If you’ve read my story then you’ll know how badly I used to suffer with anxiety and worrying. Let’s just say that it was bad, really bad…And I never try and make light of how badly I used to worry because I don’t think that helps anyone who is a ‘serious worrier’. These days I don’t worry as much as I used to, so I thought it was important that I put a ‘big fat guide’ together on how to stop worrying so much.
After I was crippled with anxiety and worry for most of my life, I decided to take control and start living, one way or another.
In the end, I searched endlessly online about worry and how to stop it because I was sick and tired of always having that nervous sick feeling in my stomach. I’ve lived with this feeling every day of my life whether it’s been due to something real or not.
Throughout my life, worrying has always been a consistent element that I’ve had a really hard time shifting. No matter what I’d try, I just couldn’t stop worrying. I even found myself worrying about worrying…
Let’s be honest, worrying takes up so much energy. If you spend all day worrying, you can find that you get migraines and headaches more frequently which leaves you feeling even more tired and worn-out. The trouble with worrying is it escalates so quickly. All of a sudden worries can start to stack on top of each other before you know it.
Much of my childhood and teenage years were filled with anxiety and worry, usually about stupid things that I didn’t even need to worry about.
Worrying became addictive. I just wanted a way to stop worrying so much, and just get a feeling of control back. Although we can’t completely remove worry from our daily lives, it is possible to reduce it and get rid of unnecessary worries.
If you’re anything like I was, you feel like you need to worry and ruminate over something for a good length of time, just until you ‘resolve it’. The bottom line is, that worrying is just a downward spiral. We never really ‘resolve’ our worries because we just find ourselves worrying about the same things a few minutes later. At least that’s what worrying has been like for me.
The only way to resolve something that you’re worrying about is to take action on it.
For example, if you’re worrying about your elderly parents travelling on their own somewhere, maybe you need to offer them transport. That’s taking action on something that can be resolved.
One thing I’ll always be here is genuine. I am not a doctor or counsellor. Much of how I eased my anxiety has been self-taught and it’s been a damn long journey. I want to be here to show you that you don’t have to suffer from anxiety and worry for the rest of your life, even if it seems like you do right now. This guide on how to stop worrying was put together with love and care to try and give you some quality actionable tips that you can use right now.
So, let’s get into it.
1. Is this helping me?
This is a great and simple trick you can use whenever you feel yourself starting to go down a spiral of worry. Mindfully ask yourself, ‘Is this helping me?’ I mean, it sounds like a simple enough thing to say, but this has really been a game changer for me and has helped me to stop worrying when I feel like I’m about to get in a tizz.
So often when we find ourselves worrying, we don’t stop and calm down. Usually, we find that we start feeling the physical symptoms of worry like sweaty palms and a racing heart. Before we know it, we run away with our worries with little chance of slowing ourselves down. So, does your worrying help you solve your worry?
In my own experience, I find that 99% of the time when I worry, it’s never helping me to solve what I’m worrying about. I just end up going around in circles thinking and thinking without actually putting a plan in action to rest what I’m worrying about.
If you can answer this basic question and the answer is no, your worrying is not helping, then all you need to do is let it go. If you’re overthinking is not moving you forward to a resolution, let it go.
It’s easier said than done, but it all starts with giving yourself the permission to stop worrying about things that aren’t helping you to progress in the right direction.
Many of the things I sometimes start to worry about are things that are in the future or the past. A lot of us have regrets, it’s all part of being human. So often we find that we can’t stop worrying about the past. Obviously, we can’t go back and change the past but nonetheless we still find time to dwell on what we can’t do differently. This is a key scenario where we’re not concentrating on real worries. So what the heck is the difference between fake and real worries?
If you want to test your memory, try and remember what you worried about this time last year. – E. Joseph Cossman
2. Real worry VS silly worry
Worries are but passing moments in time. That’s what I’ve come to believe. I couldn’t tell you what I worried about this time last year. I really can’t. I know it would’ve been a whole bunch of things but when you worry so much, everything just seems to blur into one big worry. The point here is that the worries that I was ‘worried about’ were clearly not that important. I can only count a handful of real worries I’ve experienced in my own life.
These are the things that would have drastically affected my life in a negative way, and the lives of others. For example, back in 2013, my partner experienced a near-death experience after the birth of our son.
This was one of those holy-shit-is-this-real kind of moments. The worry and anxiety I felt for both my partner and my son over the next few days were nothing but real. The negative outcomes in that situation would have been life-altering, in all the meaning of the phrase.
After situations like this, something forces you to enter a powerful new reality where you gain a moment of clarity. It’s one of those moments where you say to yourself;
“I’ll never spend time worrying about that dumb stuff ever again because it’s just not important in the grand scheme of things.”
I’m not saying you need to have a near-death experience or for someone you love to have one to get to that point, you can simply start bringing mindful awareness to each of the things you’re currently worrying about right now. In a way, it’s a shame that it takes extreme situations like this to make us realise what’s worth worrying about.
You can do this by listing down on a piece of paper what you’re worrying about. Then, you can start to divide them up into two columns;
- one that reads ‘actionable’
- and one that reads ‘not actionable‘
The ‘not actionable’ list will consist of things that do not have a clear resolution, of things that you can’t change, no matter how much you worry about them. This could be what you think someone thinks of you for example. If you’re trying to make a good impression on someone, you might overthink what signals you’re giving off and be questioning your every move around them. Or, maybe you’ve said something that you regret and think was a big deal during a conversation you’ve had.
These are examples of things that we can find ourselves churning over in our mind for hours on end when really, we’re just creating an environment in our minds for more worry.
If we can differentiate between ‘real’ and ‘silly’ worries we can eliminate a lot of excess stress almost instantly. By using this simple list exercise you can begin to take action right away.
3. Acknowledge the worry
One thing that has helped me stop worrying so much is using the acknowledgement technique.
When you find yourself starting to worry without any prompts, acknowledge the worry in a mindful way. You can do this by saying to yourself, “This is just worry, it’s normal, and it will pass”. By doing so, you can take the power away from the worry before it starts to spiral. This is a key mindfulness technique where we bring awareness to the feeling and situation at hand.
We see the worry for what it is, nothing more, nothing less.
So many of us live on auto-pilot, where we don’t stop and check in with ourselves. We become slaves to our thoughts and our emotions. Because we feel as if we have no control over our thoughts and emotions, we end up becoming more and more anxious and we can even find ourselves in depression when the negative thoughts get too much to bear. Being present in the moment and switching off yesterday’s or tomorrow’s worries is key.
In the end, all we can really do is live in the present moment. We can’t relive 5 years ago, just like we can relive 5 seconds ago. Only right now in this present moment can affect our tomorrow. Everyone else on the planet is in this very moment with you too. So understanding when worrying starts to occur is a key starting point.
We need to start getting to know ourselves better, instead of reaching out to others in desperation. This starts with acknowledgement. When we bring this awareness to the worry when it starts, we can then remind ourselves;
“This is something I do quite a lot, I see it for what it is and I have coped with it many times before.”
Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy. – Leo Buscaglia
4. Has it ever happened before?
So has it ever happened before? A key realisation for me was to come to the conclusion that most of my worries have never materialised in life, or that there has been no real evidence that I could find to suggest I needed to worry about them.
Here’s a snapshot of the categories I’d say my worries have most of the time fallen into. These include ‘real worries’ and the ‘never happened’ segment also includes what I call ‘fake worries’ – the things that we worry about even though we can’t change.
When we find ourselves worrying and worrying, we need to step back and think logically about what we’re worrying about and why. By dividing our worries into two different groups we can quickly see what we can ‘fix’ and what we need to put to rest. If something has never happened before, then logic states that it’s unlikely to happen now.
Equally, if it has happened before, we now have the right information to make sure that it does not happen again, or, we can start to take action based on previous events.
5. Get up and do something
When we begin to spiral into worrying, we can find that we just want to hide ourselves away from the world. A lot of my worries and anxiety lead to me shutting myself away. This is how I spent the vast majority of my teenage years. It became easier to sit in my room, play on my Xbox, or watch my TV than to face life outside of my home.
When I think about it now, I know that I wasted a lot of time because I was so preoccupied worrying about this and that. Of course, I still find myself worrying as anyone else does, but this one technique has helped me to combat going into my shell when it happens.
My advice to you is just to get up and do something. I know that when you’re really worrying so much about every little thing, you just want to hide away and allow yourself to be consumed, but you have to start getting active. This doesn’t have to mean going for a run or going to the gym, this can simply be tackling one little thing that’s been worrying you, or just doing a household chore like the washing.
Just start moving around.
For example, when I find myself going around in circles in my head, thinking about little things that I can’t control, I find myself going insane. At this point, I know I have to get out and do something. This isn’t because I’m ‘trying to take my mind off things’ as such, it’s because I want my brain to be engaged.
I’ve learnt that if the brain isn’t engaged in an activity, it will create an activity to work on itself, like processing information that you wouldn’t normally think is important. However, because you’re not doing anything, you start thinking about these things until they become a ‘worry’, simply because your brain is making it seem like it’s something important to think about.
- sitting around = overthinking
- getting active = mindful flow state
6. You’re going to die
This is a statement that might be a little obvious, and please do not let this come across as morbid. I just want to be real with you. As I’ve got older and realised that I’m not an invincible kid it’s made me see things differently.
The funny thing I found with being a kid is, I always thought that the people around me and people I knew would be around forever. This is because they had always been around and because it’s all I was used to. As you get older, you start to hear and see people you know pass away. I’ve been exposed to more and more death as I’ve moved through my twenties, and not just that of old folk, but people my own age too. It’s funny when you’re told, “Life is short.” As a child, I would just nod and not think too much about the words.
Being exposed to people passing away is something that is completely natural and part of life. So often things feel permanent. We get so used to our routines and the monotony of life that we seem to just forget about death and change in our lives as a whole.
This idea that everyone dies one day is not something you usually think of when you’re a child. Now, I give it more thought. However, not in a worrying way. Instead, I use this thought as motivation to do something with my life or make an impact on someone else’s. By doing this, I know I’ll of done something worthwhile.
So…do you want to live what life you have left worrying? I know I sure as hell don’t. I’m quite a ‘deep person’, and when I get an idea in my head I find it hard to shake. I’m guessing you probably are too because you’re reading about how to stop worrying so much. So when you get the thought of ‘everyone dies one day’, into your thought processes more often, I’m hoping that it will make something inside of you come alive.
I don’t want to spend the next however long I have left worrying about ‘what if’ because one day I’m going to look back and regret worrying so much. One day, I won’t have much time left and I’ll wish I didn’t let my thoughts hold me back. Because I’m dealing with my anxiety, I’m no longer stuck in the moment like many of us find ourselves.
I now look to the future and how I want it to look. I’m taking steps today so that they will pay off later on, and I think this is one mindset we can all use to stop worrying so much.
If you focus on what you want from your life and push yourself to do it, even if you make mistakes along the way, you’ll make progress, and that progress builds your character and makes you stronger.
If you’re struggling with worry right now, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what’s helping in the comments.
And if you really need someone to talk to about your anxiety I recommend contacting the Mind charity here.
Sean C is a writer, passionate about improving one’s self by maintaining healthy habits and doing the things that make life more meaningful.