Turning Anxiety into Action: Robert Leahy's Method | Psychology

Does anxiety overwhelm you at the most inappropriate moments? Has worrying become your second nature, and you just can't calm down? Dr. Robert L. Leahy offers practical, easy-to-use advice and methods in his book to overcome this.

We have compiled a simple list of rules to help you turn worry into a task that needs to be solved, allowing you to quickly move to the solution: developing a plan and taking concrete measures. However, there are traps along this path.

A typical form of anxiety is "ruminating" over thoughts you cannot accept. For example: "I can't believe they are treating me unfairly," "Why is life so unfair?" or "I can't understand why this happened."

Yale psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema described these fruitless reflections as a combination of continuous focus on unanswerable questions and negative feelings. When you "ruminate" like this, you are trapped in your own mind, hindering actual help.

To test this, ask yourself: "What counts as an answer to this question?" If there is no answer (like solving the mystery of "why me?"), admit it. Dr. Leahy shares his experience: he pondered for a long time why he was treated unfairly, only to realize that even explaining the other person's behavior wouldn't make him feel better.

The Solution: Turn empty ruminations into problems to be solved.

One person worried about declining sales, asking "Why?". It led nowhere. The solution was to ask "How do I increase sales?"—which meant making more phone calls. While he was calling clients, there was no time left for endless rumination.

Tip: To track these moments and transform them into tasks, use the Diary of Emotional Intelligence. It helps structure the chaos in your mind.

Another form of avoidance is worrying about an event that will supposedly lead to a catastrophe. "What if my boss gets angry, then I lose my job, then I can't find a new one, and my life is ruined?" You imagine a sequence where every negative event depends on the previous one. But how likely is this chain reaction? Usually, highly unlikely.

Example: Ellen worried her boss would get angry. Instead of trying to prevent a distant catastrophe, she focused on the immediate problem: finding good qualities in her boss and communicating her work progress. It worked like magic. Ask yourself: "What is the immediate problem?"

"Is this really the perfect solution? Will it give me absolute certainty?"

Perfectionism leads to paralysis. You might think the perfect solution to health anxiety is to get a guarantee from every doctor in the world that you don't have cancer. This is impossible. As long as you seek the ideal, you remain helpless.

In investing, seeking perfection means leaving capital as "dead weight" because every investment carries risk. But not investing is even riskier.

As Salvador Dalí once said, "Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it." Instead of perfect solutions, look for practical ones. Every choice has downsides. If you can accept them, you are back in the game.

I often ask neurotics, "How do you know when to stop worrying?" They reply, "When I feel less anxious."

The problem is that rituals (checking the stove, googling symptoms) only temporarily relieve anxiety but fuel it in the long run. If an obsessive stove-checker is prevented from checking, their anxiety rises initially but decreases over time. You don't need to "worry enough" or "check enough" to reduce anxiety. It diminishes on its own if you stop feeding it.

Thinking you must control everything to be safe prevents you from solving real problems.

You can control what you say during a lecture, but you cannot control the audience's emotions. Trying to make everyone love you is an unsolvable problem. Giving up control over the uncontrollable frees you to focus on urgent problems.

This aligns with the Serenity Prayer: "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."

This skill—distinguishing what you can control—is effectively practiced using the Diary of Emotions | EQ (Emotional Intelligence).

How to stop worrying? Check yourself against this table: