W

Wither Your Worries

Are you a worrier? Do you find yourself realising that you’ve not been worried about anything and begin to worry that something is wrong with that? I used to be a worrier, if I had nothing to worry about I’d get worried and I’d stay worried until I found something better to worry about. And the horrible thing about that type of worrying is it is thoroughly exhausting. It is very difficult to just

switch off at the end of the day. For me it was impossible. I’d go to bed worrying about being able to get enough sleep so as to get up on time in the morning and then spend at least an hour and a half trying to get to sleep with absolutely no success. Eventually I’d drift off into an exhausted haze and wake up late, panic, and start the worry process all over again, rushing to get moving, get dressed, get the children ready, have breakfast and make it out the door so they would get to school on time and I would get the bus I needed to get to work on time.

And all this adds up to a lot of stress, tension, and even more worry, and it becomes a vicious circle. While on the way to work, worrying if there would be anything that might delay my progress, while in work worrying if the children were behaving in school or if they were being bullied, and then not concentrating properly on the job at hand. Becoming aware of that and worrying I’d be caught slacking, on the bus on the way to collect the children from the childminder and worrying about being late, then worrying about getting home, getting them settled into doing their homework and me cooking so that they at least be properly fed, would get to bed on time and get the sleep they’d need to be able to function the next day.

Needless to say fun and relaxation were strangers to me at that stage in my life and to a degree it

was also lacking for my children too. I was so tightly wound up in worry that there were times that they just took a look at my face and did an about-turn without asking what they had intended to ask. If anyone suggested that I relax I’d only partly do it. I didn’t know how to turn of the noise in my head and I wasn’t sure at the time that I wanted to. It was a type of security blanket I kept wrapped around me, more like a hair-cloth than a security blanket. I could relax only as far as my shoulder blades but could never manage to get the knots out of them or my neck or tune my mind to nothing, in fact the very idea worried the living daylights out of me.

It was only years later when I first went to a counsellor for help with an issue I had that I learnt to let go of some of my worries. Over time I realised that the purpose that they were serving was doing me no good, I had no control over some of the things I was worrying about, I had choices over some of them and others were “what if’s” that might not ever come to fruition. I heard Richard Bandler (co-founder of NLP) ask a women he was working on recently what she could do instead with all the time she was wasting on worrying and she laughed and answered him. So what can you do instead with all the time you waste on worrying?

If you have an unresolved issue, how do you deal with it? Like my mother said to me a few years ago when I rang her about an issue I had to deal with “what can I do at this time?” When I said “nothing“, she replied “then please don’t tell me until you absolutely have to, I don’t want to waste my time being worried about something I can’t do anything about, but care enough about to be deeply concerned“. While at the time I took that as a rather unfeeling response, later with hindsight I’ve come to realise that she is right. We often hide behind worry as a way of not dealing with issues, or taking responsibility for things in our own life. We use worry as an excuse to not live a full and fulfilling life. Now if there is an issue I can’t deal with, I set it aside to be dealt with when I either have more knowledge or resources to deal with it, or if I decide it is not a big enough issue I simply let the worry wither away to nothing.