Do you worry too much?
Have you ever had a great idea but then went off it because you worried too much about the potential pitfalls? Do you struggle to fall asleep because you’re plagued with worry about anxious thoughts? Many people worry about all manner of things, but only 10 per cent of what we worry about actually happens. So if most of our worries are entirely speculative, why do we worry so much?
Why worry?
Worrying occurs when we think about hypothetical problems. We experience stress triggered solely by our imagination, and because humans have such vivid imaginations our brains get caught up in all sorts of daunting scenarios.
If you only remember one thing from this blog, remember this; worry is a perpetual liar! It tells you that you’re not good enough. It tells you that people are appraising or judging you. It gives you an utterly misleading assessment of your life and drains your energy as you contemplate stressful, yet entirely fictional scenarios. When the brain is worried or anxious on a consistent basis, the neural pathways become more established and this becomes the default setting.
But the fact is, excess worrying does little to help us and in later life we’re likely to regret it. Dr Karl Pillemer, a Professor of Human Development at Cornell University, spent nearly a decade interviewing 1,500 senior citizens. When asked about their major regrets, nearly every one of them said they wished they hadn’t spent so much of their life worrying.
So if you worry too much, what can you do about it? Here are a few strategies we can employ that might help us worry a little less.
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Redirect your attention
We can steer our attention away from the things that activate worry and anxiety by participating in activities such as sport, exercise, hobbies, meditation and sex. Just taking a long walk can be very helpful. The part of the brain that controls anxiety – the amygdala – can only do one thing at a time and walking has been shown to shut it down a little. It’s also highly therapeutic to look around and actively notice everything around you, so it’s better to walk in places where the scenery captures your interest.
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Analysing your worries
While distraction can be useful, I strongly recommend tackling worries head on. If 90 per cent of worries are unsubstantiated, then we need to question them, and the best way to do this is to write them down.
Follow this process to analyse your worries:
Write down your worries in a list.
Read what you’ve written out loud and question each worry.
Is there any faulty logic hiding within it?
Is the probability of it actually happening extremely low? Can you measure this probability in numbers? If so, what are the numbers?
What do you think another reasonable person might think about it?
What would a starving child in Africa think about it?
What would a terminally ill cancer patient think about it?
These questions and their answers should help you to bring context and perspective to your worries.
For each of your worries, ask: ‘Do I have any control over this?’
Usually, our worries are futile because they concern things out of our control. For example, if your upcoming flight crashes, you’ll have had no control over it. (If this thought still makes you uncomfortable, go and analyse the statistics because air travel is one of the safest forms of travel there is.)
If you can control any of the issues, write a list of things you can do to avoid the worrying event and then take action.
Taking action is useful for two reasons: firstly, taking action is positive and proactive whereas worrying is passive and reactive, and secondly, your actions might improve your life circumstances.
When you’ve been through this process a few times, you might find it useful to look for any repeating themes to your worrying. Do certain people make you worried? Or a specific place or type of place? Hopefully, analysing your worries will remove a few from your worry list, or at least reduce their intensity.
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Thought experiment: The worst happens
For a given worry, follow these steps:
Imagine that it actually will happen and write down the consequences. This isn’t for the faint-hearted and I certainly wouldn’t advocate imagining the death of a loved one. If something is worrying you, however, you do need to challenge those worries, so begin by visualising things like your business failing, your partner leaving or failing that exam.
Write down all the actions you could take in the event of this happening. Worrying often occurs when we refuse to come to terms with the worst potential consequence, so it helps to firstly accept it. The very process of accepting that a particular worry could come true lessens its power over you. The process of predicting what you would do diminishes its power even more.
Write a list of things you could do to ensure the worrying outcome doesn’t happen. This is similar to Step 4 in the preceding section, ‘Analysing your worries’.
This process of planning and problem-solving will put you more on the front foot and you’ll be operating in a more positive, proactive mode. When you accept and then challenge your worries in the methodical way described above, they will become easier to deal with and less intense.
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Thought experiment: Time Perspective
Simply ask yourself this question: ‘Will I care about this in 12 months?’ Whatever the problem or worry you have now, in all likelihood you probably won’t care too much in 12 months’ time. Maybe even six months’ time? By then, it will be a minor bump in the road that’s long gone.
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Acceptance
If you regularly make mountains out of molehills, try instead to make molehills out of mountains by viewing your worries and problems as an expected part of living a balanced life. Your happiness isn’t dependent on getting rid of all your problems, but on changing your approach to them. Many problems do need to be addressed, so just treat them like any other task and deal with them. However, we do create worries and problems of our own, for example by being an unrealistic perfectionist, or by being greedy, envious, careless, lazy or impatient.
Whatever strategies we use, we’ll never be able to stop worrying completely, so the best strategy of all is to accept life, as it is, with all its imperfections. And that means accepting these imperfections without having to understand, influence or control them. It’s perfectly fine to say, ‘I don’t understand, I don’t have all the answers, I don’t know for sure what will happen in the future.’
Things just happen. That’s it. They do not necessarily happen for a reason. There isn’t any structured significance to what happens to us other than the interpretations we make up in our heads.
We sometimes feel we should be flawless, and we sometimes forget that mistakes are actually okay and are part of the learning process. Look at your life choices as chances to experiment and live your life in new ways. New roads lead to new adventures and once you’ve realised that you can deal with the ups and downs, you will allow yourself to take more chances and to open yourself up to more possibilities.
Remember…. Our lives will always include worries and problems, and the techniques in this blog will give hopefully provide you with a few coping mechanisms. Worrying too much about future situations or achievements can prevent you from being happy right now, and in any given moment there are usually more things to be grateful for than to be anxious about.
If every person on the planet threw all of their problems and worries on one giant pile for redistribution, we’d probably grab ours back!
You can spend so much of your energy worrying about little things that you completely forget about the wonder and marvel of life. If you keep your cool and stay open to possibilities, all will be well.
