I’m a worrier. It’s part of my anxiety. My worries start small and get bigger. They make me feel tense and nauseated. Sometimes, if my worries get really big, I can’t sleep. I roll around in bed while my mind goes over my worry, making it bigger and bigger. I want to cry, scream, and turn off my brain, but nothing seems to stop it. I silently plead with my mind to quit torturing me, but it rages on.
I write my thoughts down in a notebook for my therapist to read and then we discuss them. I wrote about my obsessive worrying. She told me I need to minimize my worries and evaluate them. If there’s nothing I can do about my worry, I need to let it go. Easier said than done. Then she told me there is something I can do: I need to look at my worry and think about how I can make it smaller. She said I should look at the facts and figure out step by step what I can do to shrink that worry. It sounds easy but it’s hard to do.
My biggest worry is finances. I worry each week we’re not going to have enough money to make it through the week. Then the worry turns into, “We’re going to go broke!” It snowballs until I think that we’re going to lose everything and live in a cardboard box. It makes me sick each week to worry about this.
I text with Cheryl about my worries. She always tells me everything will be okay, but I can’t stop my mind. This week I texted her a breakdown of my worry.
I texted her, “I have $93.00 until Wednesday. I have prescriptions for $36.95, and if I get half a tank of gas, it will cost $25.00. That leaves me $31.11 and Wednesday is four days away. We can make it, right?”
Cheryl replied, “Yea, you can make it. Very good.”
It helped me to look at my worry clearly and made it look less overwhelming. It prevented me from obsessing over how we were going to make it through the week and kept it from getting bigger. I broke it down even further. If we eat meals at home and take short rides, we could make that money stretch. I try to take my husband on rides after work to get him out of the house, and small rides will still get him out.
Recently we got a new to us SUV and the alarm kept going off every time I locked it. On Thursday we dropped it off at a Honda dealer for repairs. I worried about the cost being big. They called and told me the hood latch caused the alarm to go off, the transmission fluid needed to be changed, and we needed a cabin filter. They said it would cost over nine hundred dollars. If I only got the hood latch fixed, they quoted me $604.00. I had the $604.00 left over from the loan, and I could do that. My dad could change the transmission fluid and cabin filter, and I would just have to buy the filter and fluid.
I decided to call my dad, and he suggested I call the dealer I bought the car from and ask if he could give me anything towards the repairs. So, I called the dealer and he said he would send me a check for half the cost of the repairs. I decided I could use the money he sends me for the transmission fluid and cabin filter. The left-over money I’ll put in my savings for future needs. By thinking it through like this it prevented me from worrying about the costs of the repairs.
I’m still working on letting go of worries I can’t do anything about. This one is going to be harder. The minimizing my worries also takes some work. Right now, I’m doing it with financial worries, but I have to work on it with other worries too. What I have been doing is helping. I’m not going to lie to you; this process is not easy. It takes a lot of work. Are you willing to do the work to minimize your worries, before they take control of you? The trick is to catch the worry in the beginning and then break it down.
Even though you’re working on making your worries smaller, there still will be days the worries get out of control. Don’t beat yourself up for it. Just keep practicing until it becomes a habit. I know that I will struggle at times with my obsessive worrying, but I won’t let it get me down. I’m going to keep working at minimizing them until it becomes a part of my everyday routine. Let’s do this together.
I’m working each day on making my worries smaller and by doing this it helps me stay in the light of recovery.
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