Confessions of a Worrywart

I'm a worrier.

More than that, I'm a multi-purpose worrier. I worry about terrorists, germs, hate crimes, duct tape, retirement, work, money, sleazy politicians and redneck neighbors. I worry about cancer, about heart disease, and not a day goes by that I don't worry about diabetes. I worry about leaving the water running when I brush my teeth, I worry about the abundance of Styrofoam in landfills, I worry about spiders lurking in my clothes. I've spent more time than you want to contemplate worrying that a Google search of my name returned, as the first hit, "My Penis Is Large Enough, Thanks" from the article I wrote on spam for the first issue of Mosaic Minds. You name it, I've worried about it. In fact, I worry about how much I worry.

It's easy to make jokes about it now because I'm actually in recovery from my worrying addiction. I used to lie awake at night, paralyzed by this awesome amount of sheer worry festering inside me. I would pretend to be asleep, so as not to alarm or annoy my husband, who was generally never fooled. I imagined people breaking into my house, or the outbreak of a fire. It was a very heavy burden to bear all the time, and it was beginning to take its toll on my daily life.

At some point, I finally realized--with the help of one very tired husband--that I really needed to learn to relax or I was going to give myself an ulcer. It took a while to sink in, but when I started worrying about those hypothetical ulcers, I decided it was time to make a change in my life. I'm not going to pretend that it was easy, because it wasn't. It still isn't. There are real reasons for a few of the more serious things I worry about, so it wasn't as simple as changing my diet to reduce the risk of heart disease and diabetes (although I should do that, too.) Gradually, I started focusing on letting things go. In the end, controlling my anxiety came down to the following two points.

Believing in myself.
I decided that although I could never actually stop any of those things from happening, I had to learn to trust that I could either get through anything life threw my way… or it would kill me. That might sound morbid, but it was actually pretty comforting when I put it that way. After all, if I'm dead, whatever the problem is won't bother me anyway. If I'm not dead, then clearly things aren't nearly as bad as they could be, right?

Planning for the worst for dummies
Part two of the worry-free lifestyle is to figure out the very basics of what would happen if what I'm worrying about actually occurred. This is a very tricky step--I usually get help from my extremely logical husband, who has a natural flair for it. For example, we're currently in the process of looking for our first house. I've been uncharacteristically breezy about this idea thus far, but last night, the worry hit, and so I addressed my fears with him.

"What if," I ask hesitantly, "what if we decide we don't want to live here anymore and we want to move to.. uhhh.. Iowa?"

He looks at me calmly. "Then we sell the house."

We sell the house! That's perfect! Now I know what to do when my bags are packed for Iowa and we still have that pesky mortgage payment--we sell the house! It doesn't matter that there isn't a chance I'm going to wake up tomorrow and long for Iowa. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with living there, but I've never even been there, and have really never even had a strong feeling for it one way or another. Reducing the problem to its simplest form helps me conquer the anxiety, though, and makes me realize that I'll be able to get through anything (even an unexpected move to the Hawkeye State.)

Battling my worrying problem has been difficult, but I'm a much happier person now that I no longer have to fear the unknown every single day. Not worrying about the future won't actually solve any problems that might arise--but neither will worrying about them in advance. And this way, I can sleep at night again, which makes everyone I know a lot happier.