The most common advice given to worriers is also usually the advice that is the most difficult to follow.  “Don’t worry,” and “Just stop thinking about it,” are often not feasible solutions for chronic worriers because their anxieties seem to persist no matter how hard they try to put them out of their minds.  In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman presents several steps suggested by Thomas Borkovec, a Pennsylvania State University psychologist, that have been useful in helping chronic worriers overcome their anxieties.

Step 1:  Self Awareness

It is important for you to be able to identify your worries as they occur, before they become out of control.  The perfect time to catch the worries is as soon as or just after the catastrophic image appears and causes the onset of the worry-anxiety cycle.  This “early detection” skill can be attained by learning to recognize the signals of anxiety, which include common situations or thoughts that trigger anxiety and the reactions that your body has when you first become anxious or worried.  Then you can proceed to step 2 and begin dealing with them.
 

  Step 2:  Relaxation

After the anxiety onset is identified, you should apply a relaxation technique to help refocus your attention and calm down.  Often recommended is meditation and deep breathing, or anything else that you have found successful in clearing the mind of the worry-inducing images.  But sometimes this is not enough to solve the problem by itself, which leads us to step 3.
 

 
Step 3:  Challenging Your Worries

This is critical because without it, your worries will continue coming back.  To successfully complete this, try asking yourself the following questions:
- Is it really likely that what I’m worrying about will actually occur?
- Are there really no other alternatives to what I am dreading?
- What constructive steps can I take to prevent this from happening?
- Does constantly worrying and obsessing about it really lessen its chances of occurring?
 

These three steps should be enough to help chronic worriers put their fears and anxieties into perspective and turn them from controlling to controlled emotions.  Self-awareness teamed with relaxation and logic are thought to be able to stimulate the part of the nervous system that can inhibit worry.  Taking active steps to relax oneself also counteracts the anxiety signals produced by the brain, possibly lessening the effects of the anxiety on the worrier.  However, if a person has a worry that is so severe that is has turned into a phobia, compulsion, or panic-inducing fear, perhaps the best solution would be turning to medication to take hold of these emotions.

  http://www.hyperstress.com/
                  -  A link to the Institute for stress management.

http://stresscenter.com/
                  -  A link to the Midwest center for Stress and Anxiety.

http://www.secondwind.net/
                  - A link to a Physical Fitness and Stress Management page.

http://www.istss.com/
                  - A link to the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.