Why you wake up tired even after sleeping
If your nervous system is too tired to read today, I recorded an audio version of this so you can just listen.
So many of us, including myself, were taught to worry.
We were taught that worrying meant you cared. If you worry about someone, it’s because you love them. You want the best for them. You hope they would do what was best. But it wasn’t until much later that I realized that meant what I thought was best.
Which leads us to the problem. Worrying is actually an action that is wrapped around judgment and control. Not only does it cause us to impose our preferences onto the world and other people, it causes us to then ruminate over trying to control the outcome - namely, what that person thinks, says and does.
We’re taught that worrying will somehow help solve the problem. We’re taught to say, “I’m worried.” As if it was something we couldn’t control. As if it was a state that befalls us, rather than an action we’re choosing.
Worrying is false productivity. It tricks the mind into thinking we’re working, because it takes so much mental energy, it feels like work. We wake up tired like we stayed up all night doing something about the problem, when really nothing was actually done.
If presented with a problem, if our goal is to control the outcome, the only way to do that is to presuppose all the different forks in the road and the ending of each of them. Now there are ten, twenty outcomes we must control.
What a way to live. No wonder so many of us are caught in spirals of anxiety.
If not that, then what?
A few years ago I had a friendship that wrecked me. We came together in chaos and it was so much fun. Sometimes new friendships can be as intoxicating as a new romantic relationship. And just as addictive.
This friendship taught me a lot. Most importantly that people don’t want to be worried about. They just want to be loved. And that means giving them space to figure their own shit out. When I released that grip I could breathe again.
That friendship didn’t survive, but I met my best friend now through it. So I think sometimes the path is just the path. You have to walk it to know what’s there, waiting to be loved into existence.
Worrying is a game we can choose not to play. It is only one tool in a box full of other ones. Because worry isn’t an emotion. It is a response to one. And we can choose our responses.
So much of our fear comes from not being able to see the monster. The size of it. The skill of it. And naming it correctly is how we face it. How we choose the most helpful tool - not in our war against it - but in our cooperation with it. This is how we disarm a mind that’s raring for a fight.
We can’t fix the car if we don’t know what the issue is. We have to look under the hood. If we are to choose the most effective response, we have to know what the actual underlying emotion is.
Sometimes it’s uncertainty screaming for certainty, sometimes it’s frustration of feeling powerless while seeing someone we love suffer, sometimes it’s helplessness knowing the only person that can help them is themselves.
Worrying is a great substitute for these feelings when we don’t want to feel them. Most of us weren’t taught to name our emotions. What good would it do? the mind says. We think the formidable opponent is what’s coming. But it’s already here.
Power is the realization that our emotions have been on our side all along. That they are worthy allies.
Most of my work is helping people turn habits into choices. My habit of worrying caused me to think that was the only way to be - with work, with myself, with other people, with life. But that one relationship got me to see my own destructive patterns, and how I could stop it.
It only takes one person to break a pattern. Go first.
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The nervous system doesn’t learn by thinking - it learns by practicing. If you’re exhausted from the constant pressure of holding yourself together, I’m here to support you. Your first session is free.
