The Worry Cure: Seven Steps to Stop Worry from Stopping You
Robert L. Leahy
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 1400097665
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
You wish you didn’t spend as much time worrying as you do, but you just can’t seem to help it. Worrying feels like second nature. It’s what helps you solve your problems and prevents you from making mistakes. It’s what motivates you to be prepared—if you didn’t worry, things might get out of hand. Worry protects you, prepares you, and keeps you safe.
Is it working? Or is it making you tense, tired, anxious, uncertain—and more worried?
For more than twenty-five years, Dr. Robert L. Leahy has successfully helped thousands of people defeat the worry that is holding them back. The Worry Cure is his new, comprehensive approach to help you identify, challenge, and overcome all types of worry, using the most recent research and his more than two decades of experience in treating patients.
This empowering seven-step program, including practical, easy-to-follow advice and techniques, will help you:
• Determine your “worry profile” and change your patterns of worry
• Identify productive and unproductive worry
• Take control of time and eliminate the sense of urgency that keeps you anxious
• Focus on new opportunities—not on your fear of failure
• Embrace uncertainty instead of searching for perfect solutions
• Stop the most common safety behaviors that you think make things better—but actually make things worse
Designed to address general worries as well as the unique issues surrounding some of the most common areas of worry—relationships, health, money, work, and the need for approval—The Worry Cure is for everyone, from the chronic worrier to the occasional ruminator. It’s time to stop thinking you’re “just a worrier” who can’t change and start using the groundbreaking methods in The Worry Cure to achieve the healthier, more successful life you deserve.
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and so on. This sounds like a lot of behaviors. Which behavior failed? And which ones succeeded? How many other behaviors do you engage in during a day, week, month, or year? Thousands? Millions? If one behavior doesn’t pay off, doesn’t that seem rather trivial? Finally, if it’s one behavior that failed, then how many behaviors do you have left that could succeed? If you segment out the behavior that failed in this specific situation at this particular time, you can still consider the many
Dweck’s research on young children indicates that some children (whom she labels “helpless”), when confronted with an insolvable task, simply give up. They say to themselves, “I’m just not good at this.” Other children are “persistent” and actually improve their performance following failure, because they say to themselves, “I’ll have to try harder” or “Let’s see what I did wrong.” In fact, this difference may be the reason why girls often give up on mathematical tasks. They tend to say, “I’m
action. Flexibility—“all the other things that I could still do”—places the outcome in a broader perspective. When Todd was worried because his business had been losing money for several months, we examined some constructive things that he could do to generate new business, but we also examined all of the behaviors that he could do both within his business and outside of his business that had nothing to do with the current problem. As Todd became more flexible he worried less about things that
make someone else feel interesting. But I suggested that she challenge her idea that it would be terrible if someone was not interested in what she had to say. What would she still be able to do if someone found her discussion of her work uninteresting? She’d be able to do everything she has always done—in other words, nothing would change. Step Five: Turn “Failure” into Opportunity Wendy’s main problem in meeting people was that she had perfectionistic standards, and she always evaluated
meeting new people, anxieties about sexual performance, shame over their bodies, and fears of sounding foolish. If almost everyone has anxieties of various kinds, then what’s so bad about hers? GO THROUGH YOUR FEELINGS TO GET PAST THEM Finally, Wendy had to decide to make a commitment to go through her anxieties—to do the things that made her anxious—in order to get over these feelings. Practicing what makes her anxious became a goal. I suggested that the signal to try something was
