Does worry keep you up at night or interfere with your daily activities? Doubts and fears are a natural part of life. However, they don’t have to diminish your happiness and productivity. Many adults have found relief through making positive changes in their thinking has helped them to stop worrying and enjoy more. Here are 10 amazing methods on how to worry less and smile more.
1. Fact: worry is literally a killer.
Not only does this habit of worrying sap the joy from life, but you can LITERALLY ‘worry yourself into the ground’.
In fact, many doctors from all round the world believe that worry is the cause of ALL disease and illness even the infectious ones.
The link between the body and the mind is THAT strong. Another way of looking at it:
Worry is the number-one ‘silent killer’ today. This might sound ‘dramatic’, but just THINK about it for a second there is a definite, known link between stress of the mind and resulting stress of the body.
This is so obvious that it hardly bears mentioning! And the fact is, we’re ALL prey to the nasty side-effects of a worried mind unless and until we learn how to extricate ourselves from its clutches and figure out how to relax, recover, rest, and ENJOY ourselves.
Because of this definite need, I’m going to give you some tried-and-true, real-life techniques for solving your ‘worry habit’ right now … … so you can get on with LIVING your life, not just WORRYING about it.
And no, there’s no ‘hokey New Age nonsense’ or advice for ‘concentrating your energies on a candle flame’ and ‘harnessing your chakras’ to be found here Like all of the advice at lovefindsitsway.com, the facts in this article are exactly that: FACTS.
They come from REAL people, REAL studies, REAL scientists, and REAL information that’s solidly based on proven, factual results.
So you can stop crossing your fingers and ‘hoping for the best’, because that’s just plain UNNECESSARY.
After all, you don’t need to make wishes when you’ve got TRUTH on your side. (You might also like to know that these techniques on how to worry less are all, each one, proven methods for scientifically, emotionally, psychologically, and physically reducing worry on ALL levels.
So no matter how your stress manifests itself, you can knock it on the head starting now.) So let’s get on with it! Ten ways on how to worry less and kill your worry habit.
2. Worry-Killer Number One: Stop Hiding and Spear-Tackle It Head On
For most people, worrying is ‘addictive’. It’s not like they enjoy doing it more like, they don’t know how to stop doing it.
They want to, but they can’t! And here’s why Worrying is a very AMORPHOUS pastime.
We know ‘something’s wrong’ but because it’s our instinctive reaction to avoid what doesn’t feel good, we try not to LOOK TOO CLOSELY at whatever it is that’s bugging us.
It’s the ‘I’m just gonna hide under some coats, and hope that, somehow, everything turns out okay’ methodology.
3. So what ends up happening is that makes you to start worrying.
- our minds tell us that something is wrong
- our bodies release a tide of stress hormones due to the ‘bad thing’ our mind is reminding us about
- our stomachs knot up
- we avoid thinking too hard about the problem, since it makes us feel so bad
- but BECAUSE we never look closely at the issue, IT NEVER GOES AWAY.
And therefore, we never progress past this level. We end up stuck in that fog of stress hormones and vague, nameless, free-floating anxiety.
Here’s the deal with worrisome issues: Most of the time, they’re like slugs. Shine a light too closely on them, and they wrinkle up, shrink, and die.
To deal with your worry habit and worry problem – WHATEVER it is that’s worrying you – you’ll feel a lot better a lot faster if you’d just tackle it head-on.
Really look at the issue under a MAGNIFYING GLASS. Analyze the heck out of it.
Figure out what’s really going on. Get the DETAILS. The more, the better.
Seriously If something is bothering you, that’s your signal that you need more detail.
So get a pencil and some paper, and map out as much detail about the issue as you possibly can. Knowledge is the cure-all for worry!
4. Ask yourself these four things to stop your worrying habit.
- What are you worried about, exactly?
- What is the cause of your worry?
- What is the absolute worst thing that could come to pass as a potential result?
- What would you do if this thing ever DID come to pass?
- What is that inner critic in you that is stopping you from enjoying your life.
There. Now you have a plan. You know EVERYTHING there is to know about the situation and you know what to do about it, if what you’re worrying about ever did come to pass.
But wait! Here’s an INCREDIBLY important fact that you must not overlook.
The secret key to the lasting success of this method is: You’ve got to WRITE IT DOWN to stop worrying.
If you don’t WRITE IT DOWN, your brain will keep a ‘log’ of the problem inside itself, and it will feel the need to keep reminding you of what you were worrying about.
It’s a survival mechanism but a wearisome one. If you want your brain to be quiet and let you relax by controlling your emotions and stop worrying (which is EXACTLY what you want!), you’ve got to show it that it doesn’t need to hang onto that information any more.
You’ve got to PROVE to it that it can ‘let the issue go’ and relax. And I’ll tell you right now: the ONLY way to do that is to write it all down, and then keep that piece of paper somewhere. Stick it in a drawer, I don’t care.
Just write it down and hang onto it if you really want to know how to worry less – because otherwise your brain will NEVER leave you alone, and your worry will STAY WITH YOU.
In a nutshell
As long as you:
- Analyze the problem.
- Think of something constructive you can do about it.
- Write it down.
You will worry no more!
5. Worry-Killer Number Two: Quit Stewing About the Future and Live Only In This 24 Hour Period.
Most of us spend our lives worrying about events that almost certainly will never come to pass. It’s true.
It’s even a law of nature! According to the Law of Averages, most of what you’re worrying about will never, ever come to pass. And yet we spend our precious days fretting about things that probably will never happen!
In his book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie suggests that we live in ‘day-tight compartments1 ’: to not worry about the future, but to concern ourselves only with what happens TODAY.
It’s sound advice. Indeed, there’s even biblical precedent: in the Lord’s Prayer, we say, ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Not tomorrow’s bread. Not next week’s bread. Not enough bread so that if we lose our jobs we will be okay until we get new ones. Just enough bread for today.
That’s this twenty-four-hour period right now, which is – after all – the only one we’ll ever have, the only one that we can do anything to influence, and the only one that matters.
Next time you start to worry about what might happen in the future, no matter how grim and scary those worries sound right now, resist the urge to concern yourself with them.
They almost definitely will NEVER come to pass – even if right now, it seems likely that they will!
6. Here’s an example from my own personal life:
Recently, a friend of mine was in dire concern for her job. A single mom, she has two small children (one of whom suffers chronic ill health.)
She needs her job not only to pay the bills, but also because it permits her to be at home with her children to take care of them.
A colleague of hers told her that the company had made a ‘stonking great loss’ in the last fiscal year, and a lot of cutbacks would be made – especially concerning the exact department that she worked for.
So she made an appointment to see her boss to discuss the security of her job but he was away at a conference and could not be reached for at least seven days.
At the same time, she received notification her rent had gone up by so much that she was no longer able to pay it – she would have to find a new house.
And just two days later, she found a lump in her breast! Three big problems to worry about. Three big problems that she was sure would come to pass.
She knew her department was getting ‘cut back to the bone’. She had the letter from her landlord in her hand. And she could feel the lump with her own fingers. She called me up in tears, worried ‘half to death’ about what to do.
I suggested she sit on it: to not worry about ‘what to do next’, but to wait and see – and until she knew FOR SURE about her problems, to not even THINK about them but carry on as if her job was secure, her home was still her own, and her body free of lumps.
One month later, she’d practically forgotten that any of these ‘terrible problems’ had even existed!
- She’d received notification from her boss that she was considered a ‘key player’ in her department and that her job was absolutely secure.
- Her landlord decided at the last minute to sell her house to another letting agency, who continued to rent it to her at the original low rate.
- She received a lump sum of money from a lottery winning that, while not big enough to retire on, certainly was enough to ensure financial stability in the case of any more unexpected price hikes.
- Her doctor aspirated the lump and confirmed that it was a ‘benign fatty lump’ and nothing to worry about.
Indeed, if I hadn’t reminded her that, just one month ago, she was weeping and quaking over the imminent loss of her job, house, and perhaps even her life, she would never have remembered that she’d been in such dire straits!
And all over what? ‘Problems’ that never even came to pass.
Don’t waste your precious life worrying about what will probably never happen.
Concern yourself only with what is concrete, right now, right in front of you, EXISTING. Everything else doesn’t merit thinking about.
Listen to Dale Carnegie. Listen to the Lord’s Prayer. Live in ‘day-tight compartments’. And concern yourself only with today’s bread.
7. Worry-Killer Number Three: Get Busy! Occupy Your Mind and Body.
Idleness of any sort creates a fertile bed for worry to put down roots in. And the key to reducing worry, no matter how dire, is to GET busy and STAY busy.
The more work you can do that occupies your mind and/or your body, the more worry-free you will become.
This is one of the reasons that break-up experts (those qualified in coaching others on how to get over a broken heart) insist that their clients take NO sick leave and NO ‘compassionate leave’ after a break-up.
Indeed, they require their clients to do as much work as they can: to work at least eight hours every day so that they can TAKE THEIR MINDS OFF what has happened.
Here’s why this works so incredibly well: Because your mind cannot think of two things at once.
It’s literally impossible. Try it: try to worry about nuclear war while also thinking about how much you’d like a donut right now. You’ll see that it literally cannot be done.
And this is why you must OCCUPY your mind if you want to give worry the boot!
Worry is nothing more than a fretting of the mind. It’s not constructive. It doesn’t produce ways to deal with what you’re worrying about.
It simply pumps your body full of stress chemicals, exhausts you, and increases your risk of illness. To un-fret your mind, you’ve got to OCCUPY it.
So start working harder than you have ever worked before at any project you like, whether that’s your normal job, writing a novel, organizing the best party your friends have ever seen, or painting the outside of your house.
Pick a project, and get busy with it. You can also focus on occupying your BODY: physical exhaustion is an excellent cure-all for worry.
Exercise uses up the nervous energy and puts your attention on the here-and-now: it’s difficult to stew about stuff when you’re right bang in the middle of a squash game or a Bikram yoga class!
The key to reducing worry is to stay busy. The more occupied your mind and your body is, the less possible it is to worry. If you are truly busy, it’s actually IMPOSSIBLE to worry.
Remember, an idle mind is a worried mind. If your life is troubling you, busy-ness is the key to keeping focused on the good stuff, boosting your self-esteem, and ignoring the worry.
8. Worry-Killer Number Four: Feed and Rest Yourself Well.
Your mind and your body are irresistibly interlinked. Your cells eavesdrop on your thoughts and your mind snoops on your cells.
Whatever’s happening in your mind, your body will soon take on board; and vice versa.
How many times have you had a stressful day at work, and developed a headache, eyestrain, or a migraine as a result?
And how many times have you felt incredibly hungry, tired, or cold in your BODY and developed a nasty bad mood to go along with it? See?
Your mind and body are interlinked. They copy each other. You’ve got to keep one happy to keep the other happy too.
So seeing as I’ve given you killer tips for worry-killing in the mind, it’s time now to focus on the other side of the coin: What’s happening in your BODY. It’s incredibly easy to become stressed, anxious, and worried if your body isn’t feeling good.
And two of the MOST COMMON ways of allowing our bodies to get ‘run-down’ is by exhausting them and letting them go hungry.
9. Here’s the deal on how to worry less, smile more and live more.
To avoid worry BEFORE it takes root, you’ve got to do two things:
- Take plenty of rests throughout the day.
- Make sure you feed yourself well.
It’s no use waiting until after you get incredibly tired, grumpy, and hungry (or ‘hangry’, as I call it – a combination between ‘angry’ and ‘hungry’!)
That would be putting the cart before the horse. Instead, you’ve got to take PRE-EMPTIVE ACTION and put forth effort to take good care of yourself before these things happen.
Dale Carnegie, again from How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, suggests that you make an effort to rest BEFORE you get tired by taking ‘micro-breaks’ throughout the day and napping at least once a day.
In fact, according to Dale, it’s more effective to sleep only six hours a night and nap for one – a total of seven hours’ sleep – than it is to sleep for eight solid hours throughout the night!
As a long-time cat-napper myself, I heartily concur: taking naps before you get to the stage where you really, really need one is a seriously effective way to stay on top of your workload and your life.
So take naps wherever possible. If you can’t nap during the workday (most people can’t, for obvious reasons), nap when you get home, before the evening meal.
You will wake up refreshed, and less likely to overeat through exhaustion.
As far as food itself goes, this is an important part of NOT WORRYING also.
Extreme hunger is a definite stress to your body – and if you go without food too long, you WILL get to the stage where the whole world seems evil and ‘out to get you’.
It’s pretty hard not to worry when you feel this way. So try not to let yourself get to the ‘If I don’t get a sandwich soon I’m going to bite somebody’s arm off’ stage, okay?
Look: I’m not saying physical hunger is a bad thing. It’s good to feel hungry at least once a day.
I make sure I feel hungry before I eat anything, personally. As far as I’m concerned, eating when I’m not hungry is just pushing more junk into my body that I don’t need.
In fact, if you never let yourself feel hungry, it probably means you’re EATING TOO MUCH, TOO OFTEN … … and are probably getting pretty FAT as a result!
But you don’t ever want to get to the ‘hangry’ stage where you feel frantic, irritable, and ready to PUNCH the cafeteria worker if he doesn’t let you come to the head of the line.
Hungry: good. Hangry: bad. (Note: prolonged hungriness will ABSOLUTELY lead to a state of frenetic anxiety where you really, truly feel as though the world is about to cave in.
If you get hungry enough, you will start to worry. It’s just the way humans are.)
Obviously, to avoid worry, you must keep yourself well-fed!
10. Here’s what that looks like in the real world.
- At least two solid meals a day and at least one snack.
- A plenitude of real food: less stuff-out-of-packages, more stuff-from-nature.
- Lots of water.
- A good balance of protein, fat, and carbohydrate. You need all three for a healthy body and a healthy, worry-free mind.
Bear in mind, this is the MINIMUM.
As far as food goes, ‘more’ isn’t necessarily ‘better’ – you can definitely overdo it, and then you’ll REALLY have something to worry about! but you’ve got to make sure you eat to at least within a stone’s throw of these guidelines to ensure your body and mind stay happy and worry-free.
I will stop here. If you loved reading this 10 powerful steps on how to worry less and live more than please do not forget to share and comment your thoughts on this amazing article.
