If you find yourself worrying, and ruminating about the future, a simple exercise may help: Write your worry down. Often, putting it in words on a page defines and put limits around the worry, helping you identify the source of your discomfort, and making it emotionally manageable. As an extension of this exercise, you can write down the best outcome, the worst outcome, and the likeliest outcome of the situation you are worrying about. Then, write down what you can do in the event of each.
All of this takes the worry out of the realm of the nebulous and amorphous, and into the realm of the concrete and workable.
As a related exercise, you can make a list of what is known, what is unknown, and what is assumed about a situation you are worrying about. Often, we make assumptions and fill in the blanks when we are worried about the unknown. But what is actually known can be quite narrow and specific. It helps to build the critical thinking skills to differentiate between these categories and recognize the reality of what we are dealing with, with decreases reactivity.
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