I had an emotional breakdown as I cleaned every inch of my bathroom last week. There was sobbing and scrubbing. There was crying and Clorox. There were tears in my toilet.
You’re probably waiting for an explanation, so here it is:
I realized I’m not good at being happy. And that made me very, very sad.
(No, I’m not hormonal and pregnant– I just act like it.)
A huge obstacle to happiness for so many people– myself included– is anxiety about the future.
And these days I’ve got lots of it. My husband and I are taking lots of big risks in the coming months (details soon), and these risks make us sick with fear. Every night one of us inevitably asks the other, “Are we going to be okay?”
But those of us who struggle with anxiety and worry can’t solely blame our unhappiness on circumstance. We dwell on the worst possible scenario so often that worry has become the default setting of our brains. Through lots of practice, we’ve trained our brains to automatically imagine terrible scenarios and exaggerate their consequences. And this is no bueno, man. No bueno.
Fellow worry warts: we’ve got to break this bad habit. Because if we can’t decrease unhealthy levels of worry, we’ll never make room for peace in our lives. We’ll never quite feel okay, even when things are (relatively) fine. And we sure as hell won’t take any necessary risks in our careers, relationships, or life in general.
The Trade-Off
Given all that, let’s talk strategy. You can’t permanently eliminate something like worry without replacing it with something better. So what can worry be replaced with?
The answer: faith. (Either the religious or non-religious kind, take your pick.)
You should take my word on this, especially since I don’t actually want faith to be the key to happiness. Faith is hard, damn it! Faith means you can’t solely rely on worrying, planning, and hard work to get you where you want to go. Which sucks. Because it’s a lot easier to Go!Go!Go! than it is to develop some intangible virtue that we typically equate with Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and our favorite grandma.
Faith is an unnerving paradox. It’s about letting go in order to receive. It’s painful yet freeing. It suck balls, but it will help you grow them.
So for the sake of our own well-being, we MUST find a way to believe that there is greatness just beyond the bend. We must develop in an inner knowing that no matter what life looks like right now, everything will be okay.
Faith In Action
My bathroom breakdown was Phase 1 of my attempt to trade in worry for faith. It involved mourning a part of myself that I must abandon — the fearful person who holds a silly belief that if she worries a little more, maybe her anxiety about the future will go away.
(This pattern of thinking is so inherently part of me, I don’t know who I’ll be without it. Probably someone who feels happy or something.)
Here are some activities and exercises I’ve been doing to take the edge off when I’m feeling particularly worried or anxious:
- Reframing scary situations and gaining a healthier perspective as a result
- Reviewing my day and taking note of the things I am grateful for
- Silence and deep breathing
- Prayer
Wish me luck. And I’ll be wishing for yours as well.
How does that serenity prayer go? Basically a prayer of discernment, enabling one to change what can be changed, letting loose of those things that cannot be changed, and finding the wisdom to know the difference. And faith (particularly the religious kind) becomes the heart and soul of that discernment process because “Good Faith” as “In Good Faith” engenders trust in God and the workings of Creation. As we align ourselves with the rhythms of said Creation and work intentionally to move through life with faithful discernment of what connects and nurtures our relationships to all things created, life just becomes simpler, quieter, less anxious and more attuned to the peace and love of God. “Zen baby, Zen!”
I forget how great the serenity prayer is because I hear it so often, but boy…if I meditated on it more, life would feel a lot easier! The more “successful” I get by worldly standards (which also happen to be the times I feel most stressed and anxious), the more I feel the pull to get back to basics spiritually. I kind of like this inner longing, actually. Currently excited to explore it. “Zen baby, Zen!”
Anxiety about the future? Oh dear, you just hit pretty close to home there. Not to mention that sometimes I expect the worst things to happen when waiting for an outcome. Example: I thought I had did much worse on two finals for two of my classes with a particularly difficult teacher. I actually woke up the other night with my stomach in knots! Thankfully I did much better than I thought I did, so I guess everything went better than expected.
Also, sometimes it’s kind of tough for me to just have faith that things will be okay. As much as I like to believe that I exercise a great amount of control over my life and future, I understand that there are things in my life that are beyond my control and that sometimes the future has a way of falling apart in mid-flight. Sometimes you just gotta sleep it off and think “Tomorrow is another day.” At least, that’s what I try to do.
Yup, sleeping it off and telling yourself “Tomorrow is another day” can work wonders. I think people would benefit from having an evening ritual that involves reflection of some kind– it refreshes the spirit and renews the mind. And I’m realizing that we’ve got to make time for this kind of thing, otherwise we’re setting ourselves up for stomach knots!
Glad you did well on your finals, smarty pants.
As one therapist told me, make one good decision and then move on, then make the next decision and move on. I feel like I have started to master the worry wart in me more recently in my job and have adopted “it is what it is.” You do your best and come what may! And… don’t forget to have fun in your life! Fill your life with as much fun as humanly possible
It’s funny. I was just scrolling through the NPR page and found a segment about “What Makes Us Happy” http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=151550273&m=151670960
Ack! It didn’t link to the right segment!
But yeah, I’m totally into all the recent studies on happiness. It always boils down to perspective and simple, healthy joys.
Oops sorry! Here it is: http://www.npr.org/2012/04/27/151361554/what-makes-us-happy
“Make one good decision and then move on, then make the next decision and move on.” I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE that!
One of my biggest weaknesses is an obsession with improving or finding a better way. Don’t get me wrong — I like that this pushes me in terms of personal development, ethics, and activism. But being this way wears me down when I apply it to smaller things. (Like when I kept making changes to the design of my wedding dress all the way up to the big day, and how even now I think about how I’d tweak the design to make it closer to my vision!) The big life changes that Brian and I are making right now have got us second guessing ourselves all the time, but I think we should take your therapist’s advice– make a good decision and then move on! Period! Thanks for sharing.
I’m glad I could share that wisdom. If you would like to go see that therapist, I know where he lives. No really. He has his office in the basement of his condo!
That’s exactly why this guy said this to me. Because I second guess myself all the time. I attribute it to the guilt I was made to feel growing up if I didn’t made the 100% best choice. Oh… the guilt. One of the atheist guys (and psychiatrist) I shared this with said I got ‘all the guilt without the god’ because my Mom went to Catholic school and I grew up without religion. Hmm thats feeling like a little TMI but whatever.
Hindsight is 20/20 baby!
Haha, I like the atheist psychotherapist’s theory.
Right now I’m practicing an anxiety-reducing technique that’s my own special blend of spirituality and CBT. I’ll be writing a post about it, I think, so look out for it!
Oh, Kim. Once again: are you my twin? Because some days it sure feels like it.
I come from a family of professional worrywarts, and I learned to worry and agonize with the best of them. It’s terrible. It ends with things like me crying when people buy me presents because I’m stressed about money. Reframing the situation with just facts and no emotions, and looking at all possible outcomes (the good as well as the bad) is a BIG starting point for me. It reminds me when I’m being extra ridiculous.
Faith? A little harder. I’d never thought of it the way you’ve framed it here. It reminds me a lot of Kierkegaard’s argument for why faith is necessary and why there can never be proof of God: faith and belief can only exist in the unproveable. If you *knew* there would be no space for belief.
Hi, twin!! Yes, reframing, exploring all possible outcomes, and rationally identifying the likelihood of each outcome are excellent tools for managing anxiety. (I know because I teach these tools to my clients and I try to use them myself. It is HARD, I won’t lie!) But you also bring up another good point — that these tools are a starting point. I’ve discovered that they are likes muscles; you have to use them as often as possible so that they get stronger, with the goal being that it becomes second nature to use them. Like muscle memory, our brains get accustomed to patterns of thinking, so the more we worry, the more we train our brains to automatically worry in any stressful situation. The good news is that it can be undone. We can change, with training and practice. (Phew!)
I think faith (religious or secular) works beautifully in conjunction with these tools. You have to have faith that you can get better, that these tools can work, that the hard mental work is worth it, and that life generally is meant to move in a positive direction despite the valleys. And actually, research has shown that people who are more hopeful often do better in life — academically, physically, etc.