The other day I received a text from a dear friend; she shared that she was very worried because when she pulled up to the AMC 24 in Highlands Ranch, she saw police cars, a fire truck, and an ambulance. She commented that she would “remain calm and fight the urge to circle around again to see why they are here.” I immediately related to her text because I, too, worry when I hear or see emergency vehicles. For my friend, she is sensitive to this scene because her two children were in the middle school pod at STEM School Highlands Ranch on May 7th. My response to her had no advice, just solidarity. We both have very different reasons for our immediate worry when we see emergency vehicles, but the truth is we are all walking around with things we worry about; it is more common than we realize.
Worry is an age-old issue — if we had an easy answer for how to stop worrying, we would all do it. For many of us, we are so familiar with our habit of worrying that it never occurs to us that we should share our worries with anyone, so we worry and carry on. For others, like my friend, we share one worry, the emergency-vehicle worry, because that is a socially acceptable worry. But what makes a worry acceptable to share? And why do we judge worries as acceptable and not acceptable? When we don’t share our worries, they become silent and they stay within, creating a weight, one that we carry everywhere we go.
Silent worries are countless; they can be immediate ones like worrying about how long an appliance will keep working or how you will make your rent or mortgage payment. Most worries go deeper though, and they may include worrying about how your children are doing when they are away from you or if they are developing like other kids are.
Silent worries may also include worrying about your marriage or your parents’ or sibling’s health or when you will be able to visit family. There are the worries we have about how others see us and respond to us. Silent worries wake us up at 2am or keep us awake long past the moment we lay our head upon the pillow at night. During the day, they are always in the back of our mind, silently interrupting our peace.
So, what are your silent worries? What makes you stop and begin to worry? What wakes you up at 2am or keeps you from falling asleep at 8, 9, 10 or 11pm? What kind of worry is impacting your mood and how you respond to your children or spouse? Feel free to sit down and make a list; making a list will help you to articulate those things that often possess your thoughts. While you write the list, pay attention to your thoughts about the list; are you surprised by all that you are writing down or sad at how long the list is? What is the conversation you are having with yourself as you write down these worries? Are you still telling yourself that the list is ridiculous and that you can never share them with others?
Is Worrying a Waste of Time?
When you type “quotes about worry” into Google, you get 20 pages of websites to look at, and as you look at all the quotes, none of them actually give advice for how to stop worrying; they all just conclude the same thing; worrying is a waste of time. So, what then do we do with our list of worries?
Continue to write the worries down and listen to your kids when they tell you theirs because they learn how to respond to worry from us. Through listening to our own and our children’s worries, we take what is within and expose it to the world outside. When we expose it, we realize that what we are worrying about, often, isn’t as big as it seemed within our mind. The weight of holding our worries within is relieved by getting it out of our interior. Bring it out, look at it and allow yourself the peace of not holding that worry anymore. If the list is really long or the worry is imminent or deep, do talk with a friend, a partner, a spouse, a parent, or a professional. By writing down your worries, you can begin to see what is big and what is small so that when the worry arrives again, instead of allowing it to spiral out of control, you can remind yourself “oh, I don’t have to worry about that one anymore” or “I should really talk to someone about this worry.” Writing down our worries helps us to do something with the weight of it; it takes it from the inside to the outside; it exposes the truth, and when we expose the truth, it sets us free.
