Is Worrying Worth It?

Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session we're going to talk about the role of worry in your life. Now we've all experienced some degree of worry. Some of us have this as an experience that is more frequent in our life. And sometimes it shows up based on certain contexts.

But it's something that if you're a human, you know what it feels like. Now, I'd like to give you a quick reflection to sort of assess the value of worry in your life. So think of all the terrible things you've worried about in your life, all the bad things that could happen, the things you've anticipated in the future. How many of them actually happened? And of all the terrible things that did happen how much suffering did you avoid through worrying? Now it would be impossible to fully evaluate this and go through every terrible thing you've ever worried about. But this kind of reflection is almost designed to be comical because when we think about it, there are so many things that we, we fret about, that we anticipate are going to go wrong when really they never come to fruition.

They never actually happen. I think that it was even Mark Twain who said, "I've had a lot of tragedy in my life and some of it actually happened." And so you have to go through your own assessment on this, especially when it comes to that second question of, you know, the bad things that did happen, did you avoid suffering, did you avoid stress by worrying beforehand? There are certainly situations where that can be the case and we can mitigate potential stress. So there's, there's no right answer on this, but this reflection may help you be more intentional about when and why you worry, because sometimes worry is just out of habit and we subconsciously think it's serving us. It's helping us in some way. It's, it's protecting us.

It's going to hopefully make us happy in the future. Maybe, but maybe not. And if worry is out of habit, perhaps showing the brain that it's not always serving us in the positive way that we think it is, will help it loosen some of its grip on the worrying mind when it is caught in anticipating a potential negative thing that could happen in the future. So you can take some time to watch this happen throughout the day. When you're caught up in worry, you know, ask yourself how, how is this really going to serve me? And if the answer is, you know, yeah, this is going to serve me, then by all means, play it out.

But if you're a little hesitant or you don't really have a good reason, see what a it would be like to just relax into the moment, just try and let it go. It's not always that easy, but sometimes it actually is. So it's worth giving it a shot. Thank you for your practice and let's settle in for today's meditation.