There is nothing wrong about worrying

By Lionel Wijesiri

I have a niece who was once a habitual worry-wart. Or, in simple terms, an inveterate worrier. If she didn’t have something substantial to agitate about, she would inflate a minor issue.

She could lie awake for hours ruminating about what results she would get from a critical medical test, but she could also spin her mental wheels fretting that she bought the wrong sized hopper pan. And at 3 am., such disparate causes mysteriously provoked equivalent agonies.

Today things are different. She doesn’t worry about worrying any more. She has mastered the art of getting her worries working for her.

Whether you’re such a worrier like my niece was, or someone who rarely loses sleep over those nagging thoughts, only you know. But, let’s face it, we are living in the Golden Age of worry.

Worry is everywhere these days, piling up - more solid, non-bio-gradable worry than most people can dispose of. It’s a kind of metal pollution, and we’re all showing the strain.

The current economy is serving up more than enough big-deal concerns to have us all chewing our fingernails: Can I afford to take a loan to fix my roof? Is my job secure? Will I ever be able to afford to retire? But if you have fallen victim to this hamster wheel, take heart. Even in times as troubling as these, experts say, there are ways to ease your worried mind.

First flicker

Yes, you can turn your worry into work. After all, Benjamin Franklin found electric power at the end of a kite string. James Watt saw steam power in his mother’s tea-kettle. So there is really nothing unusual in finding worry-power in the odds and ends of worries hanging round the house.

Not all worrying is bad. That first flicker can be constructive, if it identifies a threat and leads to problem-solving, goal setting, and acceptance of your limits. When worry sounds a wake-up call to a difficulty that we proceed to resolve, it’s productive rather than toxic, and finite rather than chronic.

For example, suppose you are faced with a shrunken savings account that won’t cover your daughter’s marriage next year, you could become paralysed by fears concerning her response and obsessed with the thought that she’ll end really sad.

That’s toxic worry. Productive worry prods you to consider the situation differently: How can you address the problem? By taking that local temp job awaiting me which will give you enough money? Sell the plot of land for which the prospective buyer is waiting? Now, that is worrying creatively.

When you continually think about the talk that you will be giving next week and imagine many distressing outcomes you are worrying. When a family member is late and you begin to imagine all variety of accidents that may have befallen him, you are worrying. There is nothing that you could do, but you worry anyway. Both are cases of toxic worry.

If you are really worried about an upcoming talk, and determine that it means you have to prepare yourself thoroughly and also talk with few friends in Toastmasters Club, then worry has been useful. When worry helps you plan for an upcoming event by imagining the various scenarios that might come about, it can be helpful.

Human imagination

Worry generally gets a bad rap in modern day. That’s because most of us don’t know how to worry well - using it to manage stress instead of letting it cause more stress. Worry is an adaptive survival function: we use our imaginations to anticipate potential dangers, then develop ways to avoid them. Worry helps keep our loved ones and ourselves alive.

Worry not only helps us anticipate dangers, but it also helps us solve problems. We turn these problems over and over in our minds, examining the various issues from different angles. The process is akin to unravelling a tangled ball of yarn: We pull on a loose thread and untangle part of it, and then it gets stuck so we turn the ball over and find another place where we can unwind it some more. Eventually, if we stick with it, we’ll probably get the thing unravelled.

Worry is a function of the human imagination, the most powerful force on earth, outside nature. Imagination is what most differentiates us from all other creatures. It is what allowed us to survive our prey-animal heritage on the African savannah and evolve into the dominant species on earth.

The major problem with worry is that it can easily degrade from a problem-solving function into a bad habit, through which we obsess about what we don’t want to have happen. We can become hypnotised by our fears and end up feeling unable to pull our inner gaze away from all the things we dread - as if we were staring into the eyes of a cobra.

Research shows that over 85 percent of things people worry about never happen. At some deep, unconscious level of the brain, it may conclude that these things did not happen specifically because we worried about them!

No more problem

Coming back to my niece, the other day I was having a chat with her to find out how she overcame her worrying problem. “It’s not a problem any more but a power,” she said, “like steam power which works only when you put a lid on it. I discovered this by accident the day my son got his driving licence.

I’ve already was having my share of worries during that time going to and from the pathetic state of our balancing our income and expenditure budget, the funny noise the washing machine kept making, my younger daughter’s teeth problem and my husband’s waistline, I just hadn’t got around to worrying about my son’s learning to drive. So it wasn’t until they pulled away from the garage, my boy at the wheel, his father at his side, that my real worry hit me.”

“I went back to start my chores, concentrating heavily on faulty brakes, tyre blow-outs, and other things that could happen. Before I’d run through them all, I’d mopped and cleaned all the floors. Then tensely I began to review all car accidents I’d heard or read about, as I cleaned three closets and my husband’s cloth drawers.

Then I turned to special hazards like drunken drivers, reckless three-wheeler tipper drivers and careless pedestrians while I was cleaning our garden.

When my husband and son came back safe and secure, I had an immaculate house, nice garden and no memory at all of having done the work,” “Wow, the whole place looks cool,” my husband and added,” it’s so sweet of you. What really got into you?”

I would have told him that it is the power of worry. That means, if we can get our worries working for us, instead of the other way around, we may eventually find ourselves having less worry to work with. But let’s not worry about that until the time comes.