It would be unrealistic and dangerous if you never worried about anything. It’s anxiety that makes you cautious when you cross the road, that makes you check you’ve turned the gas off or that makes you think carefully about what you say to people. If you didn’t have any anxiety then you’d walk across the road in front of cars or let the room fill up with gas – both potentially fatal. If you don’t worry about what you say to people then you could upset them which wouldn’t do much for your relationship with them.
So what is the right level of anxiety? Not enough and you’re in danger; too much and you spend your whole time living in the past, worrying about what you’ve done or in the future, worrying about what could happen.
It’s important to put things into context so that the less important anxieties can be reduced in importance. That means that you only need to be concerned about the more important ones. But how do you make that choice?
Everyone has different levels of anxiety. There are those risk takers who go on adventurous journeys or always seem to be taking a risk with their career or personal life. Then there are those security seekers who want to make sure everything is safe around them, that they can predict what will happen. Each one of those attitudes is right for some people, but it’s when either is taken to the extreme that it can become a problem.
If you’ve always been influenced by one particular way of thinking then your mind may not have any alternatives. For instance, if you grew up with anxious parents then that anxiety will have been the norm for you and so you subconsciously learned it, just as you learned the language of the people who you grew up with. If you have other strong influences then that may reduce the anxiety because you have more than one type of behaviour to choose from. It’s usually in early childhood that most of your basic behavioural patterns are created. That’s when you learn huge amounts of information to enable you to function as a human. Unfortunately you don’t have much choice about the influences in those early years so you may have to unlearn some things to make life easier for yourself.
If you’ve always been around negative people who don’t expect anything good to happen then this will become your standard way of thinking – unless something outstanding happens to persuade you otherwise.
Always expecting the worst to happen is actually quite a sensible way to go through life. You’re never going to be surprised or disappointed by anything. When the traffic lights are red you’re resigned to it, if your partner walks out on you it’s not a surprise, if you don’t get the job you wanted then it’s no more than you expected. You always think through all the things that could go wrong so you are waiting for them to happen and will be able to respond very well if they do go wrong. Now that type of behaviour is ideal for an event organiser. If you’re organising an outdoor event you want to have plans in place in case it rains or the caterers don’t turn up or someone is taken ill. But it can be quite tiring to have to go through all the potential problems for everything you do.
It’s important to be able to let go of things. Yes you can worry about things that will happen in the future but it’s important to put a limit on it. When you’ve worked out everything that is possible then you can stop. If you’re worried about something that has happened in the past, analyse it and see if you can learn anything from it. Then take that learning and move on.
If you know anyone who has a positive outlook on life have a chat with them. Ask them how they think about things. Listen to what they say and write it down. Don’t write off their response as wrong for you, impossible, thinking they’re just lucky. They may have an outlook that helps them to attract that “luck” and maximise it, making their life so much easier. Why not take advantage of their knowledge and apply it to your own life?
