How to Worry. . .Effectively
Because the advice of "not worrying" is not working
If you’re expecting a holiday-themed post, sorry to disappoint.
But don’t worry — because this piece is about. . .not worrying. 😏
Or more accurately—it’s about how to worry effectively, without getting captivated and controlled by your fears (since some level of caution is prudent and does, in fact, help you avoid trouble. . .).
We all do it.
We all stress about the “What Ifs”, the “What coulds”, and the “What shoulds”.
Here’s my step-by-step take on how to handle worry 👇
Note, this is meant to be useful for the 95% range of ordinary human experience. If you are currently experiencing a profound mental health crisis or identify with feelings of complete hopelessness, talk to someone who cares about you or a mental health professional ASAP.
Step 1: Identify the Feeling
Emotions like worry or fear serve as signals, indicating that something significant is happening internally or in our environment.
Recognizing these signals is crucial for managing them effectively.
Therefore, begin by consciously noticing and identifying when you are experiencing feelings of anxiety, worry, or fear.
Then, notice what kind of multimodal sensations come up.
Pay attention to where your thoughts go, and verbalize them from a meta perspective.
“I am noticing that I just had a thought about. . .”
“I’m seeing an image of. . .”
“The movie scene playing in my head is. . .”
Scan your body for any tense sensations and trapped emotions.
If an emotion becomes overwhelming, take a few moments to breathe through it, so that you can get into a resourceful state of mind, before opening the analytical hood and thinking your way through it.
The goal here is to turn on your inner Observer and pull yourself out of the river of consciousness.
You want to create space between the thing stimulating you and your knee-jerk reaction to it, noticing your flow of thoughts, without impulsively zooming into them.
Step 2: Categorize Your Fear(s)
Regardless of how unique your particular situation may be, the core fear driving it is not.
We can group all of the things that people worry about into a handful of categories.
While this may be the first time you are worrying about the specific features of whatever circumstance you’re in right now, it’s unlikely that this is the first time you’ve dealt with a situation of this kind before.
By homogenizing the fear you can tap into more resources, since, by way of association, you’ll notice patterns of success that you or others have previously deployed.
Here are some non-exhaustive categories:
Fear of Bodily Harm:
Description: Worries related to physical injury, illness, or death.
Examples: Fear of accidents, health anxieties, concerns about safety in different environments.
Fear of Loss of Relationships:
Description: Concerns about losing connections with loved ones, friends, or social status.
Examples: Fear of breakups, friendship conflicts, social isolation.
Fear of Loss of Property:
Description: Anxiety over losing material possessions or financial security.
Examples: Worries about theft, job loss, financial instability.
Fear of Negative Sensory Experiences:
Description: Fear of experiencing unpleasant physical sensations or emotional states.
Examples: Fear of pain, discomfort, loud noises, or overwhelming situations.
Fear of Failure or Underachievement:
Description: Anxiety about not meeting personal or societal expectations.
Examples: Career-related fears, academic pressures, fear of not achieving personal goals.
Fear of the Unknown or Uncertainty:
Description: Worry about unpredictable future events or lack of control.
Examples: Fear of change, indecision about major life choices, existential anxieties.
Fear of Rejection or Judgement:
Description: Anxiety about being negatively evaluated or not accepted by others.
Examples: Social anxiety, fear of public speaking, concern about peer opinions.
Consider these categories as archetypes or templates.
Each template already has an archetypical coping solution. There is a general story or structure of overcoming that you can instill within yourself for each of these.
For each bucket, you will prepare a recyclable strategy that can be tailor-fit to your own situation.
Step 3: Build Recyclable Strategies Based on Worst Possible Scenarios
Each of the above categories has a corresponding pathway to peace — a resonative mindset that will dissipate the fear’s emotional thrust.
The task at hand is to identify core ideas and values that diffuse each of the fears for you.
If you can diffuse the fear in its extreme form, working through its lower strength doses will be a piece of cake.
Make sure you are in a sufficiently reflective and mentally “safe” state before attempting any of this. I would only go through this process if you are in a state of prayer (religious), generally consider yourself resilient, or are in the presence of a 100% emotionally supportive person (like a professional). It should go without saying that if you are having any thoughts of self-harm, stop reading and seek help immediately. You are responsible for your own well-being.
The sub-steps are:
Pick a fear category
Imagine the worst possible case that presents this fear in its most terrifying form**
Run the script in your mind of “Can I handle this scenario? YES and Here’s Why:”
Force yourself to discover the Why
When you find that Why, record it for future use
**Again, do this relative to what you can reasonably handle today - don’t push yourself too far beyond what your current capabilities allow. The goal is to stretch yourself and build your muscle over time. Don’t tear anything!
Here are some examples of what this looks like for me.
Example 1
Category: Fear of Bodily Harm
Worst Case Imagination: What would it be like if I were gruesomely tortured? Like the types of things they did to martyrs or prisoners of war. . .
That strikes me as terrifying, but . . . 👏 “Can I handle this scenario? YES and Here’s Why:”
🔍
What, exactly, about this scenario scares me? Is it the immediate experience of intense pain? Or the fact that my body would be permanently changed in some way? That “I” would no longer be the same?
Say, I become permanently disfigured. How would I process this new reality? I would certainly expect to experience heavy and profound grieving at first. I would have to recalibrate my go-forward perception of every interaction with people and the environment, essentially from scratch.
But eventually, this novelty would wear off, and I would “adapt” in some way. Something else has to happen after the grieving. Life goes on and everything becomes “old news”. What might that path to acceptance look like?
Unless I’m completely bed-ridden and immobilized for the remainder of my years, there is still something that I may like to do. There will be some activities or experiences that I will have preference for over others. I could still Love other people. God will be with me regardless.
What if I’m having trouble identifying any apparent “silver lining” to all this? Well, then it’s helpful for me to remember that as with all physical things, my current state of suffering will be TEMPORARY.
So what reasons—despite fearing that extreme situation—do I have for believing that I would be OK?
If I’m still alive, I’ll would be able to enjoy the base pleasure of free will—choosing option A vs option B and judging what the “best decision” is in whatever circumstance comes my way.
If there is some suffering that is not immediately remediable, I can take comfort in that Death itself will ultimately remedy it. Even the worst possible things in life are, ultimately, temporary.
^I will store these insights into a recyclable strategy I can use later when confronted with my ordinary life worries
Example 2
Category: Fear of Loss of Relationships
Worst Case Imagination: Everyone I love abandons me. I am alone. No one wants to talk to me. Everyone runs away immediately upon sight. 😱
That would be very numbing, but. . . 👏 “Can I handle this scenario? YES and Here’s Why:”
🔍
What, exactly, about this scenario disturbs me? Is it that I would feel bad / pity / shame about myself? Is it that I would miss the opportunity to have deep connections and conversations with others? That I would lose the opportunity to create more beautiful memories of laughter and love with others?
Let’s say I find myself in this psychological dessert. With no ability to communicate with anyone else. What do I have left? I still have my relationship with God. I have my relationship with myself. And maybe my dog will still like me 😄. I can still learn, grow, and improve myself. I can build thing. I can do other, non-people related things.
Further, such a scenario seems essentially impossible these days, since the internet exists, and I could always interact with others via written medium (as we are doing now 🙂). But let’s say the internet goes down, or somehow I lose access to it. Well, there a ton of books in my backlog that I would love to read.
And regardless, even if everyone hated me, it’s still an essential part of human nature that people want to alleviate their own suffering and that they want to be loved. So I could still do good for others, irrespective of their response to me. And in all likelihood, the natural flow of these things is that they would want to reciprocate at least in some manner, anyway. i.e. How disgusted can you truly be with someone who has your genuine best interest in mind?
What are the recyclable insights here?
I’ll always have relationship with God and myself, and this is something no one can take away from me.
If the people dimension of life gets completely removed, there are still plenty of things to do.
It’s hard to imagine, even in theory, how the worst case scenario could be possible under any circumstance anyway, given what I have observed and currently understand about human nature.
All relationships will eventually come to an end anyway (at least for this side of the grave. . .)—the “suffering” of the situation temporary.
These examples should be enough to give you an idea to go through whatever fears you think are most relevant to your current situation.
While in no way do I want to experience the worst case scenarios I’ve imagined above (though isolation from a increasingly crazy world, does sound appealing at times. . . 🙂) , I do feel more at peace with them now, on the other side of having gone through these steps.
And each time I go through such an exercise, the underlying fear becomes even less captivating, via the implied systemic desensitization that is involved here.
Before we move onto the next Step, let’s note some of the reframes that can be used to diffuse any fear (you can notice some of the commonality in the above examples).
All suffering is temporary. Like the wind. Here in one moment, gone the next.
You can use this reframe, whether you’re an atheist or you believe in continuity of consciousness beyond this immediate “life” (heaven, life after death, etc.)
For the atheist, simply embrace that, according to your worldview, when all is said and done, there will only be Nothing. There will be no scars… no memories… no trace of any of the suffering you experienced. As bad as something is, it will ultimately make no difference to you, because there won’t be any “you” to experience or remember it.
This is a traditional nihilism. Not really that consoling, admittedly. But if one were consistent in believing this world view, then there’s really no reason to be sad or angry, with existential angst about anything.
“But I didn’t get what I wanted.” You’re not going to get what you want anyway, since you will dissolve into nothingness, so why express nay preference for the present moment, which you know will inevitably vanish into the abyss, no matter what you do?
For the religious person who believes in eternal life. there is a positive nihilism. As time goes to infinity 🕰️ ♾️ the significance of any piece of suffering goes to 0—exponentially so, when considering that the afterlife is occuring in a state of perfect Love, harmony, and perfection.
To give you a concrete thought experiment for this point, imagine that you’ve lived 1,000,000,000 years of pure bliss in heaven. At this point in your 1 billion years of life, how much would you care that some parts of your ~80 years on earth (wayyy back when) were bad?
Another way to think about it is, would you accept the following deal 👇:
You will live the rest of your life in pure ecstasy and bliss. Perfect joy and peace. You just have to agree to experience 1 nanosecond of terrible suffering first. Would you accept this?
Regardless of your worldview and whether you find yourself in a good situation or a bad one, remember: This too shall pass.
You can lose nearly everything, but there are some things that can never be taken away from you.
Your will. In any moment, you have some decision you can make. Some choice X vs choice Y that you can exercise judgment on.
Your thoughts. Similarly, you can always think whatever you want and no one can force you to think against your will (Communist brainwashing techniques aside 😄). And if for some reason you can’t think, you wouldn’t be consciously aware of your inability to think, and hence wouldn’t be able to “care” about that fact.
Your connection to Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, and your ability to Love.
Step 4: Identify the Worst Plausible Scenario and Plan How You Would Address It
You’ve thought through the general categories of fear.
You identified recyclable strategies for each fear archetype.
Now, go back to the concrete situation you’ve been feeling anxious about.
Remember the core fear(s) that you’ve noticed at work within it. Do any of the strategies that help you handle the worst possible scenario for that fear apply here?
Realistically, your situation will NOT materialize into one of the theoretically worst case scenarios (i.e. it’s unlikely that you’re about to be tortured or have everyone whom you love abandon you).
So then, consider what the worst plausible scenario might be. How does it compare to the worst possible scenario that you already thought about in the last step?
Maybe it’s just that you would get fired from your job. Or that you would face public embarrassment for some unintended misstep.
As unpleasant as those situations might be, you should notice that they are an order of magnitude better than the grim, worst case scenarios you thought of above.
The plausible scenario should be much easier to think through and navigate, now that you’ve done the work of visualizing success in the worst possible scenario.
So then, create the action plan for how you would handle this worst plausible scenario.
“I may get fired… so what? I know I have the skills to get another job in the industry. I’ll start reaching out to my network proactively”
“I may make a stupid mistake… so what? Growth comes from taking risks like these, and it won’t be my last opportunity to shoot my shot. I’ll set up some follow-up events in the pipeline.”
Step 5: Stop Worrying and Accept the Uncertainty
All you can do is your best.
Does your “best” involve proactively planning how you would respond in the 10,000 different variations of your circumstance that could materialize tomorrow?
Emotionally, if you’re addicted to worry, you might think it does.
But it doesn’t.
You’ve already done the work of planning for the worst plausible scenario, and you are confident your strategy for that scenario is a good one—that it’s the best way you could hope to respond.
Since you’ve worried and accounted for the worst scenario, there’s no longer a need to think ahead about any other plausible scenario. (To the degree that the features of the worst case scenario correlate with the spectrum of realistic possibilities).
Take your time and energy back. Know that you will be able to handle the 10,000 other, less severe variations without needing to evaluate each of them in advance.
It’s like the Pareto principle. You can be prepared for 80% of scenarios by planning for the most important 20%.
Worrying isn’t free — it comes at a cost.
The goal of all this is to put an upper bound on how much total worrying you’re willing to do. . .since the issue is that worry, when unchecked, only leads to more worry, in what could be a never-ending cycle, until the event in question has finally passed.
Upon hearing this, the worry-mindset may think: “But how will I know if I’ve thought about this issue enough? What if I miss something?”
That’s why focusing disproportionately on the uncomfortable worst case scenarios is so important.
And even here, in this meta mindset you can pose the same approach to the “What if I miss something?” fear. . .
What’s the worst thing that could happen? And why do you believe that you should be scared of that?
—Drago
P.S. For the academically inclined, what do you think a good quantitative model would be to represent the optimal level of worry?
With a little bit of worry, you could prevent the scenario that reduces your life quality to a 1/10. But if your worrying becomes excessive, it may reduce the everyday, baseline quality of your life from an 8/10 to a 5/10, even though the worry helped you avoid the rare 1/10 scenario.
If something has a 1 in 1000 chance of happening, should you proportionately focus 1 out of ever 1000 of your thoughts on that scenario?
No. Because the amount of worry a situation “deserves” is not just related to its likelihood, but also its severity, and more importantly—you ability to do something about it.
Technically, driving a car is very risky. A car accident has comparatively high likelihood and severity. But even the biggest worriers don’t spend much time worrying about driving; once they’ve accepted the decision of owning a car vs not—of being a driver vs not—there’s not too much to evaluate (other than if the situation changes materially, such as in the case of hazardous driving conditions, caused by a winter storm, for example).
And your model would also need to bifurcate between cognitive dimensions of worry vs the emotional impacts (and related fear mitigation strategies as mentioned above).
Anyway. . . have a Happy New Year! Don’t worry too much 😉
Because if you can get to a point of believing you’ll ultimately be OK in the worst case, that means you will absolutely be ok in the 10,000 other, less severe cases, thereby freeing you from the need to consider any other case.
what proportion of thoughts on bad scenarios
driving the car… no need to think about it again…
nerdy thing of propportion thinking… worry coefficient… weighted by ability to act
Worry strategies… also the idea of reduce life quality from 8/10 to 7/10 in order to avoid the tail risk of experiencing a 1/10