We as humans live to worry and not just simple worry, a lot of worry which in no time turn into an obsession. Think about it, when you go for a routine physical examination, you constantly keep worrying of what will happen. You anxiously keep waiting for the whole day till the reports comes only to see everything was all right. 

I remember the times when I used to sometimes work late nights in office, my Mom always kept worrying about me. She would stay awake till I didn’t come home and as soon as I open the door, first thing she would say, “I was so worried about you, I didn’t even sleep”. She worried so much that she started thinking that her not sleeping is going to keep me safe.  With an obsession of worry, we become controlling and start believing that because we worry, we are able to control the outcome.

There are times in everyone’s lives when we feel the burden on injustice. If you worry about money, the economy seems to take forever to recover. If you are worrying about love, everyone around you seems to have heart troubles and true love seems to cease. If you worry about health, suddenly the whole world seems to be sick and you start feeling frailer with each passing day.

Is there a good and bad worry?

There is no harm in worrying about something, it induces a healthy level of fear and we are able to evaluate problems and reach best solutions. A good constructive worry engages our imagination to identify issues, brainstorm solutions and take corrective actions to get positive results and let go of things which are out of control. In my opinion this type of worry is very important for our survival.

But if this worry becomes an obsessions, it constantly makes our brains go round and round, reaching to no conclusion and solving no issue. You just get addicted to it and waste your time thinking that you are trying to find a solution whereas all you are doing is going over and over the same matter without any outcome.

An obsession like this is not going to be helpful and yet almost all of us live in an illusion of obsessive worry. To me it feels like an excuse for not doing something practical. People say, “I’m really worried about it and I keep thinking of what to do”. In reality those people are not thinking about what to do, they are spinning round and round about the matter to just stay in fear and make their own life miserable.

Worrying obsessively is easy, it is what we all do most of the time as we do not have the courage to do what it takes to come out of the situation. Taking a chance, saying the truth, quitting the job, breaking up, it’s all scary, because it’s different. It is called as moving forward and trying to break free from unnecessary worry. It is easy to just sit back and say, “there is nothing we can do”. There is always something that can be done, something which might be risky, something which might be different and something which might be right.

When we worry so much we start getting an illusion of control over a situation. But we need to realize, worry is not going to change the situation in fact it is destructive enough to not let us think of what is needed.

What you should do is instead of just thinking about worries, just write them down together, keep adding to the list. Take out few minutes every day for doing this. In that time you would be able to worry and then use your rest of the day for doing something better. Once you make the list, make a point of doing things which you were not doing coz you were worrying too much about them. Life is always about living on the edge, we all need to come out of the shell of worries and start living for a change. How about we all start doing things and then looking back and thinking to yourself, “why the hell was I worried in the first place?”