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Generalized Anxiety (Chronic Worry)
What is Generalized Anxiety?
Excessive and Uncontrollable worry occurring more days than not for several months. The worry is associated with several of the following symptoms:
| - fatigue | - restlessness |
| - difficulty concentrating | - irritability |
| - muscle tension | - sleep disturbance |
What causes Generalized Anxiety?
Childhood experiences associated with chronic worry in adulthood include:
- Trauma
- Worried and overprotective parents: The message children get is that the world is dangerous. As adults they try to protect themselves by attempting to control their environment.
- Fear of abandonment: Adults who worry a lot are more likely to have lost a parent before the age of 16. They have difficulty believing that others could be trusted to take care of their needs.
- Parents dismissed emotions: These individuals are more likely to try to not express emotions.
How can therapy help for generalized anxiety/chronic worry?
Approximately 75% of chronic worriers can be helped with a comprehensive approach to therapy based on the most recent scientific knowledge.
Therapy can help you to:
- Understand why you keep worrying
- Identify productive versus unproductive worry - identify problems that actually have solutions and set in motion an action plan to solve these problems – let go of unproductive worry.
- Challenge your worried thinking – use thought records to identify and change common thought distortions associated with unproductive worry.
- Identify underlying assumptions and core beliefs that give rise to your worrying - identify the foundation of your worries and challenge the accuracy of those beliefs
- Use failure as an opportunity – learn to turn what you currently view as a catastrophe into an opportunity to learn and improve.
- Use your emotions rather than worry about them – worry is actually a strategy to avoid emotions – learn to experience your emotions and use them to your advantage.
- Learn to focus on the here and now – Chronic worriers often feel controlled by a constant sense of urgency and a need to know everything right away. Therapy can teach you how to turn off this sense of urgency. This will allow you to remain in the present and get more out of life.
From Robert Leahey – “The worry Cure”
If worrying is causing distress - a professional at the Montreal Clinic for Therapy Services can help.