Martin Rossman - The Worry Solution: Using Your Healing Mind to Turn Stress and Anxiety into Better Health and Happiness

Fighting Cancer from Within: How to Use the Power of Your Mind for Healing

Guided Imagery for Self-Healing

Copyright 2010 by Martin L. Rossman, M.D.

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
crownpublishing.com

Harmony Books is a registered trademark, and the Circle colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2010. Subsequently published in paperback in the United States by Three Rivers Press, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2010.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rossman, Martin L.
The worry solution : using your healing mind to turn stress and anxiety into better health and happiness / Martin Rossman. 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Stress management. 2. Affirmations. 3. Holistic medicine. I. Title.
RA785.R675 2010
616.98dc22 2010026873

ISBN 978-0-307-71824-2
eBook ISBN 978-0-307-71825-9

v3.1_r2

This book is dedicated to my grandparents,

Louis and Jesse Shapero and Daniel and Esther Temchin.

They had a lot to worry about, and they handled it with courage and grace.

The premise of The Worry Solution is simple.

You are wiser, stronger, and more creative than you think.

By the end of this book, you will know that for yourself.

For many years the focus of my work has been to educate people, including doctors, about how to support the bodys natural healing abilities. Many of my recommendations concern lifestyle choices that we can make. Selecting wisely from the many foods we have available to us can make the difference between a long life filled with vitality or one shortened or hobbled by chronic illness. Choosing to be physically active every day can preserve your mobility, increase your energy, and reduce your risk for many chronic diseases, including the diseases of aging. Learning to manage stress is perhaps one of the most critical choices you can make in order to enjoy a healthy, productive life.

Managing stress has a lot to do with how we worry, and managing worry has a lot to do with where we focus our attention. While there are risks and dangers in life that require our attention and response, our worrying can become a destructive habit, often perpetuated by the endless onslaught of media news and our failure to recognize that there are off buttons on our televisions, our computers, and even our minds. Life also offers us beauty, grace, and wisdom, and when we pay attention to them, both our health and the quality of our experience improve.

Humans are the only animals that create stress with their own minds. Much of that stress, and the anxiety that accompanies it, is unnecessary. We can lessen it by learning to use our minds more skillfully.

In The Worry Solution, Dr. Rossman addresses a critical problem of modern life. He shows us how worrying is a valuable mental function, but one that can go awry if we let it run away with us. He explains how we can use our awareness to sort useful worry from futile worry, transform futile worry into positive thought and affirmation, and engage the silent wisdom of our emotional/intuitive brains to enhance our creativity and problem solving.

In my first book, The Natural Mind, I wrote about a different kind of intelligence that was being revealed by both the experimental drug taking of the late 1960s and the great interest in meditation and Eastern philosophies that soon followed. While many observers became preoccupied with the very real dangers of inappropriate drug use, what they missed was that these experiments were attempts to connect with a way of thinking that is natural to humans, a way nearly lost in modern Western culture. This more holistic, synthetic, intuitive, and emotional way of thinking expands our awareness and gives us a different and frequently very useful perspective on the challenges and opportunities we face in life. The meditation and relaxation techniques, and especially the guided imagery processes, that Dr. Rossman teaches in this book can provide safe access to the intuitive and relational wisdom inside us all, without the need for mind-altering substances, whether recreational or pharmaceutical.

Marty Rossman is one of the preeminent modern figures in mind/body medicine. Through his books, his CDs, and the professional training academy he cofounded, he has taught hundreds of thousands of health professionals and laypeople to use their imagination for increased personal awareness, self-healing, and greater enjoyment of life. Marty is one of the few experts I asked to be part of my executive planning committee when I created the Integrative Medicine Fellowship at the University of Arizona, and he and I co-created Self-Healing with Guided Imagery, the first in my series of educational self-care audio programs for the public. Because of his unique expertise about the importance of the mind in health and illness, I also invited him to write the mind/body medicine chapter in the recent Integrative Oncology textbook I coedited with Dr. Donald Abrams. He has a gift for making the healing and creative gifts of imagination immediately accessible and practically useful.

If you dont use your imagination skillfully, it can be hijacked by your fears, keeping you unnecessarily stuck in an inner world of anxiety and stress. Letting yourself fall into what Dr. Rossman calls the bad worry habit is like feeding junk food to your mind. Reclaiming control of your imagination can let you use its creativity, wisdom, and motivational power to solve problems and enjoy life more. I am happy to commend you to a masterful teacher who will teach you how to do just that.

Andrew Weil, M.D.
Director, Integrative Medicine Program
University of Arizona Medical School

I am a doctor. My mission, and my passion, is to stimulate healing in people, cure illness when I can, and relieve suffering when cure is not possible.

Worry is the most common form of suffering in America. It is a key component of anxiety and chronic stress, and is often at the heart of overeating, alcoholism, cigarette smoking, drug abuse, and other compulsive but ultimately ineffective attempts to make it go away.

Anxiety is one of the most uncomfortable feelings you can have, and much of it is triggered by a bad worry habit. You will find that this habit can be changed into a way of thinking that is not only more comfortable but much more productive, and that a great deal of your worry is optional and unnecessary.

In this book, I will teach you how to stop creating unnecessary suffering for yourself and others, and how to use worry for its true purpose, which is to keep you and your loved ones safe from harm.

The Worry Solutions program will teach you how to clarify your worries, sort them into those you can and cannot do anything about, and use the wisdom hidden in the large silent areas of your brain to help you solve real problems creatively. You will learn effective ways to shift from negative worry states into more positive frames of mind. You will also learn how to stop hypnotizing yourself with scary thoughts, and concentrate instead on thoughts that bring you creativity, courage, calmness, and confidence.