#12: Worry Time

Self-care challenge from the website www.calmmoment.com/

Tell yourself not to worry and sometimes that amplifies your concerns. Push them down and they leak out or create tension in our guts or shorten our breath. It’s not healthy to eradicate worry, fear or anxiety – they are all there to keep us safe, giving us the opportunity to check that we are on the right track. But while it’s normal to experience these states, there is a time and place. If you find worry consuming you it can help to create a boundary to it. Set a specific time to worry and give it everything you’ve got for that allotted time only. 

If worry crops up at other times remind yourself you can give this your full attention later, it’s not time for it now. You might find you don’t really feel like worrying when that time comes up or with the passage of time, or the thing that really needled you earlier this morning feels tiny now. 

Dump it down onto a piece of paper and enjoy crossing out cares that aren’t really your responsibility – give yourself permission to hand these back to their rightful owners. Anything that’s not a real concern, scrub it out. Maybe there are some big worries, spend some time coming up with a plan of attack or reach out for help. Worry on its own isn’t enough, there will be things that we need to take action on. Break it down, tie up some incompletions and make progress today.