Choosing Not to Let Worry Hijack You
There’s a line between concern, worry, and how you let it impact you.
Unless you’re living under a rock, you’re probably being impacted by the crazy happenings around the world. Governments committing atrocities at home and abroad, the greedy harming people and the environment alike, and a disturbing increase in maligning the kind, compassionate, and empathetic.
Spend any time on social media, and you’ll be quickly bombarded with all kinds of terrible, awful, negative things.
Is it any wonder so many people are worried?
When I let myself doomscroll, I start to find myself worrying. But here’s the thing – worry doesn’t help anyone or anything. At all. All it does is create problems for my mental, emotional, and spiritual health, wellness, and wellbeing.
If you allow worry to go unchecked, allow it to dominate your life, it will hijack you. Before you know it, you’ll find yourself increasingly ineffectual and having a harder and harder time coping with what you CAN control.
Which, of course, brings us to the big ‘ole elephant in the room.
Concern, worry, and control
I write this a lot. When it comes to the big picture, you have little to no control over what happens. There’s very little you can do about this. Apart from voting in elections, attending protests, boycotting bad businesses, and writing emails, letters, or calling your representatives in Congress, you can’t do much else. You can’t make Trump or his associates stop tearing apart the nation, can’t make Putin leave Ukraine, or stop Musk from being Musk. That’s just the unvarnished truth.
Even when you zoom in on other people directly connected to you, there’s nothing much you can do. Can’t get into anyone else’s head, heart, or soul. You can’t make that relative stop being a racist, can’t make your boss stop using BS metrics at work, and can do nothing about anyone cutting you off on the highway.
More than that, however, when you get down to it, worry is useless. Worrying doesn’t help anyone in any way. Does worrying about anything solve it? No. All worry does is focus on the problem, then dive into how it can be worse, how it might be getting worse, and all sorts of things to fear.
Concern is simply being alert to a problem. I have concerns when it comes to the welfare of people I know. Concern means I’m aware, and if something presents itself that opens the way for me to help somehow, I can.
Worried or concerned, if it isn’t directly impacting you, you have no control.
Hijacking your health, wellness, and wellbeing
Because worry offers nothing useful, all it does is hijack your reason. It keeps you from being able to focus on things you can do anything about. Before long, worry will impact your health, wellness, and wellbeing on every level.
I’m not in any way suggesting ignoring the world and what’s going on. No, it’s important to be aware. Worrying about it, however, does nothing but make you feel bad, disempowered, and potentially even hopeless.
To many, this is going to seem like I’m asking the impossible. But pause a moment and think about it. When you worry, does it offer you any way to do anything productive about what you’re worrying about? Even if it’s someone you love who causes you to worry, what use is worry to you? All it does is rob you of your peace of mind.
Concern is awareness when it comes to problems and issues. Concern is less committed than worry, because it’s recognition and acknowledgement without added time, energy, or focus. Maybe I’m splitting hairs between the ideas of worry vs concern, but words matter. How you approach any given issue will impact how it might affect you. Or not.
When you allow worry to settle into your head, heart, and soul, you become distracted. You disempower yourself because worry helps nobody.
Worry is just like blame. Sure, it can point fingers, but does it help anyone or anything? Not in my experience, no.
You have the power to control whether you worry or not.
Mindfulness for your health, wellness, and wellbeing
Active conscious awareness is mindfulness. It’s self-awareness, specifically looking at what you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, your intentions, the positivity or negativity of your approach, and your actions. Guess what? All of these are in your direct control.
It’s true that, initially, you might have a visceral reaction that simply is, that you don’t control. Immediately after that reaction, however, you gain the power to take control and alter or change thoughts, feelings, intentions, approach, and actions. Hence, if you find yourself starting to worry, you can address this and change its impact on you.
Mindfulness is not the end-all, be-all answer to things. But it does put you in the driver’s seat when it comes to making choices and decisions for your life experiences. Applying mindfulness lets you do things to positively impact your health, wellness, and wellbeing on all levels – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.
Most of all, you can choose to take actions that keep worry from hijacking your life. When worry hijacks you, it makes you less able to make good, helpful choices and decisions on all levels.
Why give up what little control you DO have with worry? You have the power to choose to shift this and not get hijacked by it.
Choosing not to let worry hijack you isn’t hard
It’s all about practicing active conscious awareness (mindfulness) of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and the positivity or negativity of your approach to direct your actions.
When you recognize and acknowledge that worry does you no good, can’t be of any help when addressing any concern, big or small, you can choose to change your thoughts, feelings, intentions, approach, and actions regarding what caused it. Knowing that you can be concerned about something and not give it time and energy that doesn’t help anyone, or yourself, via worry, you can use mindfulness to shift focus away from it.
This empowers you. When you’re empowered, that can, in turn, empower others around you.
Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity — from the vast cylinder that exists between them — shifts life in ways that open you to more potential, possibility, and the like. From there, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you in the here and now.
The better aware you are of yourself, here and now, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, it can spread to those around you and empower them, too. That is an amazing conduit to help reason overcome fear in the collective consciousness.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the six-hundred-thirty-sixth (636) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, reblog, and spread the positivity.
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