I thought worry was a natural part of life, it was in mine. However, lately I have been able to notice this pattern of faulty thinking, and in recognizing it I have been experiencing freedom from worry. And I am growing stronger because of it.
If there is one thing I’ve been known for is that I’m a worrier. I can worry with the best of them. If you look up worry in the dictionary, there’s a picture of me. I don’t know if this is hereditary, or just learned, but my mom was always a worrier. Maybe that’s where I got it from; I don’t know. But I do know I worry a lot, and I also know something else: it never did me one ounce of good.
First of all, all the worrying in the world is not going to change the outcome of something. I used to worry about my kids being safe on their way to school. Of course, I set up rules and provisions to try to keep them safe; I told them not to talk to any strangers, and made sure they didn’t walk alone. I was a proactive parent, and I did what was considered advisable to keep them safe.
So here is the reality, they could head out and someone could call them to their car under the guise of asking for directions or they could look left but forget right and get ran over. My worrying could not stop that and I couldn’t possibly cover everything in all my pre-training.
Fortunately, so far, none of those things have happened. In fact, nothing at all has happened while my kids have walked to school. And I have 5 of them, with the oldest being a sophomore in high school. That’s a lot of uneventful walking to school episodes. This leads me to my second point.
It seems that most of my worries never come to fruition anyway. Wow – it made me start changing my philosophy. I now try to weigh how realistic my fears are to determine if I need to worry about it or not – still in the process of not worrying at all, ok? I got to chance to start this process when my 9-yr old got to have a plane ride from his Sunday school teacher for memorizing bible verses. Now his teacher was a pilot so the chance of anything happening was slim. So in figuring out the odds that something might happen, even though it appeared dangerous, I knew that I didn’t need to worry all that much.
Finally, I do realize that worrying can add problems. I have worked for myself for the last 20 years. This in and of itself can cause worries in riding the income roller coaster. And as we all have found out recently, there are no guarantees and even less so being a small business owner. So money is a big worry – so much so that I can spend hours fretting over the checkbook, checking and rechecking my Quickbooks and wasting time where I could actually be working so as to bring in money. This will actually make my worries come true and be overwhelming in the process. Not good or needed.
What we’ve recently done is my wife has taken over paying the bills, so I can concentrate on income producing activities. She’s not the worrier I am, and even if she does worry about it, it doesn’t detract from the actual goal of making the needed income to pay the bills.
If you want to know how not to worry, try to readjust your thinking in the 3 ways I’ve outlined above. And remember what the Bible says: “Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
Related posts: