Day 17: The Worry Blow-Out Technique
Week 3 Rewiring
This technique does a number of things. It allows you to retrain your mind to look at solutions, not be drowned by problems. The more you use it, the more it works. And the more it shortcuts your brain to jumping straight to solutions.
The problem with worries is that you can’t see a way out. The first step of the technique is a brain dump of all your worries. It gets them out of your head and acts a bit like a to-do list of your worries. Another problem with your worries is that they carry painful emotions. So the next step is to learn how to drop the emotion from the worry by blowing out the worry until your brain doesn’t believe the worry anymore.
After the emotion has dropped, you can think rationally. With this state of mind, you can get clarity on solutions. Having a number of steps in the process is what also helps this technique work. Because our brains like to make shortcuts. The more you use this technique, the more your brain will start to jump towards solutions without going through all the steps.
In short, the Worry Blow-Out Technique will take you from a brain filled with worry, pain, and catastrophisation, reframing your thinking to a rational, solution-focused mindset.
How It Works
It’s based on CBT as well as other counselling techniques. And the fact that your brain likes making shortcuts. With enough repetition, your brain tends to jump to the answer. You create mental shortcuts. With repetition, you tend to mentally shortcut in your thought processes.
This technique gets you to go through a process. Your brain then starts to jump to the next step. And with application, you can effectively reprogram your thinking in a much better way.
This process is something at Juvenate we call programming your success heuristics. A lot of our techniques work in this way. Helping you to create better ways of thinking that, with application and repetition, become second nature and require little effort.
Worry and catastrophisation is really limiting due to the emotional discomfort it brings with it. If you use this technique, you can change the way you think. Just reading how to do it doesn’t work. For it to work, you have to do it too. Because that’s the only way to install new ways of thinking in your brain.
So if you really want to decouple your emotions, get some clarity over your worries, and automatically get your mind to be solution-focused, you need to do some work. But it takes a lot less mental work than the cost to your mental energy of a persistently worried mind.
After a bit of repetition of the technique, it won’t be long until your mind naturally jumps from the original worry to ways of coping. And with this, you become ready for taking on the challenges of real life. You will start to plan for the worst and hope for the best.
The Four Steps
Get a blank sheet of paper and work through the following four columns.
Column 1: Name and List All Your Worries
In the first column, individually list all of your worries. Just give the worry a short name that you can recognise it by. Move down the column and list all of your worries on a new line, one by one. List them all. Start at the top and work down. Do a brain dump of everything you’re worried and stressed about and everything that’s concerning you.
This step helps you to mentally dump all of your worries onto a list. By doing this, it helps you to untangle one particular worry from all of the others. By listing them down, you start getting some clarity. You go from an overloaded worried mind to an unloaded mind and a list of your worries on a piece of paper instead.
But be warned: the relief of doing this brain dump of your worries only persists if you go through the next steps in the process as well. It’s a bit like a to-do list. The list helps you sort things. You get some clarity on what you need to do, but it doesn’t get the job done.
Column 2: Focus on What Could Happen
This step helps you to focus in on one of those particular worries you’ve listed in the first column and write down what could happen if it all went wrong. It’s the worst possible thing that could happen column. This column is what your worries are trying to protect you from. It’s what you’re really worried about. And despite how improbable it is, it’s the thing that sticks in your mind and wakes you up at night.
With a worried mind, unravelling and isolating just that one worry can be difficult. So this step helps you to separate your worries and focus on writing down exactly what it is you’re worried about.
Sometimes it also helps to step back after you’ve done this step and look at the entire column. When you do this, you’re going to start to discount at least some of those worries because all of those worst-case scenarios you’ve listed really start to look improbable in their entirety.
Column 3: The Impossible and the Ridiculous
You then need to work your worry through to its endpoint. You need to get your mind catastrophising on that one worry until it really can’t go any further. Then you need to take that worry another step further and mentally and consciously force that worry to the extreme and towards the impossible.
In fact, you need to take that worry to the ridiculous. And most importantly, until you just can’t believe it could ever happen.
When you don’t believe your worry anymore, it loses its power over you. When this happens, you’ll then feel the emotion, fear, and anxiety drop away. Taking that worry to the ridiculous mentally blows out the worry.
Sometimes you need to make it silly. You could introduce really unrealistic scenarios. You could bring in some comedy or some silly voices or just something to take that improbable in the last step towards the impossible. This step is hard to do. It’s mentally taxing and it can take some imagination as well as mental effort. But if you want to feel better, it’s a necessity. When you don’t believe anymore, the negative emotional energy drops away.
One caution. If taking the worry further makes it feel more real rather than more ridiculous, stop there — that’s a sign this needs support rather than a worksheet, and it’s worth a conversation with your GP.
Column 4: Realistically and Rationally Coping
This step is about mentally stepping that worry back from the impossible to the improbable again. From the worst thing that could happen and then back again to what’s most likely to happen.
Once you’ve blown out your worry in the last step, you lose that negative emotional momentum that powers the worried mind. Losing this allows you to look rationally at the problem instead, with a clear head rather than a worried mind.
Now mentally you’re in a much better place. By stepping that worry down from the impossible to the improbable and then to the realistic and to the most likely to happen, you can simply write down what you’d do if that was to happen. Having blown out the worry and stripped away the emotion in the last step, you can focus on logical solutions.
Even if the likely-to-happen thing is not too far away from the worst possible thing that could happen, you can still work out what you’d do if that did actually happen.
What Happens With Practice
With practice and by repeating this whole process a few times, mentally you’ll start to jump to the rational coping step. You’ll gain confidence knowing that you’ll cope even if things did really go wrong. You’ll learn to focus on one problem at a time. You’ll decouple the emotional content, and you’ll approach the worry rationally.
Often you’ll find that you’ll naturally start to discount some of the most improbable worries you have as well. And then you’ll discount more and more worries before they grow. Often you’ll not even have to make things as ridiculous as you once did before the emotion drops away too.
Remember, the brain looks for shortcuts. You’ll mentally start to go from column one to column four, missing the middle steps. And when this happens, your initial worries tend to stay much more realistic. Catastrophising becomes difficult to do. And your mind becomes focused on solutions, not worry.
With continuous practice working on each of your worries, you’ll find you don’t need to list things anymore. And when a worry comes to mind, you’ll jump to how you’ll cope and how you’ll handle your problems.
The Deeper Foundation
This technique helps you to prevent overload, drop the worry, and become solution-focused. In doing this, you become more resilient and gain the resolve to confront life’s problems. It’s been developed by using NLP to model some CBT techniques. But there’s a deeper element of stoicism too.
Epictetus said it: remind yourself that the only things you can control are your thoughts and your actions. Everything else is uncontrollable.
This stoic way of thinking goes back over two thousand years. The principles of stoicism were also a major influence for both Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis, who developed CBT, which is one of the most popular approaches used today to help people change how they think, which in turn changes how they feel and how they then react to the world around them.
Being stoic is not about denial or suppressing emotion. It’s about being able to challenge abnormal thinking and the beliefs that grow from these negative thoughts. In this way, we can get rid of dysfunctional thinking patterns that are holding us back and some of the negative emotion that’s pulling us down.
The Worry Blow-Out Technique helps you develop a mental shortcut that can help you get rid of a worried mind and develop a mind based on solutions instead. With it, you start to change the way you used to worry. And more importantly, how you feel and react.
You become more stoic to the world around you. You develop grit and the resolve to tackle problems head-on. And you develop the mental habits to get through doubt and the natural obstacles that life throws your way.
Go on, give it a go. Besides, what’s the worst thing that can happen?
References
- Beck, A.T. (1979). Cognitive Therapy of Depression. Guilford Press.
- Bandler, R. & Grinder, J. (1979). Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming. Real People Press.
- Borkovec, T.D., & Inz, J. (1990). The nature of worry in generalised anxiety disorder. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 28(2), 153-158.
- Ellis, A. (1962). Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy. Lyle Stuart.
- Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever You Go, There You Are. Hyperion.
- LeDoux, J. (1996). The Emotional Brain. Simon & Schuster.
- Neff, K. (2011). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow.
- Sapolsky, R.M. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Henry Holt.
- Seligman, M.E.P. (1991). Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. Knopf.
- Wells, A. (1999). A metacognitive model and therapy for generalised anxiety disorder. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 6(2), 86-95.