Worry is another way thoughts and feelings can affect health. We have seen how worry can be understood as the patterns of thinking driven by feelings of anxiety. Often, the content of the thoughts reflects a person’s attempt to cope with or eliminate the discomfort and ill ease present as part of their experience of anxiety.

Hafen and colleagues (1996) report some interesting facts about worry and health:

• About two-thirds of Americans classify themselves as worriers.
• About half of that group classify themselves as moderate worriers who worry between 10 and 50 percent of the day.
• The rest of the worriers report that they worry more than eight hours a day.
• Worry has been related to health problems. These include cardiac arrhythmias in patients who have had heart attacks, increased blood pressure in laboratory animals, and asthma in both adults and children.
• Uncertainty as an aspect of worry is particularly potent and toxic. When people are confronted by situations of high uncertainty, when they do not know what will happen next or how they should act, they can experience destructive feelings of helplessness and frustration. Uncertainty keeps people in a constant state of semi-arousal, unable to relax, and the price of this ongoing tension and stress is high.

Staying in the present moment is the key. In an article in Prevention, Cathy Perlmutter (1993) quotes Jennifer Abel as saying that to deal with worry, it is important to focus on what’s going on right now. Worry is almost always future-oriented, Abel says, “so if we can focus on what we’re doing right now—the sentence we’re reading, the voice of the person speaking—rather than thinking about what someone might say next, we’re better off” (78).

Excerpt from Calming Your Anxious Mind: How Mindfulness and Compassion Can Free You from Anxiety, Fear, and Panic by Dr. Jeffrey Brantley