What’s the point of Worry?
What are you worrying about?
What’s keeping you awake at night?
Years ago I was very good at worry. For example I’d lie awake worrying myself into quite a state over whether I’d passed an exam. My Dad, with consummate patience would ask me if I could do anything about ‘it’ right now. Always the answer was no. “So why worry, what good is it doing you; it’s currently stopping you from sleeping and right now that’s what you should be doing, sleeping.” Sadly this was a regular conversation we had, until I learnt to ask myself the question “what can I do about it right now”. Clearly if I was worrying the night before the exam, then the answer was either get out of bed and do some more revision, or go to sleep cos I’d done all the revision I was going to do. In other words, the worry was pointless.
It’s possible to sub classify worry, yes really….
There’s the worry that’s guilt. Guilt is that awful emotion when you feel bad after an event; you did or said something that you now wish you could alter. Most guilt is pretty quick to shift. Here’s the question, just before you did/said whatever you now wish you hadn’t, what was going on for you, did you know it was ‘wrong’? If the answer is no, then learn the lesson, take the feedback for next time and move along, don’t whip yourself to bits over it. If the answer is yes, then go ahead and do guilt, although perhaps it’s more productive to re-assess your values or will power depending on what was going on.
There’s worry that’s anxiety - this is where your imagination is having a field day coming up with possible outcomes or scenarios for a particular event, e.g. giving a presentation. Here’s the kicker though, by doing this you’re training yourself to fail. Yes in order for you to be anxious you must be running various movies of you failing, either spectacularly, or just embarrassing yourself. Again the question “what can I do about it?” helps. Let’s take a presentation, you’re worrying that the IT won’t work, well practice with it a bit more, do what you can so that you’re comfortable with it. Or you’re worrying that you’ll forget what to say, again practice. Or you’re worrying you’ll fall over whilst walking on to the stage to begin your presentation, now let’s assume here you’ve mastered the art of walking and falling over isn’t a daily occurrence. In which case the question to ask yourself is “how likely is this to happen and if it did how would I recover?” Now once your mind has finished having a field day of disasters at your expense, and you’ve come up with ways to mitigate it, it will a) get bored - now persecuting you is no longer fun and b) you’ll be running movies of things going just the way you want them.
Anxiety is failure imagined. You can beat it by imagining success - it takes just as much mental capacity as the failure part, however it’s a lot kinder to the rest of your body, yes your heart rate and stress levels are a lot lower too.
Of course there is pure worry, that’s when you’re not sure what’s going to happen in life in general. Forget one specific event to imagine failure on, here you get to do it on everything, so in a way it feels more normal because it’s about everything, it’s that general worry and when this becomes a habit it’s called pessimism. If the ‘unknown’ causes you to worry you end up being fearful of life. Yes the unknown can be scary at times, but sometimes you should also feel excited at the ‘unknown’ or curious, or calm even. Use you imagination and the power of thought and play. If you can see life as one long series of experiments, some work, some don’t, but you keep learning, tweaking and moving forward, then you take the pressure off yourself to be perfect and always get it right.
And if all else fails I find shouting “get a grip of yourself woman” works for me 
Tags: anxiety, guilt, imagination, worry