How much do you worry?
Does it affect your sleep and your waking hours?
Can you imagine that you could eliminate most of your worry? How?
The key is how you can turn worry into action.
The Art of Worrying
When you are worried about something, it is probably because you care. However, free-floating worry does nothing to show you care or do caring acts. It only deteriorates your enjoyment of life and diminishes your focus on what is here for you now.
If there is something that I am worried about, I can address the worries directly. That frees me to live the day present to what is here and not bring in potentialities that are not here.
The specific steps to the art of worrying are as follows.
Journal
Physically get out a journal and write out:
- What am I worried about? Be specific and keep writing until you feel complete.
- What can I do about it? What steps can I actually take to do something about it?
Take your time and complete both of these steps.
Then, make a decision to actually do something about it. You have already made a list of what you can do about it, so choose one thing.
Follow up that decision with taking one specific action to start the ball rolling. Then take more steps as needed. You have gotten into action, and usually that builds momentum.
Research has shown that worry is cut in half when you make a decision about doing something about it. Then worry is reduced again by half when you take the actions you have decided.
Step two
The second step to use your worry energy effectively pulls you out of the free float of worry. Don’t skip this step, thinking it is inconsequential. Do it too!
This step has to do with letting yourself catastrophize and go to the worst outcome. What is the worst thing that could happen? What is the worst part about that?
Now, accept that the worse outcome could happen, no matter how unlikely. This allows you concretize the nebulous feeling of worry.
Then ask, what would you do if the worst outcome happened? What would you do in that case?
You may realize that you are still alive and you can handle what might be there. Several solutions might become obvious.
Step two example
An example of how to use this step is when I talked a patient through getting a notice that the medication she was to receive by mail order was lost or damaged. Of course, there was a time element involved in that she was going away on a certain date and needed the refill before she left.
When she contacted the delivery service, they did not have any information and could not trace the package, so that is why they reported it as lost. They told her to contact the pharmacy.
The pharmacy said it was not their fault, so they would not do anything. However, if she wanted to re-order the medication, they would charge her and send out another bottle of her prescription. And this was expensive medication.
I said that in the worst-case scenario she would not get the package before she had to leave or it would arrive damaged so that she could not use the medication. That meant that she would have to replace the medication, and in time.
So we decided to look at the options of what to do if she did not get any useable medication on time. We discussed ordering from a different pharmacy or even changing the prescription so that it could come from a local pharmacy. I would research the pricing options to see which would not cost her an arm and a leg.
But there was some time before the window closed for getting another prescription before she went away. We did not have to make a decision at that moment. We could wait and see. There was nothing more we could do that day, and we would see what the next day brings.
This alleviated the worry by making some decisions. Lo and behold, the package arrived intact the next day. The options we brainstormed were not needed to use at that time, and she could leave with enough medication to get her through her trip and back.
Step three
The third strategy to managing worry is to stay in the present and do only what you can do in this moment.
When you treat each day as a completely new life when you wake up in the morning, you make worry unnecessary. By staying innocent, you can see anything unfold. As in the case of the missing medication, it actually showed up that next day. If not, we could have decided when to take any number of next steps.
From this day-by-day perspective, you can go to sleep knowing that you did your best and let go of everything else. You can rest assured at the end of the day knowing there is nothing else that you can do.
Why does worry dissolve?
These three strategies trick the part of your brain that is vigilant about safety into feeling safe.
Each process:
identifying the potential danger,
deciding what you would do about the danger,
taking the first step to do something about the danger,
examining the worst-case scenario and planning for that,
and doing only what you can today
let the brain know that it is safe, the situation is being handled.
. . . even if you don’t know exactly how it will work out.
If there is something you are worried about, apply these steps and notice how it all dissolves.
