Humans worry. There’s no getting around it. We are biologically predisposed to have negative thoughts, images and emotions in order to plan for anticipated potential threats.
Somewhere back in the long dark of our becoming, the ones who scanned the treeline lived. The ones who did not, did not. So we each carry a watchman, posted on the wall, eyes on the black past the firelight, and that watchman has kept us alive for a hundred thousand years. He is not the problem. The problem is that nobody ever told him the war was over, so he stands up there still, calling out shapes in a dark that is mostly just dark.
The problem with worry is that we worry too much. The problem with problems is that we often don’t take them in stride or review them peacefully. Instead, we tend to think ‘worst case scenario’ without coming to solutions. We come up with a scenario that is the bad thing, and then get stuck in the vision of the bad thing. Our foreheads scowl, our muscles tense, our bellies tighten, our joy plummets. Worry, at this level, is not simply a function of planning for possible outcomes. It is both a side effect and a cause of anxiety, in a vicious cycle that decreases happiness.
The watchman is not solving. He is rehearsing, over and over and over. Somewhere in us lives the belief that if we can only picture the catastrophe in enough detail, we will be ready for it or we will be spared it, and neither one is true. Rehearsal is not preparation. It is the disaster happening once now, at full volume, and then again, and again.
The watchman, the sentinel, however it or they live in your system, these are biologically hardwired phenomena that take on personalities of their own in the wake of trauma. So it is worth speaking to yours as a someone. The worrier in you is young, and it took the job because at some point the dark really did have something in it. It is protecting you from being caught off guard, because being caught off guard once cost you something. You do not soften worry by firing the watchman. You soften it by climbing up onto the wall, standing next to him, and looking out at the same dark he is looking at, so he is not up there alone.
See if your body will tell you where he stands. When I am in it, my breath stops emptying. I take the next one in before the last one is all the way out, so I am always a little full, always braced, and my ribs stay high and locked like a held door. When I let the out-breath finish, all the way, past the point where it feels done, something in me gets permission to stop watching. Your body is the authority on your body. Try that on. If it is not yours, put it down and go find your own.
There are 14 practical tools for helping with worry.
- Breathe. Breathwork helps to slow things down. Do a body scan and look for tensions. Soften the tensions. Not to make them go away, but so they know you came.
- Stay in the present moment. All worry is future or past oriented. Staying in the now is contrary to worry. The dark the watchman calls out is never the dark in front of him. It is always a dark that has not arrived.
- Practice positive what-ifs. If you’re thinking of all the negative ‘what ifs,’ start thinking of the positive ‘what ifs.’ A thought like “what if I lose my job and then I can’t find another and I can’t make mortgage and lose my house” can be met with all possible outcomes: “What if I don’t lose my job and everything goes on as it always does,” or “What if I lose my job and that forces me to look for work I really love. What if I find a job and make even more money than I do now. What if that lets me save so that when hard times hit I have a safety net.” This is not talking yourself into optimism. It is reminding the mind that it has been writing one ending out of a hundred and calling it the truth.
- Give yourself reality checks. If you’ve never been homeless, remind yourself that your fears of homelessness are likely unfounded. If you have been, you survived it.
- Meditate. Anxiety-based worries make the mind circulate and perseverate; the solution is stillness for the mind. Seated meditation isn’t always my first suggestion for people who worry. Moving meditation is often the better door: tai chi, chi gung, a slow walking loop with no destination in it. The body keeps the time so the mind doesn’t have to. Anything that takes you into ‘the zone’ can do it: crossword puzzles, making jewelry or art, or gardening. A mind fully occupied by one small good task is a mind that has stepped down off the wall for an hour.
- Get in your body. Anxiety takes us out of our physical experience while increasing our physical tension. Moving meditation like tai chi softens the speeding-up; so does vigorous physicality like dancing or biking. Embodiment practices, Authentic Movement, Dance/Movement Therapy, and some forms of yoga, reconnect you with the wisdom of your body.
- Find a counselor or therapist. Most of us have some trauma or core beliefs that keep us stuck in anxiety-based worries. A trained professional can help heal the wounds and shift the beliefs that keep you in the worry cycle. This one goes underneath the others. The rest of the list softens the watchman’s voice. This one asks what he saw.
- Find a group. Worry does its best work in isolation. It wants a closed room and one voice. Authentic Relating, a therapy group, a men’s or women’s group, Recovery Dharma: any circle where you say the thing out loud and hear it come back to you through other people’s mouths, which is a different sound entirely. And it does not have to be insight work. Salsa on Thursdays, a pickleball league, a choir, a bowling team. What steadies us is not always the talking. Sometimes it is only being expected somewhere, by people who notice when you don’t show up.
- Slow down and simplify your life. Part of worry comes from the practical reality that our lives are often too big for us: too much stuff, too much debt, too many activities. All beings need time to rest and recuperate. If your life doesn’t allow space to rest, something’s gotta go.
- Get out. The step above is for a life that is too full. This one is for a life that is too empty. A mind with nothing to do will go and find something, and what it finds is the dark. So get outside. Out of the house, off the couch, onto ground that did not come from a store. Hiking groups, trail crews, a volunteer shift, somebody else’s garden. Weather and other people’s needs are both very good at interrupting a rehearsal.
- Get more loving touch. Loving touch calms the nervous system. Get more massages if you can, and touch your loved ones more; studies show those doing the touching get similar soothing benefits as those being touched.
- Look for the good and practice gratitude. Gratitude increases joy and happiness and shifts a negative disposition into a positive one. It also gives the watchman something else to catalogue. He is going to make a list either way.
- Play more. You cannot skip for any length of time and still worry. Try it. Play increases joy, which is like kryptonite to worry.
- Practice your faith. Studies show those who believe in a higher power and practice their faith do better on mental-health scales, including anxiety. So if you believe in a higher power, hand over your worries.
Like all wisdom teachings, this one has to be balanced, and its shadow is this. A list of fourteen tools can quietly become a fifteenth job, one more place to fail, and there is a particular misery in worrying about how badly you are handling your worry. Pick one. Not the best one. The nearest one.
And some worry is not noise. Sometimes the watchman is right, there is something out past the firelight, and the tight belly is the most accurate instrument you own. Softening is not silencing. What you are after is a watchman who can be heard without being obeyed, who can say there is something out there and then let you decide what it deserves.
What I did not expect, doing this in my own life and alongside other people’s for as long as I have, is that worry does not end. It thins. The nights get quieter, the alarms get shorter, and one day you notice you heard the siren and did not get out of bed. Perhaps not a still mind but a kinder one.
May you be relieved of the suffering of your own anxiety. May you know peace.