How Do I Stop Worrying About Things That Haven't Happened Yet?
It's two o'clock in the afternoon, or two o'clock in the morning, and your mind is already there. The meeting that hasn't happened. The scan result you haven't had yet. The phone call you're sure will go badly. You can see all of it so clearly. It feels like information.
And all the while your body is carrying it. A buzzing, sometimes, that seems to go on twenty four hours a day. A tightness. A feeling that you must do something, right now, to make it stop.
If that's where you are, I'd like to talk about it with you. Not to give you a method. Just to look at it together.
What the mind does
The mind plays a story. It's very good at it. It says, what if. It says, imagine if this happened, and then this, and then this. It goes straight to the worst case scenario and presents it to you as though it's already on its way.
Have a look at it for a moment. Where is the thing you're worried about? Not the feeling in your body, which is real. The thing itself. Is it here, in this room, right now?
Most of the stories the mind tells us, if not all of them, are not true. They're a belief about the future. And the future hasn't arrived.
I'm not saying nothing difficult ever happens. Of course it does. I'm saying that worry isn't the difficult thing happening. Worry is the story about it, and you're living in the story long before, and often instead of, the event.
Like a fishing line
I think of it like a fishing line. The mind keeps dangling something in front of you. A thought, a picture, a what if. And it's just trying to get you hooked. If you bite, off you go. You're pulled along into another scenario, and another.
Or think of a child wanting attention. It tugs at your sleeve. It says look at me, look at me. If you keep pushing the child away, the child gets louder. If you keep running around trying to fix whatever the child is shouting about, the child never settles.
What if you just stopped, and sat, and let the child be there?
Stop, sit and be with it
This is the part that surprises people. When you stop and sit and be with the worry, rather than trying to get rid of it, it begins to lose its power. It's not that you did something clever to it. It loses its sense of power because you're being present, and the worry has nothing to feed on.
What does it actually feel like in your body? Not the story, the feeling. Where is it? Is it a tightness, a heat, a flutter? Let it be exactly that. You're not trying to change it. You're just not leaving.
It might not go in a minute. It might come back tomorrow. That's alright. Worry and stress are not problems to be solved. They are experiences to be met. And each time you meet one without running from it, you find out something about it that the story never told you.
Doesn't that mean giving up?
People ask me this a lot. If I stop worrying, won't I stop caring? Won't things fall apart?
No. It doesn't mean you're giving up. You're still making the appointment. You're still ringing the person. You're still doing whatever is in front of you to do. The difference is that you're doing it from here, rather than from inside a story about how it might go wrong.
Worry has never actually helped anything. It feels like it's doing something, because it keeps us busy. But it isn't the same as caring, and it isn't the same as action.
And if the feeling is so big that you can't carry it on your own, please speak to someone you trust, or to your doctor. That isn't giving up either.
What have you got to lose?
I'll ask you what I asked in the talk. When you can't cope with it anymore, what are you going to do? And what have you got to lose by stopping?
You've tried thinking your way out of it. You've probably tried distracting yourself and reasoning with yourself and promising yourself you'll stop. If those worked, you wouldn't be reading this.
So just for now, what if you did nothing? Not forever. Just for the next few minutes. Let the story run, and don't follow it. Feel what's here.
What happens to the worry when there's nobody feeding it?
And is it actually happening right now, or is it a story about something that hasn't?
More conversations and talks are on the Videos page of my website.
YouTube channel, Dianne Horton
Instagram: @diannespiritualmentor