What, Me Worry?

It’s a MAD, MAD world

I am propped up under the covers on our king sized bed with 2 pillows behind my lower back and one under my knees, contemplating life in a human mind and body. The regular flood of ideas and tangents and tidbits are all clamouring to get my attention and there is once again quite a lot of noise inside my head.?

I pause in my typing to find my place and the smiling gap toothed face of Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Newman pops through with the slogan “What, Me Worry?” printed above and beneath in capitalized block letters. This visiting memory makes me laugh a bit to remember the days of sneaking a look at my brother’s magazines, which were off limits to me in my early days and not of interest when I was old enough to read them. The only part I really liked was the Mad Fold-Ins that would transform into answers to riddles and questions that usually made some political or social commentary and were good for a laugh and some eyeball bending art.

How to Stop Worrying

Lately, worry has re-entered my life; a tenacious bed fellow that often falls asleep beside me and is waiting with its crooked smile to greet me again upon waking. As with most things, once I started to think about worry, or anxiety, I started to notice it coming up everywhere around me; with coaching clients, with friends and family and inside my own tummy as a familiar burning sensation.?

I remember back to a time when worry was my constant companion and in my search for solutions and solace, I googled “How To Stop Worrying.” A lot of interesting links showed up. There was information about how much was ‘too much’ worrying, ideas about why we worry, as well as tips on how to stop worrying, at least for a while. I think back to the worrying that my Mom used to regularly engage in and about our conversations around her anxious looping worry. I remember asking her, “Is your worry really useful?” “Oh yes, she replied, “if I don’t worry, then more bad things will happen.” I questioned the veracity of this statement and after we talked some more, she admitted that no, worry didn’t help, it just made her more miserable more of the time. I could totally relate then and I can relate even more now that she is gone. Just one more thing to worry about.

Worst Case Scenario

In a recent counselling session my therapist Tania brought forth a pair of statements about anxiety that shifted my understanding of this mental affliction. She said:. “Anxiety is imagining the worst case scenario and at the same time assuming that you won’t be able to handle it when it comes.”?

Lately I have found myself repeating this with coaching clients and in my own writing. I have even gone so far as taking clients through a process of outlining the nitty gritty details of their worst case scenario. Then I ask them to draw a mental picture of where they will be, how they will be feeling and what their state of mind will be when they hit this?disaster state they are imagining. When I ask them to tell me the probability of this particular set of circumstances happening, the response is usually a very low number, sometimes as low as 1%, which I hasten to point out leaves a 99% chance of more positive outcomes.?

There are usually some uncomfortable laughs at the ridiculousness of all of this imagining and a sense of relief that no, it is pretty unlikely that what the brain tells us could happen, will actually happen. The discomfort of worry is still there as we both realize that what we are all looking for is certainty. Unfortunately, the only thing that is 100% certain is …uncertainty.??

Can I Handle it?

And what of this idea that we won’t be able to handle whatever comes next? I pose these questions to my clients, “When you reflect on your past experiences can you find instances where you managed to pull through hard times with your integrity, your sense of self and your sense of humour intact?” or “Can you find instances where you see the progress you have made even when things were tough?”

After a pause for reflection the reply is inevitably yes. So often when we take the time to reflect we have to ourselves that we have been able to handle a lot of seemingly impossible situations in our lives and that we will likely be able to handle this lately iteration as well.

How often do we need a reminder that we are capable of so much more than our anxious minds will allow us to remember?

Hands Off the Hot Stove

My work with the Positive Intelligence program comes in handy here too. There are some pretty simple exercises for dealing with anxiety, as one of the negative feelings that Shirzad Chamine refers to when he talks about “keeping your hand on the hot stove.” The idea is that negative feelings, just like that feeling of worry that comes up, are there as a warning system for us; telling us that something is up and that we have to pay more attention to ourselves. They are not meant to be held onto as badges of honour or as proof of some kind of lack in ourselves. They are there to be noticed in a flash of discomfort, much like the pain we feel if we put our hand on the red coils of a hot stove. We know immediately that this is not where we want to keep our hand and that moving our hand away is the best course of action. So too must we pull away our hand from the draw of the heat of fear that comes with our anxious thoughts and set our minds towards our deeper wisdom.

Simple, But Not Easy

The steps for this are relatively simple even if they are not easy. The first step is to notice that we are caught in worry. This part is often referred to as “name it to tame it”. When we can recognize that a negative thought is trying to take over our thinking, we can call it by its name or we can label it in the PQ method as “the judge” or as one of our “accomplice saboteurs” (there are 9 types in PQ). That naming helps to give us some distance from the thought and allows us to let go of the belief that whatever it is that has got us riled up is in fact true.?

Negative thoughts are not true

Science shows that we have way more negative thoughts than positive ones and that there is very little of value or truth in the bulk of these negative thoughts. They are simply leftovers from a time when our ancestors were running for their lives (and ours too, it turns out) from very real and very hungry sabre tooth tigers. For the most part the worries that are plaguing us in modern society are not living, breathing, slobbering cats that are looking to mow us down and make us into a tasty lunch. Our modern worries are both more subtle and more personal; generally focusing on our worth as human beings.?

Catch them in the act

So back to catching the negative Nancy in the act. “I got you, you little ninny,” we can say and in the next step we can move our bodies in a little celebratory dance. This can range from a pumping of the arms up and down or a little shake of the hips or can go into full on Super Bowl Sunday post touchdown dance, whatever floats our boat in the moment. The science shows that taking as little as 10 seconds to celebrate when we catch our minds engaged in unhelpful rumination pumps up our levels of dopamine and encourages us to catch the next one. The more we do this simple action, the more we are able to bring pause into our cycles of worry and the more we are able to build grey matter in the parts of our brain that bring more helpful and positive thoughts that will lead to actions that benefit us and those around us.

A new way of folding

Let’s take the image of bad things about to befall us that has been given to us by our lizard brain and fold it in such a way as to reveal a new, more hopeful, image of what our future holds. With that new image in hand we will be able to see things differently, which in coaching lingo is referred to as either an ‘aha’ moment or as a shift in mindset.

It sounds super simple and in some ways it is. It is part of a process of inquiry, of taking time to lean into the discomfort of worry and anxiety and get ourselves ready to ask it some questions. This does mean that we have to be able to sit still with it long enough to feel the actual discomfort without flinching or pulling away or running off to the next thing to avoid feeling it altogether.

Make Space for Discomfort

This brings me to my lingering dreams that are pulling on me to try to resolve them in my early waking hours this morning. I am dreaming about painful episodes in my life where there is conflict between myself and others. My brain is calling me to attention to try to find the one thread that will make all that has happened make sense in some deep way. I pull and pull at different memories, doing all I can to get to the bottom of this discomfort; to make it go away. This goes on for some time until I realize that what I really need to do is just make space for the discomfort of these visiting memories. I pause and take a breath and let myself truly feel the sensations in my body as I think about these past experiences and the pain that they have caused me. I feel into the regret and the sadness and the grief of all that has come to pass and I let it simply be there for a moment. I can hear a little voice inside my head saying, “There, there, Sandra, there, there, you can handle this.” These happenings were my previous worst case scenarios, which have, in a rare set of occurrences, truly come to pass and which I have, through time, patience, resourcefulness and love, found a way to make peace with.?

Reframe

If I can do it then you, my friend, can absolutely do this too. It may take time and it may mean reaching out to resource people who can help you, carefully, step by step, reframe the image that worry has created, one little bit at a time, until a brand new way of seeing the problem and the world appears, as if by magic. It is time to hold the portrait of the worst case scenario in between your two hands and fold it this way and that until you see what other possibilities the situation holds. And know that, whatever it reveals, you are capable of finding your way through it.?

I am Sandra Butel and this is my beautywalk. What’s yours?