Each repetition fortifies your worry habit while weakening your productivity and well-being. You could be on the road to a panic attack. Your dissertation slides into the "Mission Impossible" zone. 

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It doesn't have to be this hard. Perhaps you've tried various worry-reducing hacks—only to experience a rebound. Are you ready for a more permanent solution?

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You now can implement a groundbreaking approach for overcoming worry and other self-sabotaging habits in three simple steps. Studies show it works, as my clients and I can also testify. It could be just what you need. [Note: If you have severe or persistent anxiety symptoms that impede daily living, please seek professional help.]

 

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Worry is a behavior—not an emotion 

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Worry is not an emotion—it's a behavior. That's good news because you have more control over your behavior than your feelings. 

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Maladaptive habitual behaviors can be short-circuited through a simple approach that integrates learning and mindfulness principles, explains Judson Brewer, M.D., Ph.D., of Brown University's Mindfulness Center. 

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He first used the approach to help clients overcome nicotine addiction, observing it outperformed the existing gold standard treatment. Then he began applying it to other self-sabotaging behaviors, notably worry, as he details in his book, Unwinding Anxiety. 

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This new approach is clearly suitable for addressing common ABD self-sabotaging behaviors—worry, avoidance, procrastination, and self-judgment. Let's examine worry for illustrative purposes, and you can generalize to other self-destructive habits. 

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Entrenched worry is a habit, a well-worn "loop," just like any habit. Evolution, Brewer explains, wired us to develop habit loops through reward-based learning that goes like this: 

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We see some food that looks good, our brain says, "Calories! Survival!" We eat the food, we taste it — it tastes good. And especially with sugar, our bodies send a signal to our brain that says, "Remember what you're eating and where you found it." We lay down this context-dependent memory and learn to repeat the process next time. See food, eat food, feel good, repeat. Trigger, behavior, reward.

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Simple, right? Well, after a while, our creative brains say, "You know what? You can use this for more than just remembering where food is. You know, next time you feel bad, why don't you try eating something good so you'll feel better?" We thank our brains for the great idea, try this and quickly learn that if we eat chocolate or ice cream when we're mad or sad, we feel better. 

 

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But Bad Habits No Longer Serve You

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This trigger-behavior-reward process creates all habit loops, including worry. But how can worry be rewarding? 

 

At some point, a stimulus triggered your worrying behavior, resulting in a reward. Your brain duly noted the association of worry with reward. Now whenever the trigger appears, your brain tells you to start worrying without any conscious effort. 

 

As Brewer observes, worrying gives us the illusion of control. Our mind churns away on a problem—and we feel we are somehow doing something to fix things. While that may offer short-term relief, worrying usually makes the situation worse. It is essentially a gamble with very long odds. 

 

Habits can save us precious time and energy, but their very mindlessness becomes problematic when they persist after their reward value vanishes. Unfortunately, we are not likely to notice when a habit loses its effectiveness. Although the reward was downgraded to a result (and a likely undesirable one), we mindlessly persist in worrying. 

 

"Worrying won't stop the bad things from happening. It just stops you from enjoying the good." ~ Anonymous | Tweet this

  

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How to Break a Bad Habit In Three Steps

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Brewer spells out the three steps for understanding and breaking self-sabotaging habits. Let's take the example of anxiety and worry (and you can generalize to other behaviors, e.g., procrastination, self-judgment, and avoidance). 

 

(1) Map Your Habit Loops

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When you feel anxiety from your dissertation or other sources, it becomes a trigger for various behaviors. Some may offer momentary relief but potential health hazards, as in this case: 

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Trigger: Feel anxious 
Behavior: Eat something sweet 
Result: Be distracted from anxiety 

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However, in the most pernicious cycle, anxiety reinforces itself through worrying behavior: 

 

Trigger: Feel anxious 
Behavior: Worry (ruminate on what's wrong, what could go wrong, etc.) 
Result: Feel more anxious 

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Mapping powerfully exposes the truth about our bad habits: Rewards are at best fleeting but more often malignant and costly. To stop the triggering effect, your brain needs to get this message by becoming curious. 

 

"Emotions are data, not directives." ~ Susan David | Tweet this

  

(2) Get Curious about Loops & Update Their Reward Status

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The next time a feeling of anxiety pops up, become curious about your moment-to-moment experience of being triggered. Go ahead and engage in the habitual behavior—but mindfully. Notice what thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations accompany your worrying, avoiding, or procrastinating behaviors. What are you getting from these behaviors in the moment?

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In Brewer's highly effective smoking cessation programs, for example, smokers are encouraged to smoke when the urge hits them—but to do so mindfully. One participant reported that mindful smoking "smells like stinky cheese and tastes like chemicals, YUCK!" Smoking wasn't "cool" anymore, she realized, and, moreover, "it tasted like s***." Paying attention led to disenchantment with smoking—a huge step toward quitting for good.