Emilie is a young mom with a personal and family history of worrying. As she told me after a Resilience seminar, “Worry has always been a massive part of my life. My mom is a worrier and my grandma is a worrier, so it’s something I assumed I would always have to deal with. It had become so bad recently I was worrying more than I was doing the things I was worrying about!”

The turning point came as she learned how to take control of her thoughts and feelings. “When Steve spoke, it just clicked with me. Since that session my life is completely transformed. I’m so productive as I’m not spending time worrying – I’m spending time doing!”

Our worries are usually unfounded. Research demonstrated that 85 percent of what subjects in a study worried about never actually happened. When the remaining 15 percent did happen, 79 percent of the subjects found they could handle the difficulty better than they imagined, or they learned a valuable lesson from it. While that is helpful information, we typically need more resources to stop worrying.

Worry is uncontrolled thinking. Our anxiety rises as we face the threat of difficulties and challenges, so our brains try to resolve the anxiety by worry. We imagine negative outcomes and fearful consequences. We think about problems in ways that only add to our anxiety and lead to even more worry.

Worry is a scary story we tell ourselves. The story is our negative interpretation of the threats in our lives. But we don’t have to tell ourselves that story. The key to winning our war with worry is to control our thinking by changing the storyline.

Every threat has two storylines. The primary storyline is the facts. We may not be able to change the facts, such as ill health, a financial crisis, or others’ actions. The secondary storyline is how we interpret and respond to the facts. And we can always change that.

A cancer patient at the Goshen Center for Cancer Care eventually rewrote his secondary storyline by finding benefit in his diagnosis. “Cancer is the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “A threat to my life made me think about what is really important to me. I changed my life to fit my priorities. I began to really live!”

Here are five steps to rewriting your worry story.

1. Write out your current worry story. Writing it down reveals what you are thinking and exposes your anxious thoughts.
2. Determine the truth of your story. Don’t believe everything you think. We have a profound ability to believe wrong things at a very deep level. Challenge any wrong thinking with the facts. Sow seeds of doubt into the wrong things you believe.
3. Come up with a better ending to your story. Imagine better outcomes. Find ways to benefit from difficulties. Decide to think differently.
4. Do something to get a better ending. Don’t merely focus on what you can’t do. What steps can you take to redeem a difficult situation?
5. Talk it out with someone. Another person can be more objective and help you think accurately and creatively.

Choosing our thoughts creates better stories that we tell ourselves. And reduces our worries. William James, an American philosopher and psychologist, said, “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”

There are many other helpful scientific tools to conquer worry and grow resilience. With some hard work and practice, we can join Emilie in spending less time worrying and more time doing something about our situations.

Copyright © 2017 Stephen Chupp. All rights reserved.

Steve Chupp is a Resilience Trainer and Keynote Speaker. He equips business and healthcare professionals and educators to successfully manage stress and avoid burnout. For more ideas and resources to build resilience and manage stress, go to www.stevechupp.com  Or contact at Steve at steve@stevechupp.com.