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Areas › Worry and anxiety › Breaking the worry loop
Out loud, in your own words, something like: my brain is doing the thing again, this is chemistry, it is here because I care. Say it in the car, in the kitchen, wherever. If you are helping someone else, say it first yourself so they hear the shape of it, then let them try. It feels silly for about a week and then it starts turning up on its own.
Believers, remember God often (Quran 33:41). What is asked for is spoken and repeated, not merely held in the head.
الأحزاب
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱذۡكُرُواْ ٱللَّهَ ذِكۡرࣰ ا كَثِيرࣰ ا
Believers, remember God often
Qur’an 33:41read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis found that people high in repetitive negative thinking have measurable difficulty controlling what stays in working memory. Disengaging from a thought is genuinely harder for some people, which is a reason for outside help rather than for trying harder. It is an association pooled across studies, so it explains the difficulty without telling you which support works best.
Zetsche U, Bürkner PC, Schulze L. (2018). Shedding light on the association between repetitive negative thinking and deficits in cognitive control - A meta-analysis.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Speaking it supplies from outside what some people do not readily produce inside.
A hammering heart during anxiety is the body doing what it does when it is braced, not a sign that it is being damaged. For a lot of people that single piece of information is the thing that finally lets the panic drop.
Most decisions are not sealed. Choose, run with it for a set time, then look again and change course if it is clearly wrong. Knowing there is a review date takes a great deal of weight off the choice.
With a child, make it a job rather than a lesson. They are the detective, the worried thought is the claim, and the task is to collect what supports it and what does not before deciding anything.