Chronic worry depletes you of joy. When you feel less joy, you feel more exhaustion and disinterest in your life. Consistently worrying will strip your sense of  feeling alive as worry can be all consuming. 

For those of you who struggle with loud, anxious thoughts and worry, you don’t need me to tell you how debilitating it is; you know.

Anxiety and worry go hand in hand. Worry keeps you in fear. When in fear your ability to be empathic, creative and wise is compromised. Worry scares you from taking chances; chances that can change your life for the better. This is how worry keeps you small.

Worry breeds anxiety. Anxiety breeds worry. 

The spiderweb effect of chronic worry pushes you to socially isolate, feeds a negative self concept and breeds self criticism. Over time, these symptoms of worry and anxiety will damage your life mentally, emotionally and physically. 

Worry always exaggerates the negative. Always. Our worry will tends to create a bigger nightmare than what is actually happening.  

If I haven’t made it clear, let’s get real, worry is a huge problem.

With all that said, my intention for this post is to uncover some false beliefs around worry, so you can detach from worry and live a more peaceful and calm life. 

To begin, lets highlight the difference between worry vs. discernment.

There’s discernment, which allows us to practice healthy decision making and then there’s worry. The key to more inner peace is to practice discernment, not worry. Discernment, the ability to judge well, is a tool that helps us make healthy choices for our life. Worry is what keeps us stuck in fear.

Worry is fear based. Worry is harmful. Worry is not necessary when you can choose healthy discernment instead. 

In order to heal anything in life, we have to have awareness. This leads to the question:

Why do some of us choose worry or default to worry?

In short, the answer is because we think worry is protecting us and we fear what would happen without it. We have false beliefs around worry that keep it active and firing. Here are some false beliefs around why we convince ourselves to worry that we have to deconstruct in order to ditch our anxiety and fear.

False belief#1 Worry helps protect me from getting hurt. 

The theory goes something like this: “If I expect the worst, then I’ll be prepared if the worst happens, so I have to keep worrying to ensure that I don’t make a mistake.”

Not true, my friends. Please stop your over active, fear based mind from scaring you into playing small in your life with this belief. This way of thinking is actually doing the opposite of protecting you from getting hurt. With anticipating the hurt and in your attempt to avoid it, you’re actually calling a negative result more toward you.

Remember that, no matter how hard you try, you cannot predict life and you certainly cannot control the actions of other people. We’re meant to live life; not control life. As you learn to let go of control, you will see that your fierce grip on life circumstances is causing more issues and less flow. Even though it feels like you have to grab tighter to ensure protection and control, letting go is the more healthy and balanced choice.

False belief #2 My worry can protect me from unwanted future events.

Not true. The thought here is that: “If i think hard enough about it; I can prevent unwanted happenings.” (If I think hard enough, I’ll figure it out.) Over thinking does not lead to genius conclusions; over thinking creates more fear and stagnation. I’m all for healthy discernment while contemplating a choice, however if you continue to stress, worry and over think beyond discernment; discernment becomes worry.

Please realize that no matter how hard you try; you can’t control the uncontrollable. If you die trying, you will live a life of much suffering. It doesn’t need to be this way. 

As you improve your relationship with uncertainty you will organically be able to lessen your grip on life. As you do, beautiful things will have the space to move in. You can learn to let go more by practicing trust in something bigger than you.

False belief #3 I’ll have to feel a lot of guilt and shame if I don’t worry about something that ends up happening. 

Not true. This belief is a product of your anxiety and worry playing a mind trick on you. Guilt and shame are emotions that are important to work through as they come up in life. You can’t control when such emotions will come up based on how life plays out.

In terms of keeping guilt and shame at bay, all you can do is “your best” when handling life situations. At some point, letting go of control is mandatory in order to avoid becoming swallowed by over thinking, worry, guilt and shame. Some times, no matter how hard you try, things are going to pan out differently then you expect or desire. This is just the human condition and it has nothing to do with you not worrying and doing enough damage control.

Expect doubt. You will have doubts arise as your navigating through life. Doubt is a normal emotion that will poke it’s head in when you’re embarking in new waters or challenging yourself to higher feats. The key here is to be with doubt, without attaching to doubt. 

Learning how to BE with any sense of guilt or shame and working through those feelings is the practice here. Guilt and shame might come up, however they do not need to dominate and take you down a rabbit hole. The problem is not that those emotions are surfacing, the problem arises when those emotions are not handled properly. The healthy practice is learning how to allow any feelings and emotions coming up to be with you without attaching to them. It’s allowing emotions to come up without letting them lead you down a negative thought spiral that keeps you stagnant and in fear.

*Feel free to read my post on how to feel your feelings for more insight on how to allow difficult emotions HERE.

False belief #4 Worrying is how I show that I care. 

Not true. Just a friendly reminder; worry is fear based. There’s no need to show concern with fear leading.

Worry is riddled with anxiety and scarcity. Putting those feelings onto someone else is like handing someone a box of angry bees waiting to sting and buzz all over them. Be mindful that your anxiety and fear are energies that can get all over someone else. Worrying about someone and twisting it into a story that means you care is not necessary, untrue and unhealthy. There are plenty of other ways to show your love, care and affection for others besides your anxiety and fear dumping onto them. 

With all these false beliefs it’s your awareness of your anxiety and worry creeping in and trying to take over control that is going to be your saving grace. It’s normal for concern to arise when your making decisions in your life. Especially when you’re taking action that’s pushing beyond your “normal” comfort zone. Wanting to choose wisely is a good thing. That tells me that you care about your life. The trick is to make wise decisions without getting bogged down with worry and fear.

3 Tools to Cope With Worry

1. Allow, acknowledge and accept the worried thoughts. As mentioned above your practice to combat worry is to allow all your emotions to come up without attaching to them. Breath through them. Workout through them. Do what you have to do to allow your feelings to come up and be processed so they can dissipate. That’s how you can move on without holding onto unprocessed fear based feelings.

2. Find the exaggeration in the worried thought. (Stay light minded) Bring in some light energy by calling out the exaggeration in your worry. Find a way to lighten the worry that you’re creating in your mind by finding where the exaggeration is. Witness your thoughts and see if you can identify the, at some times extreme, exaggeration in your worry so it can lose power and control over you. You can also try humor; see if it works for you to lighten your energy in times of getting too much in your head.

3. Stay in Action: Resume positive action in your life. Stay present and engaged in your life when worry comes up. Be in your life and body, not in your head. Worry will pull you into your head by focusing on possible future outcomes. Do what you need to do to BE present. Resuming activities where you can expel positive and productive energy will help give your mind a place to settle.  

Recovery from chronic worry:

Don’t keep your worry a secret and reach out to trusted sources for support. Being alone in worry can give it more fuel. Release your worried thoughts. Here’s a few ideas on how to do just that:

• Journal about them.

• Tell a trusted friend about them.

• Use physical movement to push through heavy worried emotions.

• Release them out of your body via breath work.

There are options for you to choose from in terms of how to work through your anxiety and worry that will come up in life. Knowing how to do that will greatly help you stay more rooted when those emotions surface.

I hope this post finds you healthy and happy. Much love. Kim.

This post was inspired by teaches from the book: The Worry Trick by David A. Carbonell

*Above image is by photographer, Amy Lynn Bjornson.