Worry and Rumination

While worrying and feeling nervous is something that all human beings experience, as with many things in life, too much of something may not be good for you.  Normal anxiety can become a problem when it is excessive, feels uncontrollable, is experienced as intrusive in your life, is persistent (seeming to always be around), and causes you significant distress, or impairs your ability to go about your day-to-day life. This is when normal anxiety becomes generalised anxiety disorder.

One of the important features of generalised anxiety is that the worry and anxiety is spread across a number of different areas such as health, work, interpersonal relationships, finances, and so on. This makes it different from other anxiety problems, such as social anxiety or phobias, where nervousness and worrying are more specific to particular situations. 

Mastering Your Worries: This workbook is designed to provide you with some information about chronic worrying and generalised anxiety disorder and suggested strategies for how you can manage your worrying and anxiety.  It is organised into modules that are designed to be worked through in sequence.  We recommend that you complete one module before going on to the next. Each module includes information, worksheets, and suggested exercises or activities.

Module 1: Overview of Generalised Anxiety

This module provides a general description of anxiety and looks at the symptoms of generalised anxiety disorder.

Module 2: Overview of Worrying

This module provides an overview of what worrying is, what triggers worrying, and what keeps it going. 

Module 3: Challenging Uncontrollability Beliefs

This module explores a particular negative belief you might have about worry, that "worrying is uncontrollable". It introduces some helpful techniques to challenge and experiment with this belief. 

Module 4: Attention Training

This module focuses on strengthening your attention so that your mind is not so easily distracted by worries. It will help you stay present-focused, keep your mind on the task at hand and learn to disengage from your worrisome thoughts.

Module 5: Challenging Danger Beliefs

This module explores another negative belief you might have about worry, that "worrying is dangerous". It will guide you through challenging and experimenting with this belief.  

Module 6: Challenging Positive Beliefs

This module explores the positive beliefs that you might have about worry and encourages you to challenge and experiment with these beliefs.

Module 7: Problem-Solving

Worrying and problem-solving are two very different things.  This module describes some valuable strategies for being able to effectively solve problems that you encounter in your day-to-day life.

Module 8: Helpful Thinking

This module explores more helpful ways of thinking about things that concern you to assist you to feel more capable and less inclined to worry.

Module 9: Accepting Uncertainty

This module aims to examine your need for certainty, to look at how this need keeps worrying going, to describe ways of challenging this need, and to discuss how to ultimately accept uncertainty in your life.

Module 10: Self Management Plan

This module summarises all the strategies introduced and helps you plan for how to stay on top of your worries in the future, including managing any setbacks that may occur.

Download the entire workbook

Click the link above to download all modules in this workbook at once, as a zip file.

We have a range of other resources which you may find helpful. 
  • If you are practising the strategy of attention training, our ‘Mindfulness of the breath’ or ‘Watching thoughts’ guided audio tracks may assist your practice.
  • For many people, worry and rumination can lead to difficult emotions.  If this is the case for you, you may find our other resources for managing depression or managing anxiety helpful. 
  • Worry and rumination can often lead to poor sleep. If you have difficulties with sleep, you might find our sleep resources helpful.
 

Last Updated: 10/07/2023

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