How To Stop Worrying & Start Living

Worry is that sense of fear that can overcome you in relation to your work or an illness or other situations. A few individuals even suffer from panic attacks where their level of worry is so high that it's debilitating. We worry about the future believing that we are totally helpless as to influencing what will happen next in our lives. I have come to trust that we are not helpless in every aspect of our lives. Worrying has a tendency to lead our imagination in the negative direction.

Every system in your body is affected by worry. Besides raising blood pressure and increasing blood clotting, worry can prompt your liver to produce more cholesterol, all of which can raise your risk of heart attack and stroke. Muscle stress can produce headaches, back pain, and other body aches. Worry can also trigger an increase in stomach acid and either slow or speed up muscle contractions in your intestines, which can lead to stomach aches, constipation, diarrhea, gas or heartburn. Worry can affect your skin as well. It can affect your respiratory system and aggravate asthma. Growing evidence even proposes that chronic worry can compromise your immune system, making you more vulnerable to bacteria, viruses, and perhaps even cancer. There's one thing that worrying does not do. It does not make the situation better. Therefore, we should find an alternative to worrying so that we have less worry and stress in our lives.

Luckily, there are methods that you are able to learn and practice that can be valuable for decreasing worry. In enforcing any of these worry-reduction methods, the earlier it's applied, in other words the earlier you are able to catch the worry, the more effective in the long run the technique will be. This is because the longer an episode of worrying lasts, the more the habit is reinforced and the more you are strengthening the bonds between the particular worrisome ideas in particular. Put differently, you are reinforcing the habit. Therefore, the earlier the worrying is caught, the less that habit is strengthened.

This ebook includes the following chapters: