Does this scenario seem familiar?

You’re going about your day and suddenly you’re overtaken with butterflies in your belly and worried thoughts in your mind.

Your worries might be attached to certain situations in your life, or they may not even have a specific topic or target.

All you know is that the pit in your stomach and the tightness in your chest are back (or rarely leave) and your mind is swirling with unpleasant, unhelpful thoughts.

You know that there’s nothing you can or need to do in the moment to tend to the topics you’re worried about, yet your mind is off and running with worry and your body is coursing with the chemical cocktail of cortisol.

Now, see if this scenario sounds familiar.

You’re sitting on the couch watching TV. A movie comes on and you quickly realize that you don’t like it at all. Maybe it’s a scary movie and you’re not a fan of scary movies. Maybe you don’t resonate with the characters. Maybe you don’t like the dialogue or the sound.

What do you do?

I’m guessing that you pick up the remote and change the channel.

So, how do worry and changing the TV station relate to each other?

When we realize that our minds are playing their worrisome movies, we have the option of changing our internal channel. This is really good news. Our minds may be accustomed to regularly playing their stressful programs, but we have the remote control.

Is it easy to change our internal channels? Not at first for most of us, especially if we’ve been playing and replaying scary movies for a while.

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© Psychology Today