Worry Free? Yes Please
The average millennial spends 63 full days a year worried and stressed out.
That’s a lot of days where you’re stuck in your head, worrying, afraid that you’re missing out on something—friends, a relationship, opportunities, something good yet seemingly unattainable.
“Some people actively worry about a lot of things—filling up their heads with disastrous scenarios that will never play out. They magnify catastrophe in their minds. Worry overwhelms them so much that it keeps them from actually doing anything about it.”
It’s human nature to worry. We might actually enjoy thinking up hypotheticals in our heads and playing these on repeat, like a bittersweet broken record. Our imaginative sides get the better of us. Like with mindfulness, we can train our brains to worry less—disrupt negative feedback loops where one thought, of something that may never happen or you have no control over, just grows and grows.
Thomas Opping @medium offers us 4 ways to finally stop worrying about ervvyyythang:
🌼 Find your stop-loss point — give worry a limitation. Determine how much things you are worried about are worth to you, and how much psychological turmoil you’re willing to endure for their sake. And what point you stop wasting mental energy on them.
🌼 Acknowledge your worries, and get them out of your head by writing them down. By writing down your worries, you feel as though you’re emptying your brain, and you feel lighter and less tense.
🌼 Shift your worry from the long-term problems to daily routines/actions that will solve the problems. Do one thing every day that brings you closer to solving your perceived problem. Work toward improving the worst-case scenario, which you have already accepted in your mind.
🌼 Interrupt the worry cycle. Find productive activities that can easily distract your thought process. Keep busy.
