Why Telling Myself to Stop Worrying Never Works

She knows the literature on worry. She has read the research. She understands the theory. She knows that telling herself to stop worrying will activate the ironic rebound process and increase the frequency of worry thoughts. She tells herself to stop worrying anyway. It does not work.

The instruction to stop worrying is counterproductive for a reason that is now well understood: attempting to suppress a thought requires maintaining it in mind in order to check whether it has stopped. The checking keeps the thought active. The harder you try not to think about something, the more often it surfaces.

There is a second problem. The instruction 'stop worrying' implies that worrying is something she is doing rather than something that is happening. It places agency with the wrong part of the system. The worry is produced by a competence that does not take instructions from the conscious mind.