Does Worrying Help?

A man went to the psychiatrist, worrying that he was sick. The psychiatrist, through the use of therapy, cleansed the man’s mind of the worries that were making him sick. And the man went home feeling so much better.

But the next day the man returned to the psychiatrist’s clinic, in more trouble than when he came the day before. Puzzled about the patient’s unexpected reappearance, the doctor asked him what was the problem this time. “Doctor,” the man replied, “I am scared. I can’t remember what it was that I should worry about!”

Many of us are like that man. We fill our lives with worries about just anything. Many of our ailments, whether physical or mental, are due to worries. Worrying tires the mind and lowers the body’s resistance to disease.

With a tired mind so-called psychosomatic symptoms can develop. It’s the way our body manifests the negative thoughts we keep. Psychosomatic ailments are often more complex and difficult to cure than purely physical afflictions.

Worry can kill, literally and figuratively. Even before actual sickness can begin to wreck the body of a habitual worrier, he already suffers enough emotional agonies, his life being a chain of apprehensions and fears. But why do we worry?

We just can’t help it. Worrying seems to be a well entrenched habit in modern humans. Since childhood we’ve been trained to worry about anything: how to improve our grades, how to be better than the neighbor’s child, how to keep our life in balance, how to ensure our own salvation in the hereafter.

Worrying is not a bad thing altogether. Sometimes we need to worry to prod us to do something crucial for ourselves, to make our life better. But chronic, senseless worrying is bad. We just have to break the habit if we have to live healthy, satisfying lives.

It’s not easy to break a long-standing habit. Habits die hard; but they won’t go away if we don’t start doing something about them. And like breaking any bad habit, we have got to start conquering our worries at some point.

The right time is right now! There’s no better time. Now, worrying may actually help us here — we can worry that if we wait for another time we may never get to do it at all.

We can start by deciding to make this day one worry-free day for us. Once a worrisome thought comes to mind, let’s think that it will turn out in either one of only two possibilities: it may happen or it may not. If we are worried about an impending situation, either it will come to pass or it won’t; our worrying alone will not change the possible outcome that we’re worried about.

If there’s anything we must and can do, let’s move at once and do it. If there’s none, worrying will only make us too weak to cope with the situation should things turn out as we fear they will, but by the time the situation occurs, we will be so exhausted that we won’t be able to deal with it. If we stop worrying, even if the worst happens, we will have an able mind and the energy to handle it properly.

There’s no sense in thinking that things cannot go right unless we worry about them. It’s quite similar to swimming. When we are so anxious to stay afloat in the water, we’d flap our arms wildly and the panicky effort makes us take on some more body weight. Then we begin to sink instead of float.

Once we learn to let go and relax, that’s when it begins to work. That’s how swimming is learned, whether in the swimming pool or in the sea of life.

Wasting our vital energies in worrying is like needlessly tiring our body in the open waters of life, and virtually drowning ourselves in the process. We need to learn to be calm and try to live a worry-free life, one day at a time. And we are far more likely to stay afloat even amidst the roughest currents.

Very, very rarely does worrying help. And when so, all it does is prompt us to do something concrete and constructive. Which means we may actually skip the worrying part and go straight into taking positive action, if there is anything that can be done.

(E-MAIL: [email protected])