Why We Worry All the Time and How to Cope

it's not an illustrious category to belong to of course but there are plenty of us at least we worry about work money being left illness disappointing over-promising madness disgrace just to start the list we worry in the early hours we worry on holiday we worry at parties and we worry all the time while we're trying to smile and seem normal to good people who depend on us it can feel pretty unbearable at moments a standard approach when trying to assuage our blizzard of worries is to look at each intern and Marshall sensible arguments against their probabilities but it can and points also be helpful not to look at the specifics of every worry and instead to consider the overall position that worry has come to occupy in our lives there is a hugely fascinating sentence on the topic in an essay whether great English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott the catastrophe you fear will happen has in fact already happened when we worry we're naturally fixated on what will occur next it's the future with its boundless possibilities for horror that is the natural arena for exploration by our panicked thoughts but in winnicott's unexpected thesis something else is revealed the disaster that we fear is going to unfold is actually behind us there is a paradox here why do we keep expecting something to happen that's already happened why don't we better distinguish past from present winnicott's answer is that it's in the nature of traumatic events from childhood not to be properly processed and as a result like the dead who've not been adequately buried and mourned to start to haunt us indiscriminately in adulthood for example we may panic that we're about to be humiliated and shamed there are no particularly strong grounds for this in objective reality but which utterly convinced nevertheless because this is precisely what happened to us when we were tiny and of a parent oh we worry intensely that we're about to be abandoned in love not because our partner is in any significant way disloyal but because someone who once looked after us at a very vulnerable point definitely was a benefit of understanding how much our worries boat of childhood is a new sense that it isn't so much the future we should be distressed about as the past we can replace dread and apprehension with something sadder yet ultimately more redemptive meaning we can feel profoundly sorry for our younger selves as an alternative to being panicked for our future selves appreciating the chartered legacy of worries we also stand to realize that we can adapt and improve on how we respond to what alarms us if we've been well parented we'll have been bequeathed holder the type of good moves to latch on to when crises occur we know how to reach out seek help perhaps give away and only take as much responsibility as with June we have access to a corridor through our troubles but when we have lacked this kind of tutelage we remain in significant ways in relation to our troubles like the frightened children we once were we may be tall drive car and sound like a grown-up but faced with concerns we resort to our toolkit of childlike solutions we overeat we go silent we scream we have little sense of other options we feel extremely limited in our powers of protest and agency we lose all the perspective to which it's appropriate and in no way patronizing to remind ourselves of what can in our deeper psychological selves still be an entirely implausible thought that we are now adults in other words in response to the kinds of Terror we knew so well at the age of four or eight we don't have to be either as afraid or as powerless as we were we can mount a direct protest we can make an eloquent case for ourselves we can complain and defend our position we can rebuild our lives in a new way elsewhere there are two ways to mitigate risk to try to remove all risk from the world or to work on one's attitude to risk knowing that many of our fears have childhood antecedents as do our responses to them can free us to imagine that history won't have to repeat itself exactly adult life doesn't have to be as terrifying as our childhoods once were and our responses to our fears can have some of the greater vigor and confidence that is the natural privilege of grown-ups we'll still be worried a substantial portion of the time but perhaps with a little less fragility and fewer burning convictions of total upcoming catastrophe thank you for commenting liking and subscribing we also offer books games home wear and therapy sessions to find out more follow the link on your screen now

Channel: The School of Life

Views: 816,285

Keywords: the school of life, mood, alain de botton, philosophy, talk, self, improvement, big questions, love, wellness, mindfullness, psychology, hack, how to, depression, mental illness, worrying, how to stop worrying all the time, how to stop worrying, anxiety, stress, stop worrying, PL=SELF, कैसे चिंता को रोकने के लिए, Cómo dejar de preocuparse, Wie man aufhört, sich zu sorgen, Como parar de se preocupar, Comment arrêter de s'inquiéter, 如何停止担心

Id: s2AUI-7GRJc

Length: 5min 30sec (330 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 15 2018