Pete,
Sorry it has taken so long to respond to your question. There are basically two things you can try.
The first is to set aside a 1/2 hour a day as "worry time." Your job is to save all of your worrying for "worry time". At this time, then you worry really hard about something. If you worry at other times of the day, you should try to "put-off" the worry to your "worry time". If it is important, you will remember what you were supposed to worry about.
The second technique is called "Cognitive Exposure." Basically what you need to do is write out a detailed story of your worst fear. You need to describe it in extreme detail of whatever your worst fear is.
The story should take 5 -10 minutes to read. The story should also contain a beginning, middle and end, but should not contain a happy ending. You should try to really get into it and imagine the most horrible outcome in as much detail as possible. Ideally you should tape the story and listen to it over and over again for an hour every day while keeping track of your anxiety across the exposure session (after all, this is exposure work). You should listen to the story until it doesn't make you anxious any more (just like other kinds of exposure work).
If you have more than one main fear, you should tackle your fears one at a time.
Hope this helps,
Josie
This message was edited by JosieR on 8-27-04 @ 10:40 AM
