I worry….a lot. I worry about the future. I worry about the past. I worry that I say “no” to a cookie a little too meanly. I worry that my friends secretly hate me. I worry that I’m going to end up alone. I worry that I may be forgetting something. I worry that I work too much. I worry that I’m failing a class. I worry that I worry too much.
My friend told me that she heard about a twenty year old girl who died of a heart attack. The girl’s best friend said that she was stressed about school and work so much that she couldn’t take it anymore. That one day she worked a little to hard and it killed her. It hit me that my lifestyle of constant anxiety could literally kill me some day.
Don’t get me wrong; being a professional worrier has helped me a lot. I never procrastinate and my to-do list is always shrinking. But living in constant fear isn’t really living. And I don’t want to look back on my life wishing that I cared a little less.
For the past few months I’ve been looking up ways to help my anxiety. It wasn’t crippling nor did I think it was something that needed to be checked out by a professional, but it was hard to find a solution. I tried ASMR and didn’t like the feeling of someone whispering into my ear. I’ve tried breathing excersizes, but I didn’t like the silence. It would ebb away at me until I was back to worrying.
I found a little trick that made me calm down a little bit more though. I read online that people should be more like lions and less like a dog. Lions have a way of acknowledging something and moving on, whereas dogs fixate on unimportant things.
Whenever I found something that worried me, I would pay attention to it. If something was little, I’d give myself thirty seconds to dwell on it. If something was big (like my friends secretly hating me), I’d give myself two minutes. When the time was up, I’d sternly tell myself to stop worrying about it.
And that’s it.
I think that giving myself a task while worrying–to try to get myself to calm down in a certain amount of time–really put things into perspective. I found myself thinking that I needed to move on. That I don’t have to fight my emotions but just learn how to manage them a little better. I know it’s a stupid trick, but it’s been helping me out a lot. I find myself less and less stressed every time I use it.