Worry is a Brain Fart

Worry has been the bane of my life. It has brought me close to despair so many times, and all that it touches can rapidly turn to shit. If I allowed this worry to go unchecked it would mean living in a world of fear and insurmountable obstacles. I honestly can’t find any redeeming features for this emotion. I once believed that it might act as a type of motivation to make me work harder, but all it really does is paralyze me and sap my energy. I see worry is just a form of unnecessary self torture. Of course like all forms of self torture this is something that I do to myself

Telling Somebody Not to Worry Is Just Stupid

The most useless advice that I’ve ever given another person (or that they have given me) is to tell them not to worry. This is about as helpful as telling somebody with an upset stomach to not have diarrhea. Worry is not like rock climbing. You don’t wake up in the morning with the idea that you fancy a bit of worrying that day – or at least I don’t. Telling somebody not to worry is worse than a platitude because it is insinuating that the other person is doing something wrong for feeling how they feel. It becomes something else for them to worry about

Worry is a Brain Fart

The best description that I can use to describe worry would be to say that it is a type of brain fart. I’m not just using the word “fart” here to be witty or flippant. It does seem to be a suitable description for an emotion that comes out of almost nowhere and causes such a stink. I’ve noticed that worry will usually latch onto something that is going on in my life, but if there is nothing obvious to worry about it will find something. This means that even if I’m enjoying smooth sailing in life I can suddenly be paralyzed by the idea that I might have cancer. There can also be times when there is plenty of troubling things going on but I feel strong and optimistic. It is the unpredictable nature of worry that earns it the title of a brain fart.

Worry is a Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing

I can rage against the unfairness of worry, but the only power this emotion has is the power I give it. The reality is that worry is not some conscious foe that is set on making my life miserable. It is just what happens when I allow a negative prediction about the future to take over my thinking. On any given day there is the potential for a billion things to go wrong and worry happens when I decide to focus on one of these things. Of course any of these potential disasters could have equally relevant to yesterday when I wasn’t worried about them, but one thing that worry does not depend on is logic.

The reason for why it is useless to tell people “not to worry” is that the advice comes too late – just like telling somebody to bolt the stable door after the horse has escaped and is already three counties away. It would make more sense to tell the person to deal with the worry rather than trying to pretend that it is not there. Worry is just something that crops up in the mind and unless we are some enlightened superhuman, in charge of every thought and feeling, there is little we can do to stop it. I’ve found that the best tactic for me is to go on the offensive. This means dealing directly with those thoughts that the worry likes to latch on to – it is sort of like giving these thoughts a non-stick surface.

How I Deal with Worry

The reason for why some of my thoughts are such easy prey for worry is that they involve my beliefs about how life should be. These troublesome thoughts are like a crack in these cherished beliefs and the worry can exploit this weakness (I’m talking again as if worry is somehow a conscious thing, but I’m just trying to be descriptive here). In this case the best way to deal with the worry is to dig right down to the beliefs because that is where the trouble really is coming from.

What I’m saying here might all sound terribly muddled but bear with me for a minute, I gave a good example of how this all works on my blog a few weeks ago in the post – Now I Love the Uncertainty of Freelance Writing . I’ll use a different example here of how my unfounded beliefs can open the door for worry. I can waste time concerned about what other people think of me. This is because I have beliefs about how they should think of me, and this opens the door to worry. I’ve created a rod for my own back because 1) I can’t read minds, and 2) I can’t control other people’s minds. The idea that I get to decide what other people will think about me is ludicrous, and the only sensible thing is to let go of that nonsense completely. By giving other people permission to think of me as they wish (not that I ever had any choice), it makes these types of negative thoughts less of a target for worry.