Worry analogy

Hi all

I'm having CBT and we're working on my GAD (I scored 75 out of 80 on the test - very high!).

I've been given the usual exercise of using a worry tree to explore my worries. In this exercise you write down the issue, WHAT exactly you are worrying about (what the worry says about you as a person) and whether this is a real or hypothetical worry.

I was having trouble with deciding if it was hypothetical or not. So I googled it an came across this useful analogy.....

Your thoughts are like you sitting in someone else's car with the radio on. As it's not your car, you can't turn the radio of at all....or switch stations. Everything you hear is your thoughts.... Some stuff you hear you like.... Some stuff you hear you absolutely loath. But you just have to hear it.

The hypothetical thoughts are just "noise". Stuff that you just hear in the background, the cheesy music, the DJ, static. The kind of stuff you should tune out.

The real worries are like the news reports you would hear in the radio. They are telling you important information.

To me this analogy just clicked in my head.

When I conducted the exercises, I just kept saying is this just "noise" in my head or is this my mind's way if giving me a "newsflash"

Once I decide it's hypothetical it weakens the worry. I also then have to distract myself or distance myself from it.

If it's real then I must decide if I can solve it now... If not distract myself until I can or plan when I can solve it

The analogy was very useful to me.... Hope it helps someone else.

Dear snookiebookie:

Thank you for sharing your CBT work, the worry tree and the analogy you came up with after googling. I think it is a good analogy except that even the news you'd hear on the radio, even that is up to critical evaluation as to what it means.

I like the analogy as to separating your worries to two separate groups: worries about which something useful can possibly be done, and worries where nothing useful can be done about it. I myself came up recently with the term "useless fear" to specify the fear I feel that does not follow with something useful that needs to be done. For example if I hear an enexpected sound while walking and feel alarm, that is useful because I proceed with looking for the source of the sound. It might be a tree about to fall on me (forest area here) or an animal that can attack me. But if I walk and feel fear which is my past abuse triggered in my memory, then it is useless fear that does not serve to protect me in any way.

atina