Worry
Ever hear someone talking about a dog with a bone and they say, “That dog was worrying that bone to death!”? I always find that an interesting turn of phrase, because it’s such a great mental picture of what worry actually is. It’s a gnawing feeling around the edges of your consciousness. It doesn’t send you into a panic (most of the time); it’s just always there, causing you to be distracted and not focused on what you need to get done.
I don’t know about you, but I have a tendency to worry. Now, I don’t really like to admit this (even to myself), but it’s true. I’ll call it by any number of other names (”I’m just focusing on solving a challenge!”), but it boils down to something on my mind that causes me to lose sleep.
I lost a lot of sleep while I was in the military. I couldn’t just lay down and fall asleep, I had to wait (sometimes for hours) for my mind to settle down enough to allow me to relax. I was always thinking about something: deployments, responsibilities, how much I hated having to wear the same thing every day, etc.
Then, one day, someone suggested that the reason why my mind was always racing was that there were thoughts locked up in my subconscious that couldn’t get out. She further suggested a technique which I began to refer to as a “brain barf”. I would sit down every day (sometimes two or three times, when I first started) for a set amount of time and either write on a piece of paper or type into a Word document everything that ran through my head. No filtering, no editing, don’t even go back to read what I wrote. Just keep writing (or typing) until I totally ran out of things to write, or the time ran out. If I couldn’t capture a specific thought or articulate what I was thinking, I just wrote “I have nothing to write” over and over until the words started flowing again.
What a relief! If I did this exercise just before I went to be every night, I found that I could fall right to sleep. No restless thoughts running through my head, keeping me awake for hours. Some type of psychological release occurred during my “worry time” that allowed all my pent-up anxieties to spill out on to the page. I’m guessing it had something to do with verbalizing (i.e. - acknowledging) the challenges that I knew (or didn’t know) I was facing.
Once you face your challenges head on by writing them down, you’re going to realize that most of them are really fairly trivial. However, if there are some that still worry you, you can take a further step of singling them out, and one by one, writing what the worst thing is that could result if your worry came to pass. Then, assign an actual “how likely is this to happen” score to it. For me, it always served as a wake up call to point out how inconsequential my challenges were, once they were brought out into the light of day. If there are still some outcomes that frighten you, you’ve established some concrete situations that you want to avoid (not some nebulous fears that you can’t put your finger on). Armed with this specific information, you can take steps to establish a contingency plan to prevent any of your worries from coming to pass.
I found out that, once I made this a habit, I needed to do it less and less. I’m to the point now where, if I have some difficulty falling asleep, I’ll just grab my journal and head out to my family room for ten minutes or so. I’ll barf all my worries out on the page and head back to bed. It’s a great tool to use when you need it. Give it a shot the next time you’re fighting insomnia due to a tough day at work.
