The Worry List

Worry is one emotion that is never helpful and never necessary. Many people tell me they don’t want to worry but they feel they can’t help it. In this episode, we’ll break down what worry is exactly and what causes it.

Then I share with you a tool you can try out the next time you find yourself worrying about anything.

Check it.

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WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER

• Why the brain likes to worry
• What increases our worry
• What we think the solution to worry is
• 2 ways to use the worry tool

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

• The Founder of  Our Peace Book
• Kimberly J Coaching Instagram Post
• Would you do me a favor? Please leave a review on your preferred podcast platform — it helps me reach more and more people. Thank you!
• I’d love to hear from you with any questions or breakthroughs or topics you’d like me to cover. Send me a direct message on Instagram @ajoyfulyou or email me at rachael@ajoyfulyou.com
• Follow me on Instagram for more
• Website

TRANSCRIPT

This is The Joyful You Podcast, episode 99, The Worry List.

Welcome to The Joyful You Podcast.

On this show, I talk all about the tools you need to cultivate a healthy relationship with food, your mind, and your life.

I’m your host, Rachael Collins.

As an eating psychology practitioner, a certified life coach, and a weight loss expert, it is my mission to show you how to work with your body, manage your mind, process your emotions, and create supportive habits so you can live well, feel well, and become your strongest, healthiest, happiest, most amazing self, a joyful you.

Hello there.

Welcome back to the show, or welcome to the show if you are new.

I always like to start with a review because I have a goal to get 100 podcast reviews by the end of the year.

So if you would like to help me out, you haven’t left a review yet, will you please take just two minutes and go leave a review.

Anywhere on any podcast app is totally fine.

Or you can share the podcast on your social media, and that helps too.

All right, today’s review comes from SS.

Neimeier, and it says, I am so, so, so glad Rachael started up her podcast again.

I have had experiences with other life coaches where opinions and non-information was shared, and to be honest, it turned me off from any life coaches.

But I am so thankful that I gave it another shot through The Joyful You.

Rachael shares so much knowledge and teaches how your brain works, which is exactly what I’ve needed through my mental health journey.

Thank you, Rachael.

Oh my gosh, you are so welcome.

I’m really glad that the show resonates with you, and I do try to give the science behind everything I teach.

So thank you, SS, for your review.

I really appreciate it.

Let’s jump in to the topic for today.

Right now, it is back to school time.

Your kids might have already gone back to school.

They might not have gone back to school yet.

They might be in the process of going back.

But I feel like this time comes with a lot of worry and anxiety for you as a parent, but also for your kids.

So today, I want to share with you a tool that you and your kids, you can help your kids use this tool and it will help you or them to be able to work with worry and anxiety instead of letting it just take over and eat you alive.

Now, the thing about worry is that it pretends to be useful, but it actually never solves anything.

Worry is just our imagination going haywire trying to predict the future, which nobody can do, trying to come up with the worst-case scenarios so that we can solve them ahead of time.

One of my mentors called this pre-traumatic stress.

It is the anticipation of stress, the anticipation that something is going to go wrong, which when we’re imagining it in our minds and worrying about it, it’s creating a lot of stress.

We are creating the stress ahead of time, and this stress is robbing us of our peace.

It’s robbing us of our joy.

And if you haven’t noticed, worrying is very exhausting.

Our brain keeps spinning constantly, and if you are anything like me, my brain likes to worry about things in the middle of the night.

So another reason that it’s exhausting is because it’s keeping me up, and I’m not getting any sleep.

Worry is one of the ways that our brain attempts to keep us safe and alive.

It thinks that if we can dream up everything that can possibly go wrong, then we can avoid it, which most of the time, let’s be real, what we dream up never happens.

So there’s actually nothing to avoid.

But for some reason, our brain doesn’t quite understand this.

And so, we worry anyway.

And our brain is just going, going, going, creating all of these stories, which are creating all of these feelings.

And it’s exhausting.

I was listening to a book called The Founder of Our Peace.

It’s by Don Hilton III.

And he mentions in this book that dozens of psychological studies have shown that people generally 1.

Overestimate how likely it is that the thing we are worried about will happen.

Overestimate how devastated we will be by future negative events.

And 3.

Underestimate our ability to bounce back should the thing we are worried about actually occur.

All of these skewed estimations increase our worry.

And let me just add on.

And they destroy our peace.

And they destroy our joy.

Now, worry is actually an action.

So that means it comes from a feeling.

Usually that feeling is anxiety or fear, sometimes nervousness.

And the feeling is created from a thought or a story we are telling ourselves.

So today, I want to teach you a tool that can help you kind of get a hold of worry.

And that tool is to make a worry list.

A lot of us, when we worry, we think the solution is to just try to ignore, avoid or push down, right?

Stop worrying about it.

Stop.

Just stop.

That’s what I used to say to myself and to my kids all the time.

We are trying to ignore, avoid or push down what we are worried about.

But what we need to do is we need to give our worries equal airtime.

And equal airtime means we are not trying to ignore, avoid or push them down, but we’re also not letting them run wild where we are just worrying all the time, and it just is consuming us.

This is called ruminating thoughts.

Very similar to a ruminant animal.

So think like a cow.

Cows will chew their food, swallow it, then they’ll bring it back up, chew on it some more, swallow it, bring it back up, chew on it again, and then they just keep repeating the cycle all day long.

Do you see how worry is like this?

We will swallow the worry, but then we’ll bring it back up, we’ll chew on it some more, swallow it, bring it back up, chew on it some more.

So what we want to do to stop swallowing and bringing up the worry and chewing on it more is we want to make an inventory list of everything that we are worried about.

So get out a piece of paper.

Don’t try to do this in your head.

It doesn’t work very well if you try to do it in your head.

It works way better if you will take the time to write it out on a piece of paper.

So at the top of your paper, you’re going to write my worries and then literally make a list of all of your worries.

Write down every single thing that you are worried about.

Don’t be afraid of them.

Don’t hold anything back.

Getting all of them out onto paper, into the open, is one, it’s going to get them out of your head, and then two, it’s going to give you information.

It’s going to help you see why you’re feeling so bad, why you’re feeling fear, why you’re feeling so anxious or so nervous or whatever the feeling is for you that’s creating the worrying.

I did this myself.

I use this tool quite frequently.

I have a lot of personal things going on right now in my life, and I am waking up in the middle of the night, my brain’s very favorite time to worry, and all I can think about is worst-case scenarios.

So I have been making a worry list before I go to bed, and it has been helping me sleep so, so, so much better.

Because my brain is not waking me up in the middle of the night, trying to deal with all of these things, I’m actually working on them before I fall asleep, and so my brain is able to stay relaxed.

All right, so you’re gonna make your list, right?

And once you have your list of all the things that you’re worried about, there are a couple things that you can do.

The easiest thing, in my opinion, is to just take a look at everything you wrote down.

Now, you might want to judge what you wrote down.

You might want to think things like, I shouldn’t be thinking these things.

I shouldn’t even be worried about these things.

These are so dumb.

And all the other judgments that are going to come up.

Just notice that.

And then for just a second, I want you to hang up your judge robe and put on your scientist lab coat.

Because remember, all of these things on your list are just information.

So what we’re gonna want to do is we’re going to want to look at the data.

You’re gonna want to take your list of worries, all the things that you wrote down, and from that list, you’re gonna want to make another list, a list of all the things that you have control over, and a list of the things that you don’t.

Now, if you don’t want to make another list, that’s fine.

Maybe just circle the things that you have control over and make a line through the things that you don’t.

What is it that I have control over?

Circle it or write it down in a list.

What’s not in my control?

Cross it out or write it on another list.

The things that you have control over, focus on doing those things.

The things you have no control over, there’s no reason to keep thinking about them.

It’s not helping, I promise you.

It’s just making you feel bad and creating more anxiety and more fear, which usually leads to more worrying.

In the book, The Founder of Our Peace by John Hilton, he quotes this poem by LeGrand Richards that says, For every worry under the sun, there is a remedy or there is none.

If there is a remedy, hurry and find it.

If there is none, never mind it.

So the first thing that you can do is decide what is in your control, what isn’t in your control, and then focus on what’s in your control.

This is productive.

Focusing on what we have no control over is not productive.

It is literally a waste of time and energy.

It’s just making our brain spin out and that is exhausting.

That’s exhausting.

All right, so that’s the first thing that you can do.

The second thing that you can do is an exercise actually from this book, and it’s very similar to the first thing, but it actually takes it one step further.

So what you’re going to do is you’re going to make your worry list.

You’re specifically identifying all the things that you’re worried about.

You’re writing everything down, and then you’re going to take each of those worries and turn them into a statement of what you want.

So usually our worries are things that we don’t want to have happen.

We don’t want those things to happen, so you’re going to take each of those and you’re going to flip it and turn them into a statement of what you do want to have happen.

So for example, if you are worried about your child not finding good friends this school year, simply flip that worry to, I want my child to find good friends this year or my child will make good friends this year.

Whatever feels the most comfortable to you and the most true, right?

See how we’re not making anything up.

That’s exactly what we want.

Our brain is just so focused on, oh my gosh, my kid’s not going to make any friends this year.

It’s going to be so terrible.

They’re going to be lonely.

They’re going to eat lunch in the bathroom by themselves.

See how our brain just spins and spins and spins and worries and worries and worries.

So when we flip it and we’re like, no, I want my child to find good friends this year.

So once you’ve taken the statement and turned it into what you want to have happen, you’re going to then make a list of what you can do that is within your control that will help you create that result.

So what is going to help your child make good friends?

Maybe it is some activity or in an event that your child would enjoy that will help them meet some new kids.

Or maybe you can have a conversation with your child about how do you go about making friends?

Maybe it’s like a role play or something.

The author calls this step turning worry into hope by acting on your worry.

You are using your awesome, powerful brain to think about your worries differently, which turns fear and anxiety into hope and peace and joy.

So remember, focus on what you can control, not on what you can’t.

If there is nothing that you can do, turn it over to God.

Trust that he will take care of it, and then just let it go.

Stop thinking about it.

Stop ruminating on it.

So if you or your child have a lot of worries, stop, take a deep breath, and then get to work writing down your worries and using your energy working on what you can control instead of using all of your energy to worry about what you can’t.

I want to close with a thought that I heard recently on Kimberly J Coaching’s Instagram.

She said, Faith is believing in something you can’t see, but so is fear.

Fear is also believing in something you can’t see.

So which one do you want to pick?

You can pick faith and trusting in your ability to figure it out.

Trusting that God will take it and make everything work out.

Trusting in your ability to handle anything that might come your way, or you can choose fear and you can worry and you can stay spinning in anxiety.

The choice is yours.

They are both believing in something that you can’t see.

Something that hasn’t happened yet.

All right, friends, I hope that this was helpful for you.

It has been really helpful for me.

I think worry is a normal thing that our brain will do if it’s left unattended.

But here’s the thing, we are the boss of our brain.

Our brain is like the little toddler and we are the adult.

And if the toddler is running around with a sharp knife, we step in and we be the adult and we just say, hey, sweetie, that’s not something that we do.

And we take control of the situation.

Same thing with our brain.

We can direct our thoughts to be whatever we want them to be.

All right, guys, thanks so much for being here and I will see you next week.

Thank you for listening to The Joyful You Podcast.

If you’d like additional support, click the link in the show notes and let’s chat about how we can work together to get you to your goal.

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If you want to hang out on social media, you can find me on Instagram at A Joyful You or on my website, ajoyfulyou.com.

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