How to force worries out of your mind

Day 253 / 365

“Blessed is the person who is too busy to worry in the daytime and too sleepy to worry at night.”

This is another good tip I got from the book “How to stop worrying and start living” about how to crowd worry out of your mind. The author gave examples of several people who were able to get rid of their anxiety by getting themselves busy doing other stuff.

Take the case of a guy who lost 2 of his daughters within the course of a year. He was so depressed he couldn’t sleep and doctors had to prescribe him sleeping pills. A few months later, his 4-year-old son asked him to make a toy boat for him. When he did that, he realized that those two hours when he was focussed at building the boat, was the first time when he had felt free of his anxiety. So he made a list of all the tasks that needed to be done around the house and just started spending time doing so. By getting busy and forcing the worries out of his mind he was able to finally move on.

During the Second world war, Whinston Churchill was asked if he worried about all the tremendous responsibilities that he has. His reply was -

“I’m too busy, I don’t have time to be worried”

The reason why this approach works is simple. Our brains are not so great in thinking about two things at the same time. If you are too involved with a task, you just won’t have memory available in your brain to waste on whatever it was that you were worried about.

If there is something worrying you at the moment, I am sure you can easily make a to-do list of things you need to get done. So stop thinking and get moving!

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — Don’t let the beetles get you down