We seem to be wired to worry. And the older we get, sometimes, the more we tend to worry. Common worries range from family and friends, to work and money, to the state of the economy and the country.
There is a good reason behind all of this worrying. Our earlier ancestor’s survived because they worried. They figured out the worse case scenarios and how to get around them, so if bad times did occur, the worriers tended to survive.
Today in our modern world, worry doesn’t carry as much benefit. In fact, it can negatively affect our health and even the health of those around us. It might help you to know that recent research has figured out that 85 percent of the things that we worry about never come to pass. In the cases where a negative outcome did occur, a whopping 79 percent of people say that they handled the situation better than they expected.
Here are some tips on how to worry less.
Make a list of all of your worries. This might seem counter productive, but things sometimes seem less scary on paper.
Next, divide those worries into the ones you can do something about and the ones in which you really have no control. Believe it or not, there are very few worries in which you can’t do something, no matter how small, to lessen the chances of it happening.
For example, let us say a big worry of yours is that you will get breast cancer. You can face that worry by getting tests and doing what you can to eliminate your risk factors. You still may get it anyway, in which case, there was nothing else you can do.
Of the worries that you can’t act upon, keep tracking them over the course of a couple of weeks. How many of them came true? Probably not many if any.
When a new worry comes to mind, don’t avoid it but either mentally scribble it out (or draw a red “X” over it, or do the same but on paper. This allows your mind to acknowledge the worry and do something about it.