FriendBurst Blog

Take Action To Stop Worry
by Joe Love

Your ability to combat worry and manage the daily stresses of your life is essential to your success, happiness and health. If you want to achieve and happy and fulfilling life you must learn to be calm and have a clear vision about yourself and your work at all time.

Achieving and maintaining peace of mind is perhaps the best single measure of how your life is going at any given point in time. Peace of mind is actually a prerequisite for achieving happiness and getting the maximum amount of pleasure and enjoyment out of your work and personal life.

Worry causes a disruption of your peace of mind and is the starting point of stress and unhappiness and it can even lead to mental breakdown. Worry of any kind tends to suppress the nervous system and can often lead to many health disorders. Health studies show that chronic worrying where someone worries about anything and everything all the time can lead to heart disease, strokes, cancer and a variety of other degenerating ailments and life-threatening problems.

Worry is a sustained form of fear caused by indecision and is often a learned behavior that can be traced back to early childhood. In fact behavioral studies often reveal that if someone is a chronic worrier his or her parents were as well.

A 2001 study by the National Institute of Mental Health found that most worry is unnecessary. The study went on to show that on average 40 percent of the things that people worry about never happen; 30 percent are in the past and cannot be changed; 12 percent are needless worries; and 10 percent are petty and unimportant. The study concluded that on average only 4 percent of the things people worry about are worth the worry.

Eliminating worry is the starting point of a positive mental attitude and the best way to achieve this is to do what Dale Carnegie described as living in “day-tight” compartments. Most stress comes from worrying about things in the future, most of which never happen anyway.

Here are 4 steps you can use to help you stop worry and achieve peace of mind:

First, clearly define the worry situation in writing. Often when you write out a clear definition of the problem you will see an obvious solution.

Second, determine the worst possible thing that can happen as a result of the problem or situation. Often you’ll find that the worst possible outcome is not that bad and by just defining and considering the worst possible outcome the stress and worry associated with the problem will disappear.

Third, once you’ve determined the worst thing that can happen resolve to accept the worst should it occur. Once you’ve determined that you will accept the worst possible outcome should it occur, you then have nothing left to worry about.

Fourth, begin immediately to improve upon the worst. Do everything you possibly can to minimize the worst possible outcome.

The key to eliminating worry is to think and plan ahead for the worst and then, stop it from happening if you possibly can. The only real antidote for worry is purposeful action. Once you have made a decision on what you can do to resolve your problem or situation, you must get busy working on a solution. When you do this you’ll find that you no longer have time to think about the problem.

Remember, your mind can only hold one thought at a time, either positive or negative. So it is your choice to get rid of any worrying thoughts and replace them with positive and constructive thoughts about a solution to the problem or situation.

When you drive the worry thoughts out of your mind and lose your thoughts in action the worry will disappear.

Love & Light,
♥Angel Love♥