Worry and Me

This month’s theme – on noticing and releasing (Forgiving? Scraping off?) worry – lies close to my heart.

As someone who writes freelance for a living, I naturally fret about the profitability of how much I can invest in creative process. I worry whether I’m doing enough, deadline to deadline, and I worry about what I’m not getting done. Am I letting others down?  

When I really have time to ruminate (in my sleep or on the heels of unrelated concerns), I feel like I have my head completely out the window of the WorryMobile, my hair whipping in the wind of worst-case scenario. This state is about as far from the present, productive moment as I can get.   

As it turns out, according to brain science, getting swept up in what could go wrong can and does put our sympathetic nervous system’s pedal to the floor and keep it there, fueling auto-immune stress response and inflammation that can flare into dozens of disorders. Ugh. 

“If you practice worrying, your brain just gets really good at worrying,” says Lewis Smirl, a clinical therapist at Jackson-based Teton Wellness Affiliates and a trained mindfulness teacher. Lewis is also a seasoned climber, skier, and all-around mountain guy, so coming from him, this fact naturally sounds simplified for the less thrill-inclined. But it takes practice, he says, for anyone to catch the stray “What if...?” and bring attention back. Over time, the catching becomes a stronger habit than the worrying. 

Here’s hoping. 

Now that I’m nearly two years into a solidly average mindfulness practice, I often find myself performing micro-techniques before I realize I’m doing them (three deep breaths, look outside and notice one exquisite detail). Sometimes I have a clear practice intention, such as acknowledging a strong emotion or turning my full attention to a legitimate worry to see clearly what’s going on. 

And sometimes I’m just noticing that my mind-body is picking up a gear, and I need to slow back down. I know exactly where stress stuffs itself (my right hip and glute, the upper curve of my stomach) and when I’m nearing my capacity of it. If I’m teetering on the worry brink, I literally feel a vibration located between my chest and throat alternating between a higher, calmer frequency, like having one’s head above water, and a lower, more ominous frequency, accompanied by a sinking feeling.  

If I stop what I’m doing and perform a scan of what else is revving up, I usually find my shoulders pitched forward and my posture loading my sore hip unnaturally. That’s my cue to breathe and see what happens. If I’m successful, I can maintain that higher frequency and the pinched feeling elsewhere in my body lessens. I can return to actually “doing what I’m doing,” as another Jackson practitioner, Ryan Burke of Mindstrength Project, says of staying in the present moment. 

My more enlightened friends or teachers might better explain this vibrational phenomenon, if that’s even what it is. In any case, it’s my layperson’s progress report on meeting worry when (not if) I find it. 

What’s working for you?