Has anyone ever told you to worry less or just stop worrying? Helpful advice right? Not in my experience. Here is the truth, no matter how hard we may try, we as humans can not stop worrying. It’s impossible. That is because our minds are built to worry. This is an important fact to realize when dealing with anxiety and stress. During this COVID-19 Pandemic it even more important to understand how “Worrying” works.

There are a few key factors that contribute to why we humans worry a lot and are more prone to stress and anxiety, than any other species.

1) Suffering is inevitable and a fact of life:

We will all suffer in one fashion or another as we live our lives. There is no way to avoid suffering. Right now there is a lot of hardship in the world and a lot more suffering.

2) Our frontal lobes make us human’s great problem solvers and problem finders.

We have used this to fix flat tires, build houses, create new technology, build societies, go to the moon, and plan for the future.  These are examples of how our mind helps us fix external problems. This has allowed humans to thrive. Yet there is a flaw in this way our brains are constructed when it comes to our thoughts, feelings, and internal experiences (how we feel and think about situations that occur in our lives)

3) The human mind tries to fix internal problems as if it was an external problem.

The human mind applies this problem fixing logic to painful internal feeling states (painful emotions, thoughts, worries about the future, past mistakes and traumas, and so on). We try to make the painful thoughts and feelings go away….but we can’t! No matter how hard we try, we cannot control our emotions or our thoughts, especially painful ones.

4) We want to avoid/ control/ fix pain as much as we can

Avoiding pain is good survival skill, but there is painful experiences that we can not avoid (suffering in life is unavoidable), so we can get trapped in a loop of trying to fix, control, or avoid painful internal experiences (feelings and thoughts) and the harder try to fix it we get trapped, and then we suffer even more. It’s kind of like a finger trap. The harder you pull the tighter the trap gets.

You are going to worry, and be stressed, and be sad, and think about all the things that could go wrong. This is an unavoidable fact. It is how our minds work and it part of what makes us humans. You can’t stop it.  Sure you can numb, avoid, or try to forget the pain temporally, but usually that leads to more suffering in the long run.

So what do we do?

Start by looking at how you cope with your own pain and suffering. How do you try to avoid or control painful feelings and thoughts. What works well in the short term, and what works well in the long term? I have attached a Coping Strategies Diary Entry chart that you can use to track your own patterns.

If you feel like you want to tray a different approach, stay tuned for more of my blogs. Or you can give me a call or set up a session. I will be talking about Acceptance more in the coming weeks. Here is a good article that touches on some skills you an use to interact with your worry in a different way.