YOU Are The One Causing Yourself Unnecessary Anxiety (& How To Break The Loop)
Tried everything to get rid of stress & anxiety? A flood taught me a trick that works.
We blame outside factors for our stressful lives.
But what if it’s us who’s responsible?
You’re burning time and energy, and the stress is plaguing your life. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
If you don’t do something about it now, it’ll only get worse.
This one small mental shift has made me feel 10kgs lighter. It’s eliminated a lot of the stress from my life. It’s changed everything for me, and I know it’ll change your life too.
Here’s why it’s YOUR fault
There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
— Seneca
Let’s assign an energy value to each minute of life — we’ll call it life-force.
Every minute you spend with friends and family, and doing things you love, is life-force well spent. Every moment you spend experiencing new things, problem-solving and living, is also life-force well spent.
But every minute you spend thinking about the possibility of something going wrong is burning that life-force away.
It’s not just ‘a bit of time’. It’s the most precious resource you’ve got, and you’ve only got one tank of it. Please don’t get to the end of your life-force reserves and realise you’ve spent it all on stress and worry.
(I got this concept of life-force from a user on Twitter called SPARTAN.)
I’m not saying you shouldn’t put away savings for a rainy day. Worrying is useful for keeping ourselves safe, and for planning contingencies. But, like most natural mechanisms, we let it spiral out of control until it becomes irrational.
If all you do is worry, you’ll end up with a life where the only thing that went wrong was you worrying about things that might go wrong.
You’ll realise that you built walls around you to stop things from going wrong, but those same walls stopped you from living stress-free.
How a flood revealed the secret to managing anxiety
I loved my 2005 Toyota Corolla Sportivo. Japanese engineering at its finest. I loved it so much that I used to think many steps ahead to preserve its life and value.
I used to worry that:
if I parked it in the sun for too long, the paint would fade
rocks flying up from the hot pavement would chip out bits of its silver paint
leaning my arm on the plastic too many times would wear out the armrest
the steering wheel leather would degrade if I gripped it too hard.
I spent a lot of time worrying about those things.
One night, we were heading to a party. It was raining pretty hard — but nothing out of the ordinary.
My air-conditioning didn’t work — meaning the windscreen would fog up in the rain — so we’d always take Georgia’s car.
I never usually parked at her place, but one night should be fine, I thought…
All that worry for an overnight rain event to destroy the car.
The price and condition of the car were irrelevant now. It makes me laugh to think about it. I feel so silly for all those minutes spent trying to park it in the shade to preserve the paint.
All that stress about the paint, the leather and the plastic — for nothing. Wasted minutes. Wasted hours. Wasted life-force.
I lost a car, but the flood taught me a much bigger lesson — a way out from all this suffering.
If I tell you to relax all your muscles right now, you’ll realise how tense you were. Feels good, right?
Now what if there was a cue like that — a sentence — for your brain?
The queue that changed my life — no more panic
When I’m all tensed up thinking about all the things that could possibly go wrong, and all the bad dice rolls I could get — I say this to myself:
Don’t worry until you have to.
It’s saved me so many moments where I (naturally) start to worry about things going wrong. And funnily enough, things don’t go wrong that often. Seneca was right.
You can’t guarantee whether or not something will go wrong — or how it’ll go wrong — so you might as well spend your life-force elsewhere.
The thing is, you realise it was all your fault when you can escape stress by changing your own mind. Nobody is stressing you out, no situation is stressing you out — it’s your reaction, and your perspective that’s causing you the stress.
The other day, we took a boat trip to the Shala River in Albania. After we hopped on the boat, they told us it’d be 40 minutes of driving in this little dingy for 30 minutes of time there. What kind of a deal was that?!
The whole boat ride I was complaining to Georgia that we wouldn’t have enough time to enjoy the river. I was feeling regret for even getting on.
But when we arrived, what I saw was yet another reminder of the rule.
It was the worst tourist trap I’ve ever been a part of. There was nothing but bars selling booze and kiosks selling cigarettes. The nature of this river (which was too shallow to swim in) was destroyed by bobcats moving dirt and fumes from machines building new ways to take tourists' money.
That 30 minutes ended up being way too long and we waited in the boat for 15 minutes. The irony.
Like my car having a swim in the car park, or me not having a swim in the Shala River, you can be totally wrong about a concern. You can be so sure the worry is justified and then a curveball will make it all a waste of time and energy.
Do things go wrong? Of course, all the time. But, you don’t know what will go wrong — or how it’ll go wrong — until it does. Only then, should you react and start to formulate a solution.
You can have safety nets, and plan well (you’d be stupid not to). But to worry all the time for something to go wrong will simply make your life worse.
Enough what-ifs. Enough guessing. Enough thinking you can tell the future.
Here’s a “what-if” for you.
What if you’re completely wrong all of the time?
Here’s how your life will change if you stop worrying
If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.
― Lao Tzu
If you don’t worry until you have to, you free up so much life for enjoying things, solving problems and living your life.
You’re loose from the shackles, free to enjoy moments.
Instead of worrying about the paint on my car, I could’ve enjoyed my last few drives with it a bit more. I could’ve enjoyed the boat ride as we glided through the glassy water in between the Albanian Alps instead of worrying about the timing.
The truth is, you don’t know if anything actually will go wrong — so why should you worry? What if it goes right? What if the outcome is completely topsy-turvy flipped upside-down on its head and you could’ve never seen it coming?
None of it matters, because there’s no use spending your time thinking about the unpredictable future when you could just focus on enjoying the moment.
Don’t worry until you have to worry.
Live in the present — in peace.
Thank you for reading.
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Without you reading, the message I’m passionate about flows into the ether. I just want to share what I learned with more people.
I wish I could’ve given past me these mindset shifts, so I’m trying to reach as far and wide as possible. Please share this post with someone who you think might enjoy it too.
Until next week,
Eren
