How To Stop Worrying: The Constant Excessive Worry Cure

Posted on February 24, 2010 by TDR in Self Help

What is Worry

Everyone worries. I do not think there is a single person in this world who does not worry. The extent or amount of worry  may vary from person to person, but worry is certainly there is each person. Worry is nothing but thoughts that make you uncomfortable. You will worry about child who is at school, about your spouse at home, about your health, about your finances 5 years from now, or even simply worry about what you would cook for dinner! So worry is nothing but a way of feeling that there is something that you are responsible for.

You may feel important that you have so many things to worry about! In fact that is true! How many times have you heard company executives say “Man, there are so many things I need to take care of today, I just don’t know how I am going to do that!” . By saying this, he is making a statement that he is a very important person because he has so many things to worry about. On the other hand, a person who has nothing to worry about (which is rare), may say: “Hmmm I am so peaceful, I have nothing to worry about”.
You may think that this person is a “good-for-nothing”! He has nothing to worry about, nothing to do!

Control Your Thoughts And Your Worry

Anyway, so we have established that worry is a thought that makes you uneasy. So its a thought. What if you can control your thoughts? If you can control you thoughts you can control your worry.  Is is possible to control your thoughts? Sit for a while and close your eyes. Imagine you are watching yourself from a distance. Just watch what thoughts cross your mind. Within a minute or two, you will see a variety of thoughts that enter and leave your mind like a train. You will amazed at the different types of unconnected thoughts that you experience. If you are able to concentrate more, after some time, you will have lesser and lesser thoughts entering your mind. It’s not easy to do this, but is possible. This gives you control  over your mind and thoughts. You can tell your mind to be quiet or ask it to think about the thing you want to think about – and not just some random thought from the past or the future.

Coming back to the worrying thoughts in your mind: if you think about it, worry is really a reaction to a thought. if you do not react to a particular thought, it will just pass like all other thoughts. For example: if a thought “My sons schools teacher has called me to talk about something urgent about my son tomorrow. I hope there is nothing wrong. I hope she is not going to tell me anything bad about my  son. I hope he is doing ok in school. I hope…” and this goes on. So here a simple thought of going to school to meet his teacher has created a huge worry inside of you. The reactions to that thought are all the “I hope…” in your mind. These are worries. If you just let the thought pass without reacting to it, it will pass away – you will get other thoughts. The mind does not like the fact that you have not reacted, so will try to get other thought till you react.  And if you succeed in not reacting at all, your mind will give up and relax. You will have no worries. This will be a relaxed an meditative state. The closer you get to this state on a regular basis, the more peaceful you will be.

In our example, there is not much we could do to change the situation: till she meets the teacher the next day. At best, she could expect good things. She can expect that the teacher has called her to talk about a special ability of her son – and feel good about it. But we are all trained to think negative, we start “worrying”.

Another example could be worrying about the test you will be taking the next day, or about the future of your business. If you keep worrying, you are wasting time. Instead just let the thoughts pass and take positive actions, aim for smaller positive goals; you will feel better when you reach  your smaller milestones, motivating you to do better. There is no time to worry.

Stop Worrying About Worry

Let the thoughts come and pass, just do no react to the thoughts. Instead think about what positive steps you can take to keep yourself happy and just do it. Do not think of the results or consequences, just do your stuff intensely and with full faith and dedication. You will see that in 90% of the cases the worry that you had was not a worry at all. You just wasted your time and energy worrying about things  that never surfaced afterall. Think about it, there will numerous examples in your own life when you worried so much about something that never really happened? Do you not look back and laugh at it. So when you know that in the future you are just going to look back and laugh at the way you reacted in the past, why not LAUGH AT THE WORRYING THOUGHT RIGHT NOW AND ENJOY?

In short,  do not worry about the worry. Let the worry thought just pass. When worry comes to your mind, just say to yourself: “Thats ok – I am not going to worry about it. I am going to go about my life without being bogged down by anything that makes me uncomfortable”. You will see that these thoughts will just dissolve into nothing. You will gradually stop worrying all the time. Just practice this very regularly till it becomes a habit.

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