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Worrying all the time is a reality for many entrepreneurs. Long hours working alone, increased pressure to succeed and the rigorous demands of running a business often result in concerns that multiply and go unchecked.
Whether it’s one or two big problems that nag at you consistently throughout the day or a host of little things that zip in and out of your head and break your concentration, there’s one simple way to manage them: take a worry break.
A worry break is a scheduled time that you set aside on a regular basis to focus on the anxieties or problems that are preoccupying you. If that sounds like a recipe for more stress, consider this: spending 15 to 20 minutes a day on a worry deep-dive can ultimately reduce your worries and help you cope more effectively with the challenges thrown at you….Continue reading….
Source: How To Stop Worrying So Much (And Manage Stress Better)
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Critics:
Worry is a category of perseverative cognition, i.e. a continuous thinking about negative events in the past or in the future. As an emotion “worry” is experienced from anxiety or concern about a real or imagined issue, often personal issues such as health or finances, or external broader issues such as environmental pollution, social structure or technological change.
It is a natural response to anticipated future problems. Excessive worry is a primary diagnostic feature of generalized anxiety disorder, but also is pervasive in other psychological disorders, like schizophrenia. Most people experience short-lived periods of worry in their lives without incident; indeed, a mild amount of worrying has positive effects.
If it prompts people to take precautions (e.g., fastening their seat belt or buying insurance) or avoid risky behaviors (e.g., angering dangerous animals, or binge drinking), but with excessive worrisome people they overestimate future dangers in their assessments and in its extremities tend to magnify the situation as a dead end which results in stress.
Overestimation happens because analytic resources are a combination of external locus of control, personal experience and belief fallacies. Chronically worried individuals are also more likely to lack confidence in their problem solving ability, perceive problems as threats, become easily frustrated when dealing with a problem, and are pessimistic about the outcome of problem-solving efforts.
Seriously anxious people find it difficult to control their worry and typically experience symptoms like restlessness, fatigue, difficulty in concentrating, irritability, muscle tension and sleep disturbance. The avoidance model of worry (AMW) theorizes that worry is a verbal linguistic, thought based activity, which arises as an attempt to inhibit vivid mental imagery and associated somatic and emotional activation.
This inhibition precludes the emotional processing of fear that is theoretically necessary for successful habituation and extinction of feared stimuli. Worry is reinforced as a coping technique due to the fact that most worries never actually occur, leaving the worrier with a feeling of having successfully controlled the feared situation, without the unpleasant sensations associated with exposure.
Noteworthy, studies also show that visual worry, i.e. worrying that occurs in visual modality, is also associated with increased anxiety and other psychopathology symptoms. This model explains pathological worry to be an interaction between involuntary (bottom-up) processes, such as habitual biases in attention and interpretation favoring threat content, and voluntary (top-down) processes, such as attentional control. Emotional processing biases influence the probability of threat representations into the awareness as intruding negative or positive thoughts.
At a pre-conscious level, these processes influence the competition among mental representations in which some correspond to the assertive power of worry with impaired cognitive process and others to the preventive power of worry with attentional control or exhaustive vigilance. The biases determine threatening degree and nature of worry content the worrier attempts to resolve the perceived threat and the redirection of anticipations, responses and coping in such situations.
There are some who respond to mental representations in an uncertain or ambiguous state in regard to the stressful or upsetting event. In this state the worrier is held in a perpetual state of worry. This is because availability of an overwhelming number (maybe 2 or 3, depending upon the worry-prone individual) of possibilities of outcomes which can be generated.
It puts the worrier in a threatening crisis and they focus their attentional control voluntarily on the potential negative outcomes, whereas others engage in a constructive problem solving manner and in a benign approach rather than to engage with heightened anticipation on the possible negative outcome.
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