How Do You Stop Worrying?

Managing Worry Is Part of Cultivating Character

One of the things we all do pretty well is that we worry a good deal.  We know how to worry about things.  We can easily find enough problems to think about so we can worry some more.  Worry is the best way to keep our mind working over time.  If we learn how to worry more often, we can skip trying to waste time sleeping.  We can lay awake all night and think about all of the things that can go wrong in our life and our business management.  Instead of sleeping we can think about all of the things we need to do to fix what we are worrying about.  That way when we get up in the morning we can go fix those things we worried all night about and we can go fix them when we are really tired and grumpy.  I think that is an excellent plan.  Not.  Don't do that approach, please.  It is not a good habit to develop.  It is also a hard habit to break.

You might be surprised to hear how many business leaders practice this kind of plan.  As foolish as it might seem, some do it almost every single night of their lives.  They go to bed to begin their process to worry about stuff that needs to be fixed.  The go to bed to start worrying about stuff.  They do it enough that it soon becomes a very bad habit.  They worry about the next darkened alley.  They may not be standing in a dark alley but they see one nearby and think they are headed in that direction.  They go to bed to think about the ways that dark alley can arrive.  They worry about what might become, not about what has already occurred.  They worry about a darkened future.  Worry is often times the result of thinking about something that is going to happen wrong.  We can see the possibility of the dark alley becoming where we will soon be walking so we try to figure out how to avoid that turn.  We worry about our options.  We do not think our choices will be obvious selections or good enough options when the time comes to exercise them.  We do not think our future choices will help us to avoid that dark alley.  That is why we worry.

Our body chemistry does not need help in producing the wrong kinds of internal fluids.  The production of the wrong kinds of internal body fluids will eventually wear our body out.  Wrong production of unwanted chemistry inside our body will eventually do some serious damage to the important parts of our body functions.  Our health will suffer if we worry too much.  Stress will take its toll on the health of our body.  We will not live as healthy nor as long as we work to enjoy.  It is a terrible plan to adhere to.  It will guarantee an unwanted set of nasty results.  To those who have developed the habit of worry, I just gave each of you one more thing to worry about.  Now your health will find its own dark alley to walk through.  More worry.

The art of worry is a process that runs deep like a bad habit.  If you chew your nails you have developed a bad habit.  Chewing your nails is not a natural bodily function.  It is an action that is prompted by the mind to do when no other reason can be justifiably found.  We only chew our nails because we developed that process as a bad habit.  That is all it is.  Chewing our nails is strictly a bad habit.  It is a habit that produces nothing worthwhile yet we protect it as if it means all the world to us.  We work hard on trying to sneak ways for chewing our nails without getting caught.  We get pretty good at it, too.  We already know it is not a good habit but we protect it anyway.  We seem to believe we gain power when we are able to sneak it by someone.  It is like making a little victory in our lives.  We seem to believe we have won when truly we have lost.  We are truly losing but we feel like we are winning.  Worrying is exactly the same thing.

When we worry we think we are winning.  We think we need to worry to get a victory in how we are living.  We think we need to worry in order to feel better about what we need to do.  We are not winning when that happens.  We only think it is the right thing to do.  We only think we are trying to win.  We are not.  We are trying to lose.  We are losing.  We are destroying the process for recognizing healthy appreciation for the things we have already produced.  We are taking our victories and forgetting about them when we place worry on our hearts.  We are searching for something to destroy the feelings we should be having in how we have won.  We are searching for something to be stronger than the victories we have already produced.  Those victories cannot be real so we manufacture more doom to think about so we can begin to manage what can happen that is bad.  We need bad stuff to happen so we can be correct in how we believe things will turn out.  We hate to be wrong.  So we plan how bad it can go so when that happens we will be right.  We want to be right.  We hate to be wrong.  That is why we worry.  We want to be right.

Learn How to Manage Your Worries, Make It Number Three!

In fact, sometimes we discover how wrong we were about what we were worrying about and that alone disappoints us.  We get disappointed when we discover how our worries did not need to be real.  That kind of discovery offers us another chance to worry more about something new.  Once we solve one area of worry we begin to search for another one to replace it.  We finished chewing on one finger so we switch to another one.  We need to keep the bad habit alive.  We need to find something else to worry about.  We will even tell our loved ones that we want to quit worrying about things.  We will also tell them that we do not chew our nails anymore.  We lie and we lie often about it.  We also do not consider it a lie anymore.  We will tell people we do not lie but the truth is, we do.

Let me ask a serious question to all of those people who worry a lot.  Do you consider yourself a liar?  How did you answer that question?  Were you honest?  Did you see how much we lie?  Did you see how easy it is to lie?  Did you discover how deeply we feel about being accused of lying?  Why is that?  Why do we get upset with someone who accuses us of being a liar?  How did we come to the point of life where we accept lying as not being a lie?  What have we done to our brains to become this way?  What is so bad about admitting what we do wrong?  I goof up all of the time.  Admit it and move on.  It goes away the minute you admit it.  The goof is almost magically forgotten.  Admit it and move on.  The worry comes to an end when you admit what is wrong.  When you get to the core of what is making you protect this bad habit you can work on fixing how much you worry.  You can begin to eliminate the worry in your life and begin to appreciate how things are turning out fine.

How do you stop worrying?

You don't.  You just learn how to manage it better.  Everyone worries off and on in their lives.  Some just do not allow their ability to worry to take over how they think and do things.  Some learn how to manage their worries.  The best way I know to curb my worries is to be thankful for all of the great things my Lord has allowed me to enjoy.  How can I worry if I am thankful?  How can being thankful produce something to worry about?  How does thankfulness translate into something to worry about?  It doesn't.  If I am thankful for my health, what should I be worried about?  I am not sitting in a wheelchair, a hospital bed, a nursing home, or taking costly medicines to manage the organs that are failing inside.  I have my health.  It is good health.  I am thankful for that place.  I get excited to be able to do the things I need to do with a body that is functioning well.

Sometimes I counsel with business owners.  Once in awhile I meet some of them who are whining about stuff in life that is going wrong.  They can spend a couple of hours telling me about how difficult it is to do what they do.  I listen.  I try not to offer any advice.  I just want to give them a platform to use to get it all out.  I let them describe all of their worries.  When they are done, I set up another time to sit down and have coffee with them.  I tell them I need some time to think about their challenges and next time we get together I will sit down with them and we will have another cup of coffee to discuss the ideas I might have.  If they are of the worrying type, my next meeting will include a friend I have.  I will make sure she is at the same table at the same time.  They will be surprised when they discover I brought a friend.  She will not intimidate anyone of them, however.  They will accept her presence at that meeting every single time.  It has never failed.

I do not usually need to say anything to help these business owners learn how to better manage their worries.                 They learn it from watching my friend.  It is automatic.  She has a PHD from a formidable college.  She is an aging woman that does not appear young.  She is an ordained minister in real life.  She has academic awards that will fill her office wall.  She owns three small business models and operates them all by herself.  She works every single day with people who are severely mentally disadvantaged.  She helps them learn how to cope with real life.  She has fifteen case projects on that table of responsibilities.  When one of them passes on, she goes to get another one to work with.  Her goal is fifteen of them at a time.  She volunteers this work.  However, none of these things they know about her when she comes to sit down with us.  They do not know about these things until I tell them.  Yet before I tell them who she is and what she does, they are already immediately impressed by what she does and who she is.  I do not need to read them her report card.  They immediately see what everyone else sees in her.  She is afflicted with a tremendously serious case of a specific nerve disorder that forces her body to be broken and deformed.  She has one leg that is considerably shorter than the other one.  She has a shoe built to compensate for that difference.  She speaks as if she has had a severe stroke.  She is difficult to understand when she speaks.  She barely has the ability to hold her own cup of coffee up to her mouth.  She is often seen with food stains on the front of her attire.

After I introduce her to them I then ask them to remind me what their worries are.  I ask them to describe what their challenges in life are to do what they were gifted to do.  I have never, ever seen one of them repeat their worries in front of her.  Not once.  Somehow I think for the moment they must feel a little bit more thankful.  I think they discovered how petty their worries were in comparison to what this lady has learned how to overcome.  She is a prime example of how we must learn how to manage what we worry about.  She is thankful for so many things in her life.  I know.  Every year my family invites her to Thanksgiving for dinner.  Sometimes I reach over to help her cut her turkey if it is too tough for her to cut.  When I am in public with her, I watch how people treat her.  They walk around her like she is some kind of poisonous person.  Mothers try to nonchalantly pull their small children away from her.  It is disturbing to watch.  She is thankful for so many good things in her life despite these things and this kind of constant treatment.  Those business owners get a lesson that likely was overdue.

We stop worrying when we find the things we need to be thankful for.  True thankfulness cannot run in the same faucet as worry.  The two of them will never blend into one thought.  If you worry a little too much, improve how you manage what you need to be thankful for.  I can easily cut my own turkey with my own hands with great ease.  It may seem simple but it is not to some others out there doing well in spite of what they will never be able to do.  Stop worrying.  It will not help you to recognize where you have already won.

Until next time...