You won't stop worrying while you think it helps you somehow. Anxious arousal and worry are related but not the same. Anxious arousal is physiological. It is the body's normal reaction to the perception of immediate danger - which can be real or imagined. Worry is psychological and is often just a habit. So, anxious arousal, being physiological, can be stopped physiologically with relaxation, which is the opposite of anxious arousal.
The fight-or-flight response is useful on rare occasions of real danger. Animals respond to external stimuli - a predator, a loud noise which might mean danger. People tend to respond to internal stimuli - imagined dangers and to socially-conditioned psychological triggers such as "what will people think of me? etc.
Worrying is never useful. It handicaps and diminishes us. The more it triggers the fight or flight with imagined threats, the more it prevents clear thinking (which is probably our greatest survival asset).
Chronic worriers probably try loads of ways to control their worrying. But somehow they don't work. The worries keep coming. Clearly these techniques are not working. What is going on here then?
What about trying hard not to think about the worry? We all know that if you are worried that you might keep looking at the spot on your friend's nose, you will be unable to keep your eyes off it. It is just the same when you try not to think about your worry. Your mind keeps coming back to it again and again. The more you try not to think about something, the more you tend to think about it. Frustrating and depressing.
The thing is, that if you try actively not to think about something, you have to think about it in order not to think about it. Mmm. So that method is not going to work. The benefit of cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy as a treatment is that the toolkit of techniques is huge with something suitable for everyone.
A lot of our everyday behaviour is automatic. Our brain just takes over and acts as our helpful personal assistant. It does things without our awareness. This is usually helpful, but sometimes gets in the way.
So the brain keeps the heart pumping and the digestion going. We may become aware of these things, but when we shift our awareness, the brain keeps doing them anyway. It keeps our legs moving when we decide to walk somewhere. So is shouldn't be surprising that the brain takes over in other ways too, such as automatically sending us down the worry road.
When you learn to tie your shoes, ride a bicycle, drive a car or learn to play the flute, your brain gradually develops the neural pathways to make your practicing become automatic.
The more you practice, the more those pathways develop. Fairly soon, you know how to tie your shoes and you don't think about it anymore. Your brain just does it for you. It is like this with worry.
The thing that starts the worry off is usually spotted by the brain without your conscious awareness, and once you are worrying, the brain starts to point out all the potential dangers it can think of. This becomes such a well-trodden path that you can arrive in this worry mode in a flash. Your brain knows the route so well. It knows all the previous incidents that provide evidence of threat or vulnerability and it forgets about events in the past that suggest the opposite.
So with chronic worry, most of the trouble has begun before you even know it. Negative neural pathways have developed. The good news is that you can develop positive neural pathways, and you can learn to break into this automatic cycle. As a result, you can break the pattern of worrying. Surprisingly quickly with cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy. Because hypnosis works with the unconscious part of your brain.
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