Dustin Wax at Stepcase Lifehack recently wrote a post on The Work of Worry. Dustin points out that worrying is often more work than just biting the bullet and taking action.
If worry is so much work,why do we do it?
Our tricksey minds!
Worry can spring from tricks our minds play on us. There are thousands of misdiagnoses and misperceptions our minds make. Most of these tricks are a variation of one of these three:
- Fortune-telling – How many times do you worry over what may happen
in the future. When we fortune-tell, we create phantom worlds for ourselves in our mind, predicting events that have yet to happen. The phantom worlds I create for myself never feature me and my lover on a Caribbean beach. That would be too pleasant. Instead, when I fortune-tell, I imagine myself poor and homeless, fighting rats for scraps of bread in the alley. And that’s on a good day. - Mind-reading – When you are talking with someone or exchanging emails do you try and read the mind of the other person? Mind-reading is assuming that you know the innermost thoughts and feelings of the people around you. I do it all the time. Amazingly, the other person is never thinking of how amazing or sexy I am. Nope, they are thinking of how stupid or useless I am. Funny how that works, isn’t it?
- Catastrophizing – This one is the big one. We catastrophize when we take a situation or even a possible situation and automatically assume that the worst possible outcome is the one that is inevitable. No matter how improbable that worst-case scenario is, I am sure that it is going to happen.
What can we do?
There are a few easy, little, steps to force some perspective into worrisome ways.
- Admit that you are a shitty psychic. The fact is, neither you nor I know what is going to happen in the future. In fact, if I look back at all of the fortune telling I have done and all of the mind-reading I have engaged in, I find that I was absolutely, completely wrong almost 100% of the time. Clearly, I suck at this and am almost always wrong when I fortune-tell. I bet you are the same. If you have always been wrong before, why should you believe yourself this time?
- Face the fact that if you are sitting in front of your computer reading this post right now, you have survived every obstacle life has thrown at you. This is a 100% success rate. Clearly, you are doing something right. I have faced some really rough times in my life and I am still here. I bet you can say the same thing. Face it, you and I have been so wildly successful at living up to this point that neither of us has any reason to think that the next challenge life throws at us is going to be insurmountable. After a nuclear winter, the survivors will be me, you, cockroaches and Cher.
Life is way too short to worry so much. In fact, if you have the energy to expend on creating phantom worlds and worrying about non-existent events, rather than struggling to find food or shelter, I would wager that you have a pretty good life. Recognize that and embrace it!
Do you have any more tips on how to beat worrying?
(Photo via Evil Erin)
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