Sometimes life circumstances, or our own mood, conspire to lead us into a state of endless worry. We never seem to be able to figure anything out, and the anxiety makes it increasingly difficult to get anything done.
One strategy that we often recommend is to schedule worry time. It sounds crazy, but putting aside time each day to worry about things can help you move on. The notion is that you schedule time to really worry about, or think through, problems. Then when a worry comes along before then you jot down a very brief (a few word) description of the worry, so that you have a list of things to worry about when the time comes, and then tell yourself that you can move on because you will have time in the future to really think the problem through.
The reason this works is because it addresses one of the most debilitating aspects of endless worry – the fact that, even though we are worrying all the time, we never really get to look at any one problem in enough detail to figure out whether the worry is at all realistic, and, if so, what to do about it. We are constantly glancing at worries out of the corner of our eyes, and then registering the anxiety and fear and moving on, which only serves to convince ourselves that all of these worries really are overwhelming and impossible to solve.
Here are some excellent books with more ideas –