The Recipe For Countering Worry And Anxiety

Most people are besieged by worries, day in and day out. How do we deal with them? Can they actually be gotten rid of? Is it possible to once and for all stop worrying? Of course it is.

Far too many folks spend their nights in bed before going to sleep, replaying the day's tapes, sometimes the same old tapes they've been playing every night for years: worrying about losing their job, worrying about getting sick, worrying about getting old, worrying about failing at school or work, worrying about being rejected by a loved one, worrying about how you're going to resolve some overwhelming situation or fix some overwhelming problem.

Worry is expecting negative things to happen. It is pessismism with an emotion attached, that emotion being: anxiety. Worry, then, is pessimism plus anxiety.

Hypothetically, let's say for just a moment that we have no control over our lives. (This is the farthest thing from the truth, but let's just suppose for a moment…) What's worrying going to change. If life is just a random stream of meaningless coincidences, the wouldn't worrying only make the undesirable more unpleasant?

Wouldn't a positive attitude make the ride through random circumstance more pleasurable at least? Even if we had no control over our lives, we still have choice: the choice to be hung up with anxiety over the next negative thing coming our way, or the choice to turn away from it and face whatever may come openly, courageously, and with integrity.

But we do have control in our lives, and lots of it. We are not powerless at all. In fact, we have so much power that we can create negative situations and circumstances simply by worrying about the possibility of them happening. Now, that's self-sabotage if ever it existed.

Behind every worry is a fear. Identify the fear behind the worry and you're more than halfway to diffusing it. Next time you're worrying about something, ask yourself - what am I afraid of? Then, to diffuse the fear you reveal - recognize it for the illusion that it is. Our fears are usually "future-based", meaning that we usually fear something that has not happened yet. Therefore, we're fearing something that doesn't exist. How ridiculous is that?

Fear of abandonment, for example, means that we have something we're afraid of losing. But how much do we really have it if all our attention is caught up in the possibility of losing it. We're already losing it that way. Losing something we have. Instead appreciate what you have - feed it your positive attention free from fear of loss, and it's probably not going anywhere.

The saddest part about worry is that, in worrying we live through the event we anticipate with such anguish before it ever actually happens. We distinguish the possibility of a good thing happening with worry about it going bad. And we extinguish good things in our lives worrying about them going bad just the same. Imagine if an athlete before every game worried that his team was going to lose. How much help do you think that athlete would be at getting his team to win?

The alternative to worry is to trust that nothing is "written in stone" until it happens. And if you have time to worry about something that hasn't yet happened, you definitely, absolutely still have time to keep that thing from happening (or if not, then at least transmute it from a negative experence to a positive one). How do you do this?

By replacing the worry with anticipation. Anticipation is expecting positive things to happen. Anticipation is optimism with an emotion attached, that emotion being: joy. Anticipation is optimism plus joy. This is the recipe for countering worry.

How do you handle worry? Replace it with anticipation. Don't just hope for the best. Plan for it - in your expectations.