The Stop Worrying Today

Course

Week 1: Introduction & How to Stop

Worrying Today

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Copyright Henrik Edberg, 2016. You do not have the right to sell, share or claim the ownership of the content of this course. This course is for informational purposes only and it contains my opinions based on my experience. You should always find the advice of a professional before taking action on something I have published.

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Like many people all over the world I was for many – far too many – years what one may call a chronic worrier. I worried about what could go wrong on a test in school. I worried about what people would think of me if did – or did not do – something. I worried about my future in all kinds of ways. I worried about my health. And of course about money. I even worried about what could go right, about success in my work or in dating and relationships and what new issues that could bring and if I could handle things going so well or if would mess it up or not be happy in that new place. I didn’t worry all the time. But I spent all too much time on it. I was trapped in a box of my own worries, my own monsters of the mind. It sucked so much energy out of me. And it took up loads of time each week that I could have spent on something much better, more productive or fun. And like many I thought: “well, this is just how life is. Not just for me but for people in general.” Luckily, I was wrong. And over the years I have learned how to handle the so destructive worry habit and how to keep such thoughts from oftentimes even popping up in the first place.

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In this course I want to share just the best habits and techniques that I’ve discovered over past 10 years for handling and overcoming worry. These are only the very most effective habits that I’ve used to stop being a constant worrier and that I still use to this day whenever such thoughts start to creep up. These are the habits that have helped me to reclaim so much energy, time and happiness. I truly hope that this course will help you to do just that. Because I’ve been there, under the destructive thumb of nagging worries that give you an upset stomach, hold you back from getting the sleep you need and from living the life you truly want.

Now, let’s get started.

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My name is Henrik Edberg and I live on the west coast of Sweden with my awesome wife and an adorable and slightly quirky cat.

I have written weekly articles and newsletters on personal development on my website The Positivity Blog since 2006 for an audience of half a million monthly readers.

Other courses that I’ve created are:

- The Self-Esteem Course - The Stop Procrastinating Now Course - The Smart Social Skills Course - 31 Days to a Simpler Life Course - The Invincible Summer – a Course in Optimism

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I will keep things simple in this course. Each week you will get just a few new specific action-steps to take. Because I don’t want you to just read a whole lot of pages and feel good for a while. And I don’t want you to feel overwhelmed and so you’ll take little or no action after a while and lapse back into worrying. I want you to be able to change or add simple habits to your own life by using this course as a guide. I want you to be able to make changes in your mindset that stick so you don’t revert back to your old familiar and negative thought patterns. Now, at the end of each week’s guide you get a couple of action-steps to take that week. These steps always include doing some work with that week’s worksheet. The exercises in the worksheets will help you to more fully understand yourself and how to apply the habits and strategies you learn to your own situation and life.

So please do the exercises and fill in the worksheets throughout the course. It is only a few extra minutes you have to invest each week.

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NOTE: If you don’t have a printer to print out the worksheets simply use a pen and a notepad or a Word-document (or something similar) on your computer to fill in the answers to the exercises and questions of the week. On the next page you can find a few answers for questions you may have before starting this course.

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Common Questions & Answers What do I do if I fall of the horse? As you are taking the weekly action-steps life may interfere. You have too much to do at home or at work. You get sick. Life throws you a curveball. And you get behind on taking action for a few days or a week. What do you do then? Instead of stressing yourself out and trying to cram in two weeks of actions into one week, relax. Instead of beating yourself up for not keeping up, be kind to yourself and nudge yourself on to the right path again. Do that by starting again where you left off. And if you need a day - or two - of rest during the course then take it and then continue where you were. If you get behind on the weekly schedule then that is totally OK and you will reach the final day anyway. It is important to not stress yourself out during this program but to take things one step at a time. Otherwise it is very easy to lapse back into your old habits once again.

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What do I do if some strategy doesn’t work right away or if I make a mistake? As you go through the action-steps of this course you’ll hit a bump or two. If you try something during this week or weeks ahead and it doesn’t work quite as well as you had hoped the first or second time then don’t make one of the most common mistakes and give up. Instead, keep going. Keep using the technique or strategy during that week and the following ones. And if you slip up, if you make a mistake during these weeks then welcome to the club. Everyone who wants to do something of value, who wants to expand their comfort zone and make real changes will make mistakes and slip. It is the natural order of life and one very effective way to learn. So even though such a thing might sting for a short while don’t take too seriously. Don’t beat yourself up about it because that will certainly not help. Nudge yourself in the right direction once again and keep going instead.

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What do I do if I want to spend more time on the course or I get overwhelmed? If you want to spend two weeks or a month on week #1 or week #5 for example then do that. Keeping the weekly schedule is just a recommendation. If the action-steps for a week feel a bit too much then take some more time to continue to work on them. Or skip a part in the action-step summery for that week to focus on what you’re already doing and practice that. Later on in the course, in action-step summaries for weeks 2 to 7 you get a quick recap of habits and techniques from previous weeks. If you can, keep using them so that each week they become more and more of the “new normal” and habits that stick. But if you get overwhelmed by a habit or two in the recap section then let one or more of them go for the time being. And then you can simply come back and work on the skipped habit(s) later on instead. So you can do this course at your own pace if you like. It’s your choice.

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Here’s what we’ll explore each week during these 7 weeks of replacing worry with inner peace, clearer thinking and with moving forward in life the way you want to. Week 1: Introduction and How to Stop Worrying Today. Week 2: How to Replace Your Worries with a Smarter Approach to the Future. Week 3: How to Get a Steady Start and Just Taking Care of Today. Week 4: The Power of Action, Facts and Zooming Out. Week 5: The Paralyzing Worry of What Others May Think or Say. Week 6: How Daily Mindfulness Will Help You with the Destructive Thoughts. Week 7: Following Up and Moving Towards a Lighter Future.

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Why is worrying such a very common habit?

Well, a big part of it is simply that people worry because of many different reasons. And many of those reasons can be quite powerful.

So where do you start to get a handle on this problem? Well, I have found that a good place is with increasing your awareness about why you personally worry. By doing so it becomes easier to:

More quickly catch yourself in the act of starting to worry and to shut that down before it becomes big snowball of worries that will be a lot harder to get handle on.

See the personal trouble spots where you may want to focus a little extra of your energy and attention.

5 of the most common reasons why we worry (that may sometimes overlap) are, in my experience, because we:

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1. Have too many worry-inducing influences in our lives. And we don’t know how to handle that in healthy way. Or we may sometimes have not even considered that they are there in the first place and what to do about them. The people closest to us, media, the internet sites we most often visit and the world around us in general has a big daily influence over us. These influences have been there throughout our childhood, teenage years and into adulthood and may just seem like what is “the normal”.

2. Want to think every future scenario through and look at all the possible angles. Planning and sometimes being concerned about a possible outcome or future scenario can be very helpful. But getting lost in your mind and in trying to control every possible outcome as they spin around and around in your head is not.

3. Get stuck in inaction and in spending too much time on thinking. There is time for thinking and planning. And there is a time for action. But many of us have too often gotten stuck in inaction, in procrastination and in spending way too much time and energy on thinking instead of on action, moving forward and filling life with what we truly want.

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4. Have a habit of spending way too much time in the past or a possible future. The past and old memories can be so comfortable to revisit. Or they can be scary and hold you back from trying something one more time. The future can hold so much promise as you get lost in sweet daydreams about the wonderful life you hope to have. Or you start building larger and larger monsters of the mind and get yourself wrapped up tightly in a disaster scenario. Getting addicted to the past or future is so common but can also be quite destructive as it feeds the flames of worry and negative thoughts. Or as it holds you back in pleasant daydreams about “someday” instead of confronting and taking action on what is here right now and what you actually can influence a lot.

5. Simply not managing the fundamentals of energy. This is perhaps the most basic one. When I don’t get enough sleep, eat healthy food at regular times each day and get enough exercise then I have found in my own life that it’s a whole lot easier to be susceptible to worries and for my mind to start seeing life though a negative lens. In this course I will go more deeply into the best and most practical advice I have found to deal with each of these 5 reasons for worrying.

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And by reading or listening, doing the worksheets and taking the weekly action-steps you’ll each week add new habits and techniques to your mental toolbox for handling, minimizing and overcoming the worry in your own life and especially in situations that causes a lot of it.

Now, the next step after having gone through this list of 5 common reasons for why we worry is to do this each time when you start to worry during next 3 days… Ask yourself these 2 questions:

What am I worrying about right now?

Why am I doing that?

Write down those two answers as best you can whenever you worry during these days. Consult the 5 reasons again to help yourself to find the main reason.

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This exercise will help you to get started with thinking about why you get stuck in worrying. By doing so you can to get to know yourself even better and see your own worry habit and pattern more clearly. You may for example discover that you:

Spend too much time in a possible future.

Try to think every possible scenario through all too often.

Perhaps may need more sleep.

Here’s what to do: A simple way to keep this log is to write down the questions above in a document in your smart phone and then to just continue to fill that document with the answers you find during your 3 days. Or to keep a pen and a small notepad - with the questions written down on it - with you at all times. At the end of the third day, use your worksheet to record your top 2 most common reasons for worrying (of the 5 listed in the previous pages). And also write down what your top 3 worries where during these days. When you name these worries try to be specific as best you can. Don’t just write: “worried about my grades” if you are actually worried about not getting a good grade in Spanish or math.

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And maybe you’re not actually worried about dating in general but mostly about running out of interesting things to say during a date. The more specific you can be the easier it will be to manage the worry to a reasonable size – instead of making a mountain out of a medium-sized hill – and to start looking for concrete and specific steps you can take to improve upon that situation. Also, by not just not letting the worries spin around in your head but getting them down on paper or in a computer document it becomes easier to see them with clear eyes.

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Now that you have taken a first look at your own situation – you can of course refine or add more worries that you want to work on as we go through the course – I’d like to share a simple 3-step combo that I use whenever I feel that worries are starting to spin in my mind and that you can start using right now and today to put a stop to a worry. Here’s what you do (it takes about 2 minutes).

Step 1: Take just 1 minute to fully focus on your breathing. Sit down. Close your eyes. And start breathing a little slower and deeper than you usually do. Breathe through your nose and make sure you breathe with your belly and not your chest. As you do, focus only on the air going in and out. Nothing else. For about 1 minute. Why this focus on the breathing? Because when you become worried you get tense, stressed and your thoughts start spinning in your head. Your breaths become shorter and often you often start breathing with your chest.

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This simple 1-minute step of 100% focus on simply the air going and out helps you to calm both your mind and body down and to think more clearly again.

Step 2: Say your stop-phrase. After you have calmed down by focusing on the breathing it’s time to say stop to the worry.

In your mind shout or firmly tell yourself: STOP! Or you can use my favorite stop-phrase: NO, NO, NO, we are not going down that road again! Or find your own stop-phrase that you like and that works well for you. This step will help you to break that snowball of worried thoughts before it becomes bigger and a lot harder to stop. The STOP! or a stop-phrase of your own choosing helps you to sharply and firmly disrupt the worry and to make it easier to focus on something more helpful once again.

Step 3: Use a zoom out question. In this final step of the combo you do one simple thing. Ask yourself this question:

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Will this matter in 5 years? Or even 5 weeks? When you ask yourself this question about something that may worry you then - in my experience - the answer is usually that it will matter very little or not at all. But when we get worried it’s so easy to start building a mountain out of molehill. To magnify a small or medium-sized challenge or problem into something much bigger in your mind. And so you go from being perhaps a little concerned to being really worried and anxious. This question helps you to zoom out from that. To see the task or challenge that lies in front of you for what it really is in a wider perspective. This is a very important thing because one thing that worriers don’t do enough is zooming out and seeing things from such a healthy and realistic perspective. They often get intensely focused on what is happening right here right now instead and then magnify that thing into the terrible consequences in the near future. A nice bonus about asking yourself this question is also that it can help you to see with clarity what WILL actually matter in 5 years or weeks. The things that matter the most to you or the few things you ought to be legitimately concerned about. This question will help you to not ignore such things and, if possible, to give you a kick in the butt to start creating a plan for how to solve or change them.

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Create a reminder I highly recommend writing the steps in this exercise on a piece of paper and putting that note where you cannot avoid seeing it during your day. Such places could be your workspace, your bedside table, bathroom mirror or your fridge. By doing so you’ll be more likely to actually use the 3-step combination to quickly put a stop to the worries that pop up during your day. I did that and my post-it note looked something like this:

1 min – belly breathe – 100% focus on the breaths.

NO, NO, NO, we are not going down that road again!

Will this matter in 5 years? Or even 5 weeks?

Now, next week we’ll dig a lot more into working through a worry that you may often have. But for the time being take a look at the action-steps for the first week of this course on the next page and take action on them.

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The Action-Steps for This Week Here’s a quick summary of the action-steps to take this week:

1. Day 1: Write down the 3-step combo on piece of paper and put it where you cannot avoid seeing it every day this week.

2. Day 1-3: Raise your awareness of your own worry habit by writing down the answers to the 2 questions every time you start worrying. At the end of these 3 days use the worksheet to record your top 2 reasons and top 3 worries.

3. This week: Each time you start to worry or find yourself already doing it use the three step combo of breathing, saying stop and asking yourself the “will this matter” question.

4. Day 7: Use the worksheet to review how the three-step combo worked for you this week.