Well, you have to worry, don’t you?

I’ve been looking up the word “worry” in my Concise Oxford Dictionary. First it talks about a dog worrying at something by biting and shaking it, and then goes on to allowing “no rest or peace of mind…”. Further down, there are mentions of worry beads, worry-guts, worry-wart, reminding me how many different ways there are to talk about this uncomfortable aspect of our lives.

We all know what we mean when we say “I’m worried”, and we all probably mean a slightly different thing, simply because we are all different and each of us is a unique recipe of thoughts, feelings, ideas, beliefs and experiences. But perhaps many of us could agree that worry boils down to not allowing ourselves rest or peace of mind. Doesn’t sound too nice, does it?

This is how worry seems to grow: it starts with either a troublesome thought or a twinge of anxiety. Then the thought provokes anxiety or we start to wonder what the twinge is about. Our subject matter might be an event in the past or something we are anticipating in the future. Usually it takes us away from the present, the here and now. This alternating between thought and feeling continues. The more anxious we feel, the more we are compelled to think about the reason for those feelings and to try and think our way out of them. Something tells us that, if we just think enough, we will come up with a solution that makes us feel better. Well, excuse me but how often does that happen? Not sure it has ever happened to me!

Worry can be a habit, even an obsession. We have favourite topics and we invent new ones just to fill in any gaps. We worry about big things, such as the safety of our children, and little ones like running out of printer ink. Sometimes we think we have to worry in order to prevent something bad from happening. If we find we’re not worrying about anything, we worry that there is something big lurking that we should be worrying about. We talk about our worries and we say things like “you can’t help worrying, can you?” or “I can’t stop worrying about…”. I could go on for ages about all this, because I used to be a first class worrier. If there were worrying Olympics, I would have been inTeam GB.

And what changed things? Well, funnily enough, it was a very Big Problem. A problem so big that, if I allowed it to, it would take over my life. I reached a point where I had to sink or swim. I decided to learn to swim and that meant finding practical ways to conquer worry. I had known for a long time that worry was illogical, that it was a waste of energy and that it was probably unnecessary, but it never occurred to me that I was a person who could do without it.

I found out, through desperation, that I am indeed a person who can do without worry. I asked for help, spoke to experts, did my own research, and then I found that I had a toolkit full of valuable and simple ways to find freedom from obsessive negative thinking, unease and anxiety. Now, I’m nowhere near the Dalai Lama yet; I still fret sometimes, especially about little things like being late or getting stuff done. But, for the most part, conscious worry is no longer a problem. As soon as I notice it, I can let it go and choose something else to think about. I no longer believe I have to worry and I no longer feel taken over by it.

On its own, with no other change at all, this is an immense achievement and a gift. I see it as both. I feel it is so valuable that I must share it and so I am putting it all together into a book. I’ll be looking for comments and stories and would love to know if anyone is interested in telling me about their worries and their antidotes to worry. Do you worry? Is it a problem? What do you do about it? What would you like to know? Please do share, and watch my posts for more on my pet subject!