How to Launch a Teen: Worry

Planning is productive, worrying is not.  Worry is never useful.  Worry does not prepare you for future challenges or potential disappointment.  Instead, worry activates the reptilian brain.  Unless you are in immediate physical danger, triggering the fight-or-flight response through worry results in prolonged, distracting, and physically exhausting levels of anxiety.

So just don't worry, right?  Trying not to worry actually makes it worse.  Attempts at distraction or self-directives to avoid certain thoughts can actually make those thoughts more accessible, more frequent, than doing nothing.  Harvard University psychologist Dan Wegner calls these paradoxical responses ironic processing, and his research suggests that stress or depression can intensify the effects of ironic processing.  This means that the more stressed or depressed you feel, the more likely trying not to worry will increase your levels of worry, just at a time when you don't need it.

One of the most effective techniques I have used to help others break their worry habit is the use of scheduled worry time.  Worrying is only allowed during a specific period of time each day.  All worries that occur during the day must be stowed away and not examined until worry time.  Then all the worries of the day are recorded and examined.  Worries that can be addressed through an action plan are identified and plans are made to deal with them.

I believe you also have a book on your shelves called The Worry Cure:  Seven Steps to Stop Worry from Stopping You.  Robert Leahy and I disagree that some worry is productive.  What he calls productive worry I maintain is part of the planning process.  But he does make excellent points about the use of worry to avoid unpleasant emotions and provides a plan for accepting uncertainty and challenging worried thinking.