Links between worry and Nental Health

[wayne7]

Hey, i have GAD and Pure O and i worry about stuff far too much yet i am confident in many areas. I am getting worse though and think a lot of our conditions are all bases on excessive worry. Is it a learned behaviour? I have become so used to it that i would worry if i didn't worry :unsure: it's like a comfort i have learned to accept. How about you? What helps and anything anybody can recommend. Thank you.

[ankietyjoe]

I think it's definitely a learned behaviour.

From my perspective I found meditation to be a very potent tool for fighting over worry and obsessive thoughts. It helps train the brain to accept things and not ponder on them. You can let things go far more easily.

[wayne7]

Cheers @ankietyjoe. I have tried mindfulness and meditation but i was too easily distracted and guess i need to stick with it.

[ankietyjoe]

Being distracted is kind of the point. It'd be impossible not to be at first.

It's like dieting to lose weight. You can stop eating altogether and run a marathon every day, but at first it doesn't look like there's much progress. You need to practice and persevere.

It's bloody hard though, but worth it! :)

[wayne7]

thanks for the advice and reply @ankiejoe its definitely something i am going to keep trying.

[Buster70]

Hi , I'd say with me it's partly a learned behaviour but some of it was always there , I probably worried more than others as a teenager that things could go wrong or I might end up looking stupid , life's been pretty tough family wise for me so its gradually ground down my mind into thinking the worst and even when a situation doesn't go quite as bad as I imagined I look for the next problem , I've even had a good day and somthing has gone well and a panic has come over me that somthing bad must happen to balance it out , my partner is ill a lot with heart and lung problems and i drive her insane watching over her for signs she's getting worse I become hypervidulent on her breathing and colour of she's ok I switch to my health , distraction somtimes helps but my mind will drift back into worry time and time again , I'm on a waiting list for cbt it may work or not but I'm willing to give it a try not sure if you ve been down that route yet , sorry I haven't got the answer I guess we are all looking for that on here , take care .

[wayne7]

Cheers @buster70 hopefully cbt should help and i am on a,waiting list for that too. I won't take meds but have tried. I think we can slowly change our ways of thinking with help and guidance.

[MyNameIsTerry]

I always say Mindfulness, it's aimed very much at living in the moment and allowing your thoughts to come & go without interaction with them. It took me months to get into it through daily practice but it is powerful, as studies are showing, and makes changes in various regions of the brain thus tilting it in favour of positivity & compassion and away from fear & negativity.

In Professor Mark Williams book he says "you will fail at first". He says this is normal and they are learning experiences. That was good for me to hear because my training & experience in business agrees with this - all feedback is positive to learn from.

If you see it as a chore, you could try rewarding yourself for a time until it becomes a healthy habit.

Anxiety is absolutely learned behaviour. Epigenetics alone shows how even a gene passed on needs to be activated to start working and it can be switched off too.

I believe that through the associations we make, our constant negative thinking patterns, the shift towards negative core beliefs, etc that we are just making ourselves worse the longer it goes on. Even brain scans show thickening of the fear centre in the brain which suggests more connections between neurons & synapses. The good thing is, the old beliefs about the brain not being able to change it's structures after a certain age have been debunked and it is now accepted in neuroscience that the brain keeps changing all through our lives. Doesn't that make sense since many areas of us change as we mature?

[wayne7]

cheers terry @mynameisterry. Interesting information and yes about the Mindfulness i do see it as a chore but i still plan to keep trying and persevere.

[elibabez]

Being distracted is kind of the point. It'd be impossible not to be at first.

It's like dieting to lose weight. You can stop eating altogether and run a marathon every day, but at first it doesn't look like there's much progress. You need to practice and persevere.

It's bloody hard though, but worth it! :)

I think bad eating habits are easier to lose than severe G-A-D

because bad eating habits can be avoided by going a different route to that favourite takeaway
or perservering for a few weeks despite the temptations and breaking out of the bad eating habit - trust me its hard for a few weeks but then you get used to not eating the rubbish, and dont think twice about eating a banana when hungry instead of say - a donut

However ---------
high anxiety is different

No matter how much you distract yourself - even if you go a month totally avoiding it and blocking out the `anxiety causing things`
there will be eventually something to trigger it and make it flare up from 0-100 within a second!

Unless you cure it, there is no avoiding it

Distraction is just a temporary paper over the cracks. It isnt solving the problem.

So - dieting in my opinion is far easier to get the hang of than avoiding anxiety