Three questions that will help you stop stressing

When I’m stressed, my worries escalate. One method I use to corral my spiraling thoughts was developed by Martin Seligman, the director of the Penn Positive Psychology Center. He studies how people build resilience and has found that how we describe our hardships to ourselves can influence how we view them. Seligman developed a three-part framework people can use to interpret life’s challenges: permanence, pervasiveness and agency. I find it helpful to pose a question about each one when I feel out of control.

Is this problem permanent? Our brains focus on negative events more intensely than on positive ones, and they tend to linger in our minds. This can make a problem feel as if it’s here to stay, even if it isn’t.

So when patients tell Seligman that they are anxious about something, he asks whether it is temporary.

Knowing that your problem has an end point can help you shift from a state of emergency to tolerance, even if it’s painful in the meantime, said Eric Zimmer, author of “How a Little Becomes a Lot.”

Zimmer asks himself whether an issue will still bother him in five hours, five days or five weeks. If you determine that something will still worry you in five weeks, Zimmer said, then you can direct energy and resources toward dealing with it.

Is this problem pervasive? Sometimes a misstep or a crisis can cause us to generalize, drawing sweeping conclusions from one event. An example, Seligman said, is telling yourself you’re unlovable after a breakup, as opposed to “‘I never should have hooked up with him to begin with.’”

To harness your racing thoughts, Zimmer suggests asking yourself: Is this problem affecting every aspect of my life? What areas remain unaffected and positive?

When we are in the midst of a difficult situation, “we can get so myopically focused that it looks enormous,” Zimmer said. Instead, he said, “zoom out and look at the whole picture.”

Where do I have agency with this problem? Seligman originally thought that personalization — the belief that negative events are all our fault — determined how a person weathered problems. But now he believes that agency, or the ability to take actions and make decisions that affect our lives, is a more important factor.

After you have acknowledged an ordeal, Seligman said, you can ask yourself, “‘What can I plan to do about it?’”

Pinpoint what is within your control — write it down if it helps — to figure out where you have agency, he said.

When Zimmer is brainstorming solutions to an issue, he tries to see it as a puzzle instead of a problem. “It allows me to think that in many cases, there is indeed a solution,” Zimmer said. “I just need to find it.”