Blog Posts Tagged "Worry".

Here’s an idea for a behavioral experiement for people who ruminate (passively & repeatedly think about the causes or consequences of problems without moving to active problem solving. Often involves self-criticism).

Prep: If you have a smart phone, you might find this easiest to do using your phone to record (you could use a basic notetaking app or your calendar app, or whatever suits you).

Or, you could just use a piece of paper/notebook.

Record: each time you notice yourself ruminating (as it happens)

You might do this by noticing
- when you are lost in thought,
- thinking about the past or the future, or
- when you are feeling negative emotions.

Any of these can act as triggers for you to ask yourself “Am I ruminating right now?” Or “Was I just ruminating?”

Record approx how many minutes you were ruminating for.

At the end of each day, record: any incidents of rumination that led to useful problem solving i.e., you took a specific action.

At the end of the week: Calculate your ratio

e.g.,

15 incidents of rumination, taking up approximately 10 hours, 3 incidents of it leading to problem solving = efficiency rating of 20% (3 incidents of problem solving out of 15 incidents of rumination) or 3 hr 20 mins of rumination to 1 problem solving action.

4 topics ruminated about, only 1 topic problem solved.

(Note that even the act of doing the recording is likely to lead to you doing more problem solving so your problem solving number might be higher).

Make an advance prediction:

Before you start, make a prediction of how much time you spend ruminating and your efficiency percentage. The goal of the exercise is to test how realistic your thoughts are about your rumination and perhaps give yourself some objective, personalized evidence that your rumination is not very useful for problem solving and how much time is available for thinking about something else.

Behavioral experiments have been shown to be highly effective in changing both thoughts and behavior.

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Often we do the things we do because of hidden payoffs. What’s a hidden payoff of worrying?

Worrying protects us from having to do problem solving.

Think about it…. :-)

If I said “Would you prefer to spend the next 10 minutes worrying about something you commonly worry about? e.g. your weight.

Or

Would you prefer to spend the next 10 minutes taking a small problem solving action that would actually help improve the problem or make it less likely to occur?
e.g., making a healthy salad to take to work for lunch tomorrow?

Which would you choose?

Most people would pick sitting on their butt and worrying for 10 minutes. It’s familiar and in the short term it’s easier.

Honestly, if someone asked me this question, most of the time I would choose sitting on my butt and worrying. So I’m not saying there is anything wrong with YOU that would choose something that is easier over something that is harder. It’s a natural inclination.

But….. to get unstuck you need to sometimes choose the harder option. You don’t have to do it all the time (setting perfectionstic standards is likely to cause you to just give in and give up), but if you’re currently choosing non-avoidant problem solving action only 1/10 times, try to up this to 4/10 times. That’s a 400% improvement and you’re still choosing problem solving action less than half the time!

Note that I mean “doing” problem solving action, not thinking about doing problem solving action, but you don’t need to solve your whole problem all it once. It can be any small action.

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