On Worrying

Worry is just a fantasy (except not a fun one). 

On my way into the office earlier this week, as I excitedly reached for the elevator button, I was struck by a sinking feeling. One of my reps was on the precipice of closing a huge partnership with one of our clients - he'd worked incredibly hard on it for months, all of our boxes were checked, and I knew the result would be monumental for our client and team. Yet the feeling of excitement that initially carried me through the building doors had suddenly transformed, and I instead found myself thinking what's about to go wrong?

While in retrospect, logic and reason enable me to recognize that my fleeting reaction was unreasonable, at the time it felt significant and overbearing. It's deep, innate, limiting, and a feeling I've unfortunately come to know quite well over the years. Foe under guise of Friend: Worry.

It's taken me a long time to unpack the concept of worrying, why it happens, and how it can feel so stifling. What I've found is that while we can identify it as a generally unproductive feeling, it's also pretty much impossible to fully dismiss from our natural system of processing the circumstances around us. 

To understand this, we need to go back thousands of years. In those times, a typical excursion outside of our cave would involve a dangerous hunt for food, risk of accidentally gathering poisonous berries, and probably dodging a woolly mammoth. Basic needs like food, shelter, and security were scarce, and any threat could mean the difference between life and sure death. For your average caveperson, worry was a survival mechanism. 

While we clearly live in very different times, the part of our brains that served to keep us alive back then is still around, attempting to protect us from perceived threats. It's what kicks in fight-or-flight mode, a valuable resource in dire situations but for the most part in modern times, unnecessarily triggered. In effect, even when things are going well, we end up acting from a place of scarcity and fear. Things can never be too good; the people and circumstances we cherish won't always be there; our success is ultimately capped, because something is about to go wrong, right?

One of the most eye-opening books I've read, The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, describes this phenomenon as the Upper Limit Problem, a human tendency to put the brakes on our positive energy when we’ve exceeded our unconscious allowance for how good we can feel, how successful we can be, and how much love we can feel. Worry is the Upper Limit Problem's strongest ally, convincing us that somehow we'll be safer if we just spend our time anticipating the worst.

Even though these ancient feelings are no longer relevant, we can't change the way we're wired. However, the good news is that we don't have to be bound by our Cavewoman Brain.

While Hendricks' book goes much deeper into the different dimensions of why we Upper Limit, his central thesis is that everyone is capable of working toward a more modern state of being. In fact, those who can find a way to recognize when it's happening and actively redefine the parameters of the goodness they're allowed can actually enjoy it -- and not be worried about it all disappearing.

So next time you find your mind racing with uneasy possibilities, your senses vacillating between genuinely happy and terrified, check yourself. Instead of thinking it's too good to be true, try to accept that it's just plain good. The likelihood is that it truly is, that everything is going to be fine, and there's no woolly mammoth lurking around the corner.