Letting Go of Worry

What are you trying to avoid in your life? Does worry take up a big part of your waking hours or, perhaps, your sleeping hours? What we are talking about does have a name, and maybe it is time to redirect the energy drain known as “worry.”

Most of us try to avoid certain things in life – poverty, depression, unhappiness, stress, illness and pain, to name just a few. It makes sense to want to avoid these things as much as possible. The challenge comes when seeking avoidance becomes a primary motivation. Some people spend an enormous amount of time worrying about how to avoid or about how to cope IF these situations do occur. It becomes the first thoughts when waking up and the last thoughts before going to sleep – if one can actually get to sleep.

Just by spending that much time worrying, we are pretty much eliminating the possibility of feeling happy. We are also elevating our stress levels, thereby weakening our immune systems. Ironically, this just makes us even more susceptible to illness and pain – some of those things we are trying to avoid. Melancholy and depression can easily follow. And, if we feel this badly, we probably aren’t going to be doing very well at work or school, either. All of our energies go into worrying about every little thing that MIGHT happen, and we have no energy to actually go and do something about it.

The fact is, we move toward and become like what we think about. If we spend most of our time worrying about something, we shouldn’t be too surprised when it shows up in our lives.

Someone once called worry “interest paid on trouble before it comes due.” Now, you wouldn’t think of doing this with your money, would you? So why in the world would you do it with something far more precious than money – your time, your health and your very life?

So ask yourself, for every minute you spend worrying, what else could you be thinking about, what could you be planning, what challenges could you be out solving, instead?