on the bad risks only/disproportionately, instead of my chance of survival?

3. Check your facts: Are these risks affecting me personally and immediately? When we see/read the news, all the highlighted risks can feel really close and imminent to us. Fact check to see what is the likelihood that the risk will happen to us now.

4. Evaluate your ability fairly: Have I ever managed to get through a similar situation before? Our mind tend to focus on negative memories, so actively recall and repeat our success stories. Remember, what we focus on, will grow.

5. Externalize the worries and see it like getting a new sms/email: are these real infos for me or just a scam? I will not respond to scammer!

6. If it turns out to be irrational worries, choose to move on. Repeat the steps as needed to help rewire the brain. What we do repeatedly, we get good at.