A lot of people come to me with worry or anxieties that they just can’t get rid of or move on from. Many times they feel that something is wrong with them because they are feeling all of this stress and worry. But being worried is a learned reaction to a situation that we feel is out of our control. Worry is about being fearful or uncertain about an unknown outcome tied to a future event. I say that when we worry it is an attempt to try and control or manage the outcome, but in reality we have very little control over how things work out. We can play our part and be responsible for our choices but we are not responsible for others. But as we worry we think we are “doing something about it”.
As we worry we try to forecast or become a fortune teller as to what others are going to do, or all the possible ways things will play out. We think we are being productive because we are giving our minds something to do, but all this churning of thought and emotion is just getting us wound up. We get lost in the worry and we start feeling stressed out – heart racing, head aches, nail biting etc.
The anecdote to all this worry is to calm your fear. I know easier said than done, but you have two choices, you can continue to churn and overthink this worry, or you can give yourself the gift of reassurance. What I say and I do believe is that everything does work out. Like all of us I have had many situations that were uncertain in my life and I had no idea how or when it was going to be resolved. All I knew was that I was being responsible for myself in that moment and I trusted myself.
See if you can tell yourself that things will work out. This may sound too simplistic for you, or you may have a negative attitude that this never happens to you. If you can’t accept that things will work out as a way to calm your fear, then what can you tell your mind when you start to worry? The idea is to stop the worry cycle and the first step is to become consciously aware of when you are doing this. For the really pessimistic people I work with we start out by saying when the worry surfaces “I’m not going to think about that now”. This pushes the worry away and doesn’t give it power. So that’s another way to deal with this is taking the power away from worry – not feeding it.
Worry tends to be one of those brain activities that goes on autopilot and is hard to correct, but through observation, persistence and you just telling yourself, I don’t have to worry because it’s not going to help me, can make a small but lasting difference.