https://www.victoriakleinsman.com/mindset/how-to-stop-worrying/
Worrying is like praying for something you don’t want
I’m sure we all know too well how worry feels. Stop for a moment now and just notice what you’re currently worrying about in your life… How does thinking about what you’re worrying about make you feel?
But what is worry? Worrying is a form of thinking about future events in a way that leaves you feeling anxious or uncertain.
When we worry we are attempting to mentally problem-solve an event that planned on happening in the future which has one or more possible negative outcomes. It’s an attempt at control.
Whilst future thinking is often helpful and can assist us with goal setting and planning, it becomes a problem when we ‘future think’ about events that leave us feeling anxious, uncertain and on edge.
Clinically, excessive worry is the primary symptom of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).
As humans, we like to control. It’s how our brains work. We are wired to future predict because back in the caveman days if we didn’t plan ahead for potential danger, we wouldn’t survive.
So our brains are wired to constantly problem solve which of course is helpful but not so much if we find ourselves in a constant state of anxiety.
When we can’t accept that the said future event is completely out of our immediate control, we revisit that event in our heads and play the ‘what if’ scenarios out over and over again. We image every “what if” and how we might handle it—we’re trying to control an uncontrollable situation.
How can a mental state tied to so much anxiety be rewarding? Each time we worry and nothing bad happens, our mind connects worry with preventing harm:
worry → nothing bad happens.
And the takeaway is, “It’s a good thing I worried.” (We probably aren’t consciously aware of this thought process.)
