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I used to worry all the time. I realized I didn’t worry about having a stroke (let alone 2 strokes in 2 days), but I worried all the time. The strokes happened regardless of whether I worried or not.

These days I have given up worrying. Mostly. The American humorist Erma Bombeck says, “Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere.”

I have learned to be more accepting of life. I accept it, and then I deal with it. When I would worry, it was my way of putting off of dealing with it; my works “worrys”, my personal “worrys”, and my life “worrys”!

Tony Robbins teaches about 3 questions we are always asking. They are, What am I focusing on? What does “this” mean? What am I going to do about it?

Ask yourself his three questions consciously. We answer them all the time unconsciously. My mom was in a rehabilitation center and she was worrying up a storm by using these three questions.

What was she focusing on? She imagined the worst scenarios that she could. She will be homeless and run out of money. What does this mean to her? She will wear the same outfits for days or weeks. She will be dirty. What is she going to do? She will beg for money and slowly her life will leave her.

It is a pretty ugly imagination or picture which she dreams up for herself. My heart goes out to her. I know she must change her way of thinking if she wants different outcomes.

The same goes for us. If we want to let go of worrying, we need to focus on the present moment. That’s right, right NOW. It is difficult to concentrate on the now when we have so many things that happened to us and what we are going to do in the future. If I deal with the now, I won’t have the ability to handle our past and our future. Do you get the point I am trying to make?

When you focus on the now, I not saying you forget your past and future. You need to get more balance by looking at your past, future, and the present moment. That’s all – I write to you both lightly and seriously.

Remember that your mind does not listen to your direct commands to NOT DO something. The better way is to trick your mind to think or feel about something different. The mind loves novelty!

Every year, you absorb about 5% more than the previous year. To put it in perspective, only 500 years ago, 74 gigabytes (GB) of information would be what a highly educated person consumed in a lifetime, through books and stories. A whole lifetime versus a single day. You need to deal with all this information!

The human brain, yours and mine, can process around 1 megabyte (MB – 1,000 equals 1 gigabyte) of information every second. But our conscious minds can handle only 5 or 6 bytes of information a second.

Research at Cornell University suggests that the average person makes 35,000 decisions every day, with over 200 decisions related to food alone. Others say it can be as high as 80,000 decisions every day. Accounting for eight hours of sleep, it boils down to a decision EVERY 1 – 1.5 seconds. How many of those choices do you make with your conscious awareness of the process? Do you wonder why you get the chance to be worried?

Be cautious about your mind wanting to be occupied with something. If you have got it the habit of worrying, you can replace it with a new habit that is more aligned with the NEW you.

There are two different exercises that you can do EVERY TIME you find yourself caught in the worrying loop. You can do both of them, or one or the other.

The first is a journaling exercise. Are you ready? Let’s do this exercise. First, you need to get your journal, a pen, and paper or the back of a napkin and a crayon. It does not matter. What matters, is that you write down your feelings and thoughts. Second, imagine all the sensations that are all around and impacting you. You mostly manage your sensations through your subconscious mind. The part of us that we don’t think or feel about it.

When we notice what were conscious of, sometimes our subconscious mind lets some thoughts and feelings percolate “up.” But consider journaling consistently. You never know, you worry about all sorts of things, but it starts to reside!

The second exercise is this 2-minute mindfulness exercise or mini-meditation which is a simple practice that you need to control your jumbled mind when you are worrying!

• First, look around and notice where you are.
• Then close your eyes and notice the surrounding sounds. Remember, you can be with your breathing with the sounds.
• Take one deep breath to settle yourself.
• Then follow your breath, from the moment the air touches your nostrils as you inhale, feeling it fill up your chest and belly, and as it leaves your body as you exhale, noticing if the air feels warmer or colder.
• Repeat this for five deep breaths.

“The core of this brain hack is understanding that you can interrupt a distracting thought with a meditation, and it doesn’t have to involve three hours in lotus pose,” Wendy Suzuki, Ph.D., author of Healthy Brain, Happy Life (due out this spring), tells SELF. “You can literally take 30 seconds and close your eyes and start to focus on your breathing.”

Try either exercise!

Do you need to quit your habit of worrying? There are many more productive habits like reflecting on how many air molecules does Earth’s atmosphere have? Wow…that came out from left field! It is to make a point that the habit of excessively worrying is a waste of energy. Let it go!

https://oursubconsciousmind.com/11-crazy-facts-about-your-subconscious-mind/, https://inlpcenter.org/subconscious-mind/, https://oursubconsciousmind.com/what-is-your-subconscious-mind-in-depth-guide/, & https://www.self.com/story/trick-to-stop-racing-thoughts