Leadership

3 Tips to Silence Your Inner Worrywart

By Jessica Stillman

Updated on: April 13, 2011 / 9:37 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

We're halfway through April and while that means milder weather and flowers in the parks in many places, for college seniors it also means graduation is starting to loom large on the horizon. A lucky few no doubt have offers from employers or grad schools in hand and are sleeping like babies, but many soon-to-be grads are facing plenty of anxiety about the future.

If that voice in your head asking whether you'll ever get a job or be forced to move back home just won't shut up, is there anything you can do to get a handle on your worries? Working out, meditation or yoga might help for awhile, but if your anxiety comes back as soon as you have a quiet moment, blog Work Shifting has suggestions. In a recent post, Amanda Alexander outlines advice to get control of your stress, including these smart tips:

Walk down the memory lane of your previous worries. Can you remember what you were worried about this time last year? If you can actually remember them, which were worth the worry? Remember the old saying: "Today is the tomorrow that we worried about yesterday."
Play with your worry voice. Give the voice a character with a life. For the sake of illustration, I like to call mine Dobby (after the negative little house-elf from Harry Potter).... Turn the volume on the worry voice up and down, change the pitch of the voice, get it to sing. How about getting the voice to sing its lyrics to the tune of Kylie Minogue's "I Should Be So Lucky"? Once you've had a good old play, go back to the volume and turn it right down until you can't hear that worry voice at all!
Perform a worry autopsy. Write down what you are worried about in a notebook. What is the worst that could happen because of these worries? Think about how you would handle this worst-case scenario.

The idea of assigning your inner worrier the voice of Dobby is adorable, but it also makes sense. When you face a worry or a mental roadblock, experts suggest taking the time to really notice what you're thinking and feeling before trying to correct the problem. After all, it's hard to fix problematic thinking if you're not even fully aware of what's going on in your own head. Assigning your inner worrywart a silly voice is a painless way to trick yourself into paying attention to your thoughts without immediately stressing about changing them.

There's also some support for the idea of performing a worry autopsy. Best-selling author Tim Ferriss, for one, recommends visualizing your worst fears as a sort of inoculation against anxiety. This might seem like a counter-intuitive stress-buster, but Ferriss claims a calm look at the worst-case scenario is often enough to convince you that your worries are less serious than they first appeared.

Check out the complete post for more worry-busting tips. When you're stressed out, how do you calm your fears and get that annoying inner voice to be quiet?

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(Image courtesy of Flickr user left-hand, CC 2.0)