Are You Managing Worry?

This week, let’s talk briefly about WORRY.

As we think about managing stress, staying fresh, avoiding burnout, and all those good things, it’s fair to say that too much worry can take us down hard.

First of all, what is worry?  Since this is a quick article today, we’re not doing a deep-dive, so let’s keep it simple:  worry is anxiety about the future.

Worry is always FUTURE-focused.  It’s impossible to worry about something happening RIGHT NOW.  That’s entirely something else going on, which we can cover in a future article.

But WORRY?  ALWAYS future-focused.

Now, we could say there’s “useful worry” and “toxic worry”.  I hesitate to even use the words “useful” and “worry” in the same sentence!  In fact, this is the first time I’ve used this term useful worry.

But what I’m really talking about is future-based anxiety that is based on a likely or highly probable negative outcome–it’s a reality-based assessment about things not turning out well if you don’t make a course correction.  It’s some healthy forecasting.

This is a GOOD thing to be able to do, and something we all do on a regular basis.  This is an important life skill–to be able to do some effective, reality-based forecasting.

However, the kind of WORRY I’m talking about today is something totally different!

It’s NOT a reality-based assessment of future possibilities.  Rather, it’s what we call “CATASTROPHIC THINKING”—creating catastrophes in our minds, about negative outcomes that have a “low-to-no” probability of ever occurring.

Let’s look at an example.

Example 1  Healthy, reality-based forecasting:  “if I don’t stop overspending, I may not have enough money for vacation” (assuming his math is accurate)

The anxiety that THIS thinking causes if useful, functional, and self-preservational.  Again, some anxiety is HEALTHY, as part of our brain’s survival mechanism to keep us safe, and possibly alive.  Of course, what we DO with that anxiety is the crux of the matter.

Example 2  Catastrophic worry:  “I have a bad feeling that I’m going to get fired.  I won’t be able to handle that!  How will I pay my mortgage?  I’ll probably end up homeless, my wife will definitely leave me, my friends will think I’m a loser . . .” (assuming there’s no evidence that he’s in trouble at work–in fact, he recently had a great performance review!)

The anxiety that THIS thinking causes is not useful at all and potentially harmful, leading to behaviors that move us further away from our goals.

The message for today—SEE THE DIFFERENCE between healthy, reality-based forecasting and catastrophic worry.  The first is based on reality, and has usefulness, and the second is based on misguided anxiety and fear, and has no usefulness whatsoever.

See if you can identify either of these going on in your head this next week. Get good at this type of self-observation. See it as a crucial life skill to build, step-by-step, just like we build any skill.

And we can talk another time about how to deal with worry and convert it into something more useful.  Stay tuned.

Have a great week!

– Sean Cox, Chicago