Published: Good Men Project (May 12, 2015)
Matthew Rozsa’s seven tips on how to stop worrying and start living.
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While I’ve written before about suffering from anxiety, there is more to worrying than the extremes of a neurotic condition or panic attack. Most of us deal with worries large and small every day, from mundane errands that loom ahead and ongoing problems that need to be solved to more existential fears involving mortality and purposelessness. For some, these thoughts race through their head constantly; for others, they get tucked away into the subconscious, resulting in a more mild but no less distracting discomfort.
Here are seven ways to overcome your worries:
1. Bottle them up. We’re frequently told that we should talk about our worries instead of repressing them, but to some extent it’s necessary to ignore them. Even though a part of your brain is insisting that you immediately solve your problems, that isn’t always realistic. If you can’t act now, and you’ve planned to the limit of what can reasonably be expected of you (more on that in a moment), then do everything you can to block these nagging thoughts from your head.
2. Avoid idleness. When you find yourself worrying constantly, it’s tempting to offset it by turning your brain off – watching television, playing a video game, sleeping, that sort of thing. While these certainly work as short-term solutions, they can become addictive if relied on excessively. Not only are some already addictive on their own (such as video game addiction), but because they can have a numbing effect, this makes the emotions they’re attempting to mask that much more powerful when we stop doing them.
3. Keep yourself busy. Just because you should limit your idle relaxation time doesn’t mean you shouldn’t relax. Quite to the contrary, feeling like you constantly have something to do is a recipe for all kinds of health problems. That said, try to find something that will engage or stimulate you. This can range from creating a work of art and participating in a new physical activity to simply spending more time with friends and other loved ones. As long as what you’re doing makes you happy and keeps you involved in the real world, it will probably help you out.
4. Be kinder to yourself. As one of my friends recently explained, every one of us still has an inner child who wants to know that everything is going to be okay. It’s important to be honest with that child, even when the news is bad (come to think of it, especially when the news is bad), but you shouldn’t be a worrywart or abusive. If you tell your inner child that the sky is falling whenever a problem arises, it’s going to be perpetually freaked out; similarly, if you are too hard on yourself, a feeling of worthlessness will percolate up to your conscious emotional state.
5. Allow yourself to be angry. When we’re worried, the chances are that we’re also angry. Because we live in an era that rewards calm deliberation, it is tempting to view these feelings of anger as shameful. This is wrongheaded through and through – if others have inconvenienced, deceived, or in some other way wronged you, it would be unhealthy to not feel angry. That said…
6. Don’t get too angry. The most obvious danger of getting too angry, of course, is that you might make rash decisions that you’ll later come to regret. That said, there is also the possibility that you’ll allow your anger to overwhelm every other thought and emotion in your mental arsenal. Anger is healthy and necessary, yes, but if you allow yourself to be too frustrated or upset, you won’t be able to effectively focus on relaxing (the two emotions conflict).
And how do you handle your actual workload?
7. Plan as much as possible. Apps like iCalendar, as well as orthodox software like Microsoft Excel, are widely used to help people organize all of the appointments, work assignments, and personal resolutions they need to juggle to maintain productive lives. That said, not everyone is psychologically inclined toward hyper-organization, and if you aren’t one of them, that’s fine. Even something as simple as a pen-and-paper “To Do” list can be extremely useful. When you can clearly see everything that needs to be done right in front of your eyes, it is enormously comforting.
If you have ideas of your own about how to overcome chronic worrying, feel free to share them in the comments below!