The feeling of worry is usually considered something essentially negative. That feeling that generates discomfort, anguish and, sometimes, even anxiety. It leads to thoughts that accompany day and night and often we do not know how to manage. However, the truth is that it is important and fulfills a very specific purpose. The function of worry is to stimulate the brain to face a problem and solve it. This is key for people to be able to deal with the obstacles in their daily lives. But we don’t always know how to differentiate between something trivial and a real problem.
The worry mechanism also acts as a filter, since it is activated in circumstances that require it. Otherwise, everything would activate this feeling and not only would it not end up distorting its original purpose, but it would have negative consequences for the person’s mental and emotional health. Since this would be subject to a continuous situation of stress and tension. However, this is something that happens to people who tend to worry too much.
Worry is necessary to face life’s difficulties, since this is part of the process of solving a problem, says psychologist Sara Montejano Martín. But there are people who do not differentiate between what is important and superficial issues, which gives rise to high physiological activation and a feeling of lack of control in which one is trapped. And this is what happens to people with a tendency to worry too much.
This does not mean that they are not skilled at solving problems, on the contrary. The specialist assures that people who worry excessively have good abilities to undo problems and look for solutions. Their only difficulty is that it is difficult for them to take the step of putting them into practice, as the expert explains. This is one of its main characteristics.
Another trait has to do with intolerance of uncertainty. When faced with an ambiguous situation, what they usually do is interpret it from a negative point of view. Or what is the same, waiting for the worst to happen. Constantly anticipating the worst outcome causes a continuous state of alarm that results in psychological and emotional exhaustion, explains the specialist.
It is difficult for this profile of people to differentiate between those problems that are true and those that are not, since they equate them. To avoid doing this it is important to remain realistic and objective. That is, analyze what the implication of that problem really is, how much it can affect and how long its effects can last. You just have to look back and think of so many situations in which something seemed like a big obstacle at the time, when the truth is that it really wasn’t at all.
