The Unreliability of Worry
How to Overcome Worry and Take Back Control of Your Life
Worry can feel like an intractable, oppressive force, but when we observe it objectively we can start to understand why we do it and how it's not very helpful. Worry can make us feel worse and often doesn't accomplish anything, making it a habit to be aware of and try to break. Worry can have a negative effect on our life, making it seem smaller and feeling bad.
Worry is habitual and can make us feel like our life is out of our control. It is important to recognize that we can choose our feelings and take control of our life by practicing feeling good. Worrying can lead us to live an avoidant life, trying to avoid what we fear.
But often, when we come up against what we worry about, it can be liberating to realize that it wasn't as big a deal as we thought. We can also look at how we tie our identity to our job and the impact of losing it, which can be crushing in multiple ways. After losing a job, the speaker realized that the identity and value they derived from their job title was an illusion; the worry and effort to protect themselves from the job loss was wasted energy.
It was through this experience that they were able to discover the futility of worry and their true identity. Worry is not productive because there is nothing we can do about it. We must bring intentionality to our thoughts and feelings, focus on what we know, and respond with faith and confidence when we realize that there is nothing we can do.
We can choose how we engage with worry, questioning it and finding the value in it to ultimately change us. We do this by paying attention, being grounded in the truth, and choosing the relationship we have with it.
Key Lessons
Worry can feel like an intractable, oppressive force, but when we observe it objectively we can start to understand why we do it and how it's not very helpful. Worry can make us feel worse and often doesn't accomplish anything, making it a habit to be aware of and try to break. Worry can have a negative effect on our life, making it seem smaller and feeling bad.
Worry is habitual and can make us feel like our life is out of our control. It is important to recognize that we can choose our feelings and take control of our life by practicing feeling good. Worrying can lead us to live an avoidant life, trying to avoid what we fear.
But often, when we come up against what we worry about, it can be liberating to realize that it wasn't as big a deal as we thought. We can also look at how we tie our identity to our job and the impact of losing it, which can be crushing in multiple ways. After losing a job, the speaker realized that the identity and value they derived from their job title was an illusion; the worry and effort to protect themselves from the job loss was wasted energy.
It was through this experience that they were able to discover the futility of worry and their true identity. Worry is not productive because there is nothing we can do about it. We must bring intentionality to our thoughts and feelings, focus on what we know, and respond with faith and confidence when we realize that there is nothing we can do.
We can choose how we engage with worry, questioning it and finding the value in it to ultimately change us. We do this by paying attention, being grounded in the truth, and choosing the relationship we have with it.
Key Lessons
- We can choose to observe our worries objectively and understand that they often don't accomplish anything.
- Recognizing and questioning our worry can help us to be liberated from it.
- We should tie our identity to something more than our job in order to take control of our lives.
Full episode transcript available at: https://theunionpath.com/episodes