The Viable Alternative

As I get deeper into my personal healing work, I’m learning that everything, yes, EVERYTHING that we do has some sort of perceived personal benefit, even if on the surface it is detrimental to us and the people around us, including our loved ones, and we’re able to consciously identify these detrimental effects.

Truth be told, if we didn’t see some benefit from doing them, we wouldn’t be doing them in the first place. We’re just often not aware of these perceived benefits.

This of course also includes our compulsive behaviours that range everywhere from nail biting, to smoking cigarettes, to drinking alcohol excessively, to overeating, to having an explosive, hair trigger temper, to domestic abuse (this goes for both sexes), to the heinous repeated crimes a person engages in that we hear about on the news, and, to the subject of this blog, worrying.

In my life, I’ve always been told about how fruitless it is to worry, how it makes a situation appear worse than it really is, how it causes stress which in turn causes premature aging and illness, and how instead, it’s better and more empowering to have Faith, but this morning, as I was engaging in my morning ritual and getting ready to go to work, here I was worrying about my life and my future – namely if I’ll ever become successful, will I ever get my life together and am I doing enough right now to make the life that I want to live happen.

Having become increasingly emotionally aware due to therapy, I began to search deeper within to locate where this worry was coming from. I realized it had come from feelings of anxiety I had in direct response to certain situations I was dealing with in my life. My habitual, knee jerk response to feelings of anxiety in my body is to worry. Realizing this, the logical thing I did was to change my thoughts in order for me to stop worrying, right?

Wrong.

Even though I knew that worrying is fruitless, I STILL felt compelled to continue to worry. It was then I realized that my worrying was a way to soothe my anxiety because it was a dysfunctional way for me to think I was taking control of a situation. The paradox is, that though it’s used to soothe anxiety, it only serves to increase it, which causes more worry, which, you get the picture, turns into a vicious cycle.

I’m inclined to believe that that’s why most people worry. It’s a way to manage anxiety, though it does the opposite, and the reason why most people fail to stop worrying despite the fact that they know it’s fruitless is because they’re emotionally disconnected from what compels them to worry in the first place. That unconscious habit to soothe their anxiety will win every time over their conscious desire to stop worrying UNTIL they become aware of what they’re doing emotionally.

So, if you want to overcome your worrying and take back your power so you can think more constructively and take more constructive action, the key is to connect to the anxiety you feel in your body and get out of autopilot by starting to CONSCIOUSLY make it a point to choose a different way of thinking and behaving, fully cognizant of the fact that worrying WILL NOT soothe the anxiety in your body.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps,

Ike Love