Don’t Worry, Be Happy

There was a man who went to the psychiatrist worrying that he was sick. The psychiatrist, through the use of therapy, was able to cleanse the man’s mind of the worries that were making him sick. The man went home feeling so much better.

The next day the man returned to the psychiatrist’s clinic in worse state than when he came the day before. Puzzled, the doctor asked him what the problem was this time. “Doctor,” the man replied, “I am scared. I can’t remember something that I should worry about!”

That’s the way many of us are. We fill our lives with worries about just anything.  Many of our ailments, physical and mental, are due to worries.

Worry fatigues the mind and lowers the body’s resistance to disease. We develop so-called psychosomatic symptoms, the body manifesting the negative thoughts we keep. This type of ailment is often more complex and difficult to cure than purely physical afflictions.

Worry can kill, literally and figuratively. Even before actual sickness can wreck 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 is a well-entrenched habit in us. 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 ensure our own salvation in the hereafter.

Worrying is not a bad thing altogether. We need to worry to move us to do something to enhance ourselves and better our lives. But chronic, senseless worrying is bad. We need 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! 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. And our worrying alone will not change the outcome. If there’s anything we must and can do, let’s act 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. By the time the situation occurs, we will be so exhausted that we won’t be able to deal with it. But if we stop worrying, even if the worst happens, we will have the courage and 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.

But 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. All our efforts spent in worrying is like wastefully tiring our body in the open waters of life and virtually drowning ourselves.

If we learn to be calm and try to live a worry-free life, one day at a time, we will stay afloat even in the midst of turbulence. Our experience of life will be much better overall.