These questions will help you to determine how much of a worrier you are.

1. Do many things worry you every day since you wake up?
2. Do you make problems larger, not smaller?
3. Do you worry, even during happy times or joyful moments?
4. Do your worry preoccupy your mind, and you can’t stop it, though you try hard?
5. Do you worry about many things that most people around you do not worry about?
6. When one worry is solved, do you immediately focus on another?

Your worry plays a large role if you answered yes to all six questions. The fewer yeses, the better and healthier you are. You have a moderate level of worry if you answered three to four yeses and a low level of worry if you only have one yes. Worry, a mental part of anxiety, can create anxiety thoughts, indicated by “what if…” or focus on “what might happen…”

Therefore, the more yeses you have, the more excessively worried you are, which means you build up maladaptive anxiety thoughts.  Your anxiety thoughts become chronic or disorder when they interfere and disable your daily life.

Here are the dynamics: (1) worry becomes anxiety thoughts, (2) anxiety thoughts provoke unrealistic fears, (3) fears are strengthened and become progressive, especially when those are parallel or matching with past happenings, (4) the past happenings apparent at the present moment as a feeling of doom, unease, or apprehensive which are continuously lingering in mind, and go beyond the real danger itself, and (5) fears then generate disorderly panic because of the experiences of steep terror from the uncertainties.

You will be amazed when you realize how, in this case, the objects of your “fears” are unclear. Realities and irrealities are then indistinguishable. Body and emotions react strongly to give a response to fight or to flight.  But if you decide to fight, the questions are, who or what will you fight? And how are you going to fight?

The “enemies” are not there, and yet they are there in the thoughts. They are expressed through your emotions and body reactions. Your thoughts are your “enemies.” Your mind is the racing field of disordered thoughts. You then accumulate and hoard more and more anxieties by being anxious with your anxious mind, and your anxious mind is anxious to be unable to stop being anxious.

If you come to this point, perhaps you need professional help. With properly organized and holistic (i.e., medical, psychological, and spiritual) interventions by the well-trained therapist, you learn to regain power over your anxious thoughts. Don’t wait any longer. You will then learn to be a warrior rather than a worrier in the therapeutic journey.