How to Stop Worrying: The Spotlight Technique

"Worry is all about fear of uncertainty. Worrying is an attempt to try to resolve the scary uncertainty, but the process is endless because most of the time worry questions can't really be answered for certain.

The thing to do instead is to confront your fear of uncertainty by purposely leaving worry questions unanswered and moving on with whatever you are doing with your time in spite of the fact that they are unanswered.

This is, of course, easier said than done, but I like to give my clients a simple way to think about how to do this that can make it easier to conceptualize. I call it the spotlight technique.

The way to think about it is like this: imagine that you are a spotlight operator in a theater. So you get to decide where on the stage the light goes. Pretend that the stage is your mind and the spotlight is the spotlight of your attention: where you are focusing your mental effort and energy right now. On one side of the stage, you've got the anxious thoughts raising all of your worry questions: "Are you going to lose your job?!" "Do people think you're weird?!" On the other side of the stage, you've got whatever you are actually doing right here, right now in the present moment.

The spotlight technique is simply this: When you catch yourself putting the spotlight on the worry questions and trying to analyze the answers, all you have to do is make a conscious choice to move the spotlight of your attention onto the other side of the stage, onto what you are actually doing with your time right now. This requires you to give yourself permission to not solve the problems that your brain says you absolutely must solve right now."