COVID-19: Breaking the worry cycle

If you spend too much time worrying about coronavirus, this is the episode for you. I will discuss the one question you can ask yourself to help you break out of spending hours trawling through COVID-19 news reports.

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Hey, it's Chris back with another episode on the COVID-19 pandemic and how we deal with our anxiety and manage our mental health around that. And today I want to look at how to break that cycle of worry where we just spend hours and hours worrying, trolling the internet for information. And the, the one question that we should ask ourselves to help break, it sounds a bit Buzzfeed, but uh, we're going to the ferry and talk about that. So if you're finding yourself spending too much time reading, look, you'll have information thinking about what you're going to do, then chances are you have a matter of belief that something on the lines of worrying keeps me safe. Being informed keeps me safe. The more time I spend worrying and learning, then the safer I am going to be, the safer I can keep my family. And obviously that's counterproductive at this point because we spent all of our time worrying and not enough time enjoying life and there's really no benefit of it.

Speaker 1 (01:01):

So the question, what we're really thinking about though is have I made the best decision and you know, say you think about should I go out and get some food? When should they go and get some food? Have I got enough food if I go out and get some food, am I exposing myself to covert 19 what should I do? Well, the question you should ask yourself is, is there any new information here? Because a lot of the time we gather all the information, we make the decision and then we keep worrying about it. Even though we can't improve the quality of the decision and that's what we're looking for. We were trying to make that best decision, but we can only improve the quality of that decision. If there is new information, if the government publishes something new, if something changes, which unless you have that new information, then you're not going to be able to make a better quality decision and therefore there is no point spending more time worrying about it and if there is new information, well then you can let yourself worry about it a bit more because then you will be able to make a higher quality decision and that's the deal with that you should make with yourself because if you just say, I'm not going to worry about this, your anxiety is going to be like, Whoa, no, we all worrying about this because we need it to keep us safe.

Speaker 1 (02:20):

Again, we talked about this before about this idea of colluding with our anxiety of saying if there is new information I will do a bit more worrying so I can improve the quality of my decision making as to why I should do bullet. If there is no new information or we didn't know, I fed all the data into the model and I've made the best decision I can and therefore there is no point in expending more energy worrying about us. So when you find yourself worrying too much, great way to break the cycle, ask yourself that question. Is there new information to feed into the model? And if there is, we feed that in. If there isn't, then we just move and we don't let ourselves worrying because we've already promised ourselves we can worry later when there is new information. It's a quick tip. See if it works. Let me know how you get on in the comments. If you found that useful, then please subscribe and I will see you soon for another COVID-19 video. Stay safe and hopefully see you again soon.