Worry certainly sounds like a negative activity, and it is, but when you’re immersed in it, worry feels like the most logical, positive direction. How else can you prevent bad things from happening – or be prepared to deal with them when they do – if you don’t worry about them first? Unfortunately, “bad” things are going to happen regardless of any amount of obsessive thinking you do trying to anticipate, prevent and prepare for them. All worry does is keep you living in a perpetual state of anxiety for no good reason at all, and what kind of a life is that? Claire knows this all too well, whose story I share in my book Overcoming Anxiety, Worry and Fear: Practical Ways to Find Peace.
When Claire got home from work, she picked up the phone to check her messages. Over the past several months, she’d been working on reducing the anxiety this simple act produced. Claire was fearful of the phone. She didn’t like to call and talk to people, and she especially didn’t like picking up her messages. She’d been working through why that was and, as part of the process, had given herself the task of checking the phone each day for messages instead of putting it off for days like she used to.
Relax, she told herself as she picked up the phone and hit the code for messages. They’re just messages. They can’t hurt you. Claire knew her fear of the phone was really a fear of other people’s expectations. Usually, when people left a message, it was either to provide information or to make some sort of request. The information she could deal with; she was working on dealing with the requests. You don’t have to say yes to everything, she reminded herself. For Claire, requests represented a conflict between saying yes and remaining under the radar, going with the flow of others’ expectations, and saying no, making herself much more visible and vulnerable.
Good, only three messages, she thought. You can handle three.
The first was the vet with a reminder she had an appointment in the morning for her cat. Yes, she knew about that one. That was easy; it was information. The second was from a survey calling for the third time that week. This she happily deleted. she could easily say no to this one because the request was from a far-removed, unknown party. The third was from her mother, asking her to call. It was short without any detail.
Why is Mom calling? Claire thought to herself, feeling her anxiety beginning to rise. Don’t panic, she told herself. You don’t know why she called. It doesn’t have to be something negative just because you don’t know. Working to keep her breathing calm and steady, she punched in her mother’s number. There doesn’t have to be a problem. Mom would have left more to the message if there was. Using the timing of the rings to help with her breathing, Claire got the answering machine after the sixth ring. Briefly, she acknowledged getting the call and let her mom know she’d be home the rest of the evening.
She could just be out running an errand, she reminded herself as she felt the familiar knot trying to form in her stomach. Claire put down the phone and started preparing dinner. It wasn’t long before she realized she wasn’t really thinking about dinner; instead, she was still worrying about the phone call. Go ahead and call Julie. If there’s something really wrong, she’ll know.
Her sister answered quickly; she was busy putting her own dinner together. Claire told her about the message and asked if she knew the reason for the call. Julie told her she figured it was about getting Jessie’s new address. Mom was fine. When Julia had talked to her yesterday, Mom said she’d misplaced the notice Jessie had sent out. Julia had admitted she couldn’t remember where she’d put hers either and figured Claire would have it. She did. She gave it to Julie and then waited for her mom to call.
Okay, she concluded after she hung up with Julie. That was okay. Before, she would have put off calling for several days, absolutely terrified of the reason for the call, imagining multiple disastrous scenarios. She would have been embarrassed to admit her fears to Julie and wouldn’t have called her either. And then when she had spoken to her mother, she would have been furious at her for causing a scare over such a little thing. This time they could have a nice, normal conversation without the tension. Yeah, Claire thought to herself, without the tension.
Claire made a conscious decision to write her own script regarding the situation with her mother. She could have quickly fast-forwarded into disaster, propelling herself into full-blown panic about the call, but she didn’t. She stopped, evaluated what she knew, and composed the most probably scenario. When that did not alleviate her worry completely, she sought out additional information by calling her sister, filling in the blanks with knowledge instead of wild speculation.
Anxieties are all about wild speculation. The script they write never has a happy ending. To restore your own sense of peace, calm, and, yes, happiness, you need to stop fears from writing the script of your life. It’s time to Recast Anxiety: Setting the Stage for Peaceful Scenes in Your Life.