On Not Worrying

I have been asked to comment on the practice of not worrying.  I'm not sure that I can discuss the subject with any sort of authority or in any really articulate way, but I thought about it in the car for a bit on my way to Court (about which I was not worried) and then I thought I'd give it a shot.

Worrying for me is as natural and effortless as breathing.  I've always done it, it's always been so.  In the privacy of my own head, the worrying was going on and as far as I was concerned about it, I had as much control over that as I had over the placement of my freckles.  Absolutely none.  

As it turns out, I was wrong.  Worrying is, in essence, a bad habit.  The underlying premise of worry is that if we do it enough about something or try to imagine every possible doomsday scenario, we can either head off the bad outcome or at least fortify ourselves in case the worst happens.

Neither of these things is true.

The future is going to unfold in whatever way it will, whether you worry about it or not and you cannot "undo" a bad future outcome simply by worrying about it.  Furthermore, no matter how much you worry about something in an effort to prepare yourself, if the future comes and the worst does happen, you're still gonna take it in the teeth. 

If and when you decide to stop worrying, the thing you have to do, and I'm serious about this, is accept the fact that you do not have the power to change the outcome of reality with your mind.  If you are as neurotic and anal retentive and worry-prone as I am, this is a bit of a challenge.  Neurotics think that everything is their fault, and that is really me.  I used to absolutely believe that if I worried enough about something bad, it wouldn't happen and that if I didn't worry about something bad it would happen.

First, you have to say, out loud, to yourself "I do not have the power to control the future with my mind."

Stupid, but true. 

Then you have to practice.  To me it was like learning to rollerskate.  Not being very coordinated, I fell down a lot when I was learning to skate.  I fell.  I skinned my knees.  I failed.  But I kept trying.

When you first start not worrying, you have to mentally tell yourself "I'm not going to worry about that."  And then you just....don't do it.  It's really hard.  At first I could only not worry for a few minutes at a time.  But then I reminded myself that worrying wasn't going to change anything and there was no point to it.  And I started over.  It also helped me to mentally ask myself several questions.  These are:

Did you do anything to create this situation?

Do you have any ability to change this situation?

Do you have any responsibility to change this situation?

If I didn't make it, can't change it and/or have no responsibility for it, then there is, per se (to use a lawyer term) no reason to worry about it.  That right there will eliminate 50% of the shit that you worry about.

At some point, I read something that said that most things that we worry about never come to pass.

That really helped me.

It's comforting to know that the odds are in your favor.

What I started to notice is that when I wanted to worry about something, and then I made myself not worry, the odds were right.  Most of the time, what I wanted to worry about...never happened.  And even if it did, at least I only had to deal with a little aggravation when it happened, instead of the whole pile of worry combined with the aggravation. 

As time passed and I practiced, I began to really enjoy not worrying, not being upset.  The first time you make yourself not worry about something that you're worried will happen, and then it doesn't happen...man, are you glad you didn't worry about it.  And then, with a little positive reinforcement under your belt, you get better.

But platitudes are all fine and good when you're talking about issues that are relatively unimportant.  Sooner or later, life is going to throw you a doozy.

When my mother was first diagnosed, my first inclination, of course, was to go to the bad place.  My mind went straight to mental incapacitation and drooling and chemo and suffering and bed sores and wasting away and what in the world would we do with my Daddy.  And when I made myself stop it, I felt guilty.  But the fact is that I could have spent two months in absolute misery focusing and thinking and worrying about horror.....and......it didn't happen.  She doesn't have cancer.  She isn't having chemo.  She isn't suffering.  Her surgery wasn't invasive and went off without a hitch.  I would have wasted all that time and energy and emotional wherewithal for nothing.  No good purpose would have been served.  And even if she had had cancer, if I had worried and spent two months in mental and emotional anguish, it wouldn't have changed anything or lessened what we would all have had to go through.  I didn't make her medical condition and I didn't have a magic wand to waive to fix it.  I would have only made a horror worse by wasting good time based on what I thought would happen later.  Once you stop trying to mentally will things to be different than they are, then it's easier not to worry.

Looking back, I'm glad I practiced on little things.

Now, not worrying doesn't mean that you can sit on your butt and do nothing, trusting blindly that if you don't lift a finger everything will work out.  You have to do what you can do.  As Victoria Moran says, when faced with hardship or uncertainty or the unresolved future, you have to do "the next indicated thing." 

This means dealing with life, as it comes.  Sometimes, these tasks are easy, mostly they are mundane, occasionally they are terribly hard, but tending to them is necessary to a less worried life.  If you do the next indicated thing you head off many messes that would otherwise present themselves and give you opportunities to worry.  As I said,  worrying is a bad habit and I think it is particularly a habit of control freaks because the lack of control is what causes the worry.  So for me, a control freak, if I do what I can to control the things that I can do something about, then my opportunities for worry are decreased.  I guess it's like taking all the alcohol out of the house when you're a drunk.  You have to do what you can do. 

So you pay the bills, you read the files, you listen to the doctors and you do what you can do, you do all that you can do but then you have to just let it go.

Understand that you can't control everything.  Turn out the light.  Go play.  Let tomorrow take care of itself.

So there it is, The Bee Charmer's Guide to Not Worrying.  I hope it helps.  If not, I can give you my shrink's name.  She's much better at this than I am.

Image:  Buddha of the Simple Garden by Robert Crum.