Worry, Stress… and Pulling Yourself Together!

Increasingly, I find myself talking to people who, until the pull themselves together, live in fear of the future. We might casually call it "worry" - we might even label it stress. But all it is is unchecked useless thought.

"All it is" is slightly misleading - because this fear keeps people awake at night - and recent research has firmly established that just one night's disrupted sleep results in a build-up of the proteins associated with dementia on the neural pathways' synapses - as a client said to me recently "Well, all you've done now is given me something more to worry about at four in the morning!" I should, of course, mention that a subsequent good night's sleep will clean out the synapses but regular disrupted sleep is very bad indeed for your long-term mental health. And worry and stress are conclusively bad for your digestive and immune systems but, most importantly, your cardio-vascular system. The point is, that fear will get you one way or another!

That is, of course, unless you pull yourself together and do something about it. This is good news indeed, because you can do all you need to do to simply not just stop fear in its tracks but cut the legs right from under it. All you need to do is turn your mind away from the useless thoughts that lead us down a blind-alley. You don't fight the fear - there's no point in shadow-boxing something that isn't there! You don't even give it the time of day! You simply take the time and make the choice to experience the here and now, just as it is here and now… this is the essence of mindfulness.

In the here and now, freed from our own repetitive and ruminate thought, all is well unless, of course, you're being chased by a hungry tiger... which is why we were wired this way in the first place! Fix your wiring.