I'll be totally open and honest (as I promised to be when I started this blog) - I'm going through a "rough patch". I worry. I worry a lot. about EVERYTHING. I worry about my health, I worry about my family. I worry about the rational and the irrational until I exhaust myself with worry. I work myself into panic mode and back down again, and then I worry some more. I recently started seeing a psychiatrist to try to get to the root of my worry and fix it, and can I tell you - it takes a lot of effort for me to just type those sentences. The fact of it is, I've been ashamed of this problem for so long - fearing that sharing the information with others will paint a picture of me in a negative light. Emilie's weak, Emilie's weird, Emilie's crazy... while the truth is - I'm just a normal human being that has a problem that requires attention. And the more important truth is - if anyone judges me or shines that negative light on me because of this information, then they are not a person that I need in my life.
Because of this quest to get myself back to "normal", I have been doing a lot of reading lately, and something I found this week has really stuck with me. In a nutshell, it says that usually people who are anxious spend the majority of their time either replaying the past or stressing over what might happen in the future, when what we need to do is focus on the present. The more we are able to focus on the present and those things that are currently in our control, the less out of control and anxious we can feel. Focus on this day, this hour, this minute even - those are the things that we are currently truly faced with. Why worry about what will happen tomorrow or 2 years from now? and it's even more futile to replay past events and worry over how we would change them or pine to relive them. We cannot go back to that point in time and we can't predict the future, so why spend so much of our lives consumed by either of them? So, I'm working on this, and I would challenge others to do the same. Let go of the past, quit stressing over the future - just live in the moment before it passes us by.
Crazy? Maybe.
ReplyDeleteWeird? Definitely!
Weak? Not a chance.
When I find myself stressing and worrying I try to remember two things:
The past is past. It's over. There is nothing we can do to make it any different and we can't go back.
As for the future... "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." ~ Matthew 6:34