Ten ways to worry less..
1. Don’t think of problems as difficulties. Think of them as opportunities for action.
2. After you’ve done your best to deal with a situation, avoid speculating about the outcome. Forget it and go onto the next thing.
3. Keep busy. Keep the 24 hours of your day filled with these three ingredients: work, recreation, and sleep. Don’t allow yourself time for abstract thinking.
4. Don’t concern yourself with things you can’t do anything about. Armchair generals don’t win battles, but they do have nervous breakdowns. 5. For the time being anyway, eliminate daydreaming completely. Stop building air castles.6. Don’t procrastinate. Putting off an unpleasant task until tomorrow simply gives you more time for your imagination to make a mountain out a possible molehill. More time for anxiety to sap your self-confidence.
7. Don’t pour woes and anxieties to other people. You don’t want their sympathy - it’ll merely make it easy for you to feel sorrier for yourself.
8. Get up as soon as you wake up. If you lie in bed, you may use up as much nervous energy living your day in advance as you would in actual accomplishment of the day’s work.
9. Try to arrange your schedule so that you will not have to hurry. Hurry, a blood brother to worry, helps shatter poise and self-confidence, and contributes to fear and anxiety.
10. If a project seems too big, break it up into simple steps of action. Then negotiate those steps-link rungs in a ladder…one at a time. And don’t allow yourself to think about the difficulties of step number two until you’ve executed step number one.
What were you worried about this time last year?
Can’t remember?
July 15, 2008 at 1:55 am
Hey Melinda,
some good points you have. Especially 1, 6, 9 and 10.
I think number 2, 5 and 8 are exagurrated.
I don’t think number 8 is based on true research but to your personal feeling.
Anyway, as procrastination said it, I have indeed some work to do and don’t want to do it tomorrow
Have a nice day
July 15, 2008 at 3:06 am
What a great blog, and very helpful. I plan on using some of these tips myself. Thanks.
July 15, 2008 at 5:44 am
I especially like #6. As Zig Ziglar has said, "If you gotta swallow a frog, the longer you look at it is not gonna make it any prettier!"
July 20, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Another great blog Melinda! These are rules that people should live by. I like #7, don’t pour woes and anxieties onto other people. Where I work I always have people coming up to me and complaining about how unfair their lives are and they make themselves so helpless and unwilling to do anything positive to make things better for themselves. They just keep feeding a self defeating attitude that dooms them to failure. Their lives are like a treadmill, they’re running but they’re not going nowhere. Sad to see, I just cant relate to that way of thinking. Thanks Melinda!
July 20, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Melinda: Some of these qualify as inspirational quotes. Mind if I add them to my ever growing list?