#107 - Worry

It's not strange to worry sometimes, but can it be taken to an extreme? I think so. On this episode I talk about:

- why we worry.
- how other's offer us worry and add to our existing worry.
- why worrying isn't loving.
- how worry can become habitual.
- and how to decrease how much you worry.

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jamelyn@jamelynstpehan.com

Transcript

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I'm Jamilin Stephan and this is want to want it episode number 107 worry. Welcome to want to want it a podcast for women of the church of Jesus Christ of latter day saints who are ready to ignite not only their sexual desire, but all of their desires to create a more fulfilling life and marriage. I'm jamielynn Stephan. I'm a certified life coach, a wife, and a mother of seven children. I'm excited to share my personal journey to desire with you and teach you how to desire more as well Hey everybody. I am so happy to be here today. I took a few weeks off recording and kind of out of my business because I have a brand new grandson that I got to spend so much time with. And he is of course. Amazing and loved by everybody and so much fun to hold and be with. But. It's time to get back to reality and engage in my business again. So here I am today to talk to you about worry. Worry is kind of interesting to think about, because remember I taught you the model, right? You have a circumstance, and then you have a thought about that circumstance and that thought creates a feeling in your body and that feeling drives you to act. And then that action or inaction, whatever happens gives you the results that you have in your life. Worry is super interesting because it happens in your mind. So worry can be a thought, right? Your thoughts can be worry, type thoughts, because worry is really when we allow our mind to dwell on. Uh, difficulties or troubles or problems, and maybe even not even real problems, but some of them are actual problems. Some of them are just potential problems that we have and we kind of get so that our mind is dwelling and we're worrying. So. You could put worry in the thought line of the model. So let's say that the circumstance is that you're going to take your driver's license exam today. And so your thought is I'm so worried I'm going to fail, right? So you have worry as a thought. But worry can also be a feeling you can feel worried. And most of us experienced some worry in our life because it's almost a part of anxiety. So back to the example of the driver's test, you've got your driver's test and your thought is if I mess up my parallel parking today, I'm going to fail. And then, because you're thinking that thought you feel worried, you feel worried about parallel parking. So we're, it can be a thought or a feeling, but it can also be an action. I want you to think about another definition of worry. So another definition of worry is like when you're touching or disturbing or pulling on something repeatedly, like a dog can worry on a bone, right. He worries a bone bite, just meaning that he's biting it and working on it constantly. And for a long time, It's the same idea with worry in your action line, you can just constantly worry and dwell on the problem. So let's say you're getting ready for your driver's test. And in your mind, you just keep dwelling on the fact that you could fail and you keep thinking of all the things you might do wrong to fail, and you just repeatedly go to the story of how you might fail. And so your action is to worry. So as we talk about worry today, You're going to hear me describing worry as a way of thinking. Feeling actions, like all of those different things come into worry. Which honestly makes sense because worry is like fear and doubt. And so it is an opposition to faith. Which I'm going to talk a little more about later, but faith also can be a thought or a feeling or an action. So it is interesting, right? It's an opposition to faith and it can be. What you think or what you feel or how you act. Worry. Like anxiety is always future focused. We are not feeling worried about what's happening right now in the present moment. Like in this instant, I'm not worried about this instant. Does that make sense? I may be worried about the next instant, but worry. Isn't something we experience. About what is happening right now, this very instant. So it's just a good thing to remind your brain that worries always living in the future. Usually an unknown future, but by dwelling on all that could possibly go wrong. We cause herself pain in the present, right? This unnecessary discomfort and pain in the present because we are caught up in worry. Now where it is so interesting as well, because worry is something that we actually are willing to give people more of. So if you had a friend and she was feeling like she was such a failure as a mother, and she was so disappointed in herself. You would never add to her feelings of disappointment by telling her oh, and by the way, you're also failing as a wife, right? We just like, we don't do that. Or if you have a friend who's overwhelmed in his life, you're not going to take the time to be like, Hey, listen, I get that. You're totally overwhelmed over here, but you have totally dropped the ball in this area of your life as well. Just so you know, We do not do that. In fact, if anything, we try hard to talk our friends out of negative emotions. We desperately want people to feel better. But sometimes when our friends tell us about their worries, we can be really quick to add more worry onto their worries. So for example, maybe your friend is worried about the COVID vaccine. Now, this is kind of a controversial subject. So maybe I shouldn't be bringing this up on my podcast, but let's just say that your friend is debating about giving her kids a COVID vaccine and is super worried about whether it's the right thing to do. And it's really frightening about it. And then she comes to talk to you and instead of doing what you would do, if she was sad or depressed or overwhelmed, you decide to offer her more worry. But you start telling her stories of kids in the hospital that weren't vaccinated are about someone that you heard had vaccinated their child. And that child ended up in the hospital because of the vaccination. Right. Now it's not because a good friend should withhold good information. That's not what I'm trying to say. But it's the emotion behind what you share that matters. So check yourself. Are you stressed and worried about this too? And so are you sharing this information from that place? Or can you share information that you have from a place of reason and calm? Now, maybe this is a tough example for some, but I just want to encourage you to look within yourself and ask, do I feel my friends worries or do I help them out of it? Like, for example, a friend who doesn't want to fuel worry. Maybe it would say, I can see how worried you are about this, because it can be really hard right now to find clear answers about what to do. And I mean, I've had my own struggles. But I do know this. You are your child's mother for a reason, and you're going to know the right thing to do. You're going to be able to come to a decision and make peace with it. Something kind of like that, right. Something that acknowledges how they are feeling while offering them the opportunity to turn to faith or reason or calm. Because there's no clarity and worry. So if nothing else, a good friend wants to help their friend get to more clarity. Not to more worry. Now not only do people encourage us in our worry at times. People offer us worry all the time. They offer us things to worry about and they tell us really, we really should be worried right there. Like if you're not worried, you really should be worried. It's time for you to worry. You know, you should worry about your kids. You should worry about their future or their grades or their relationships or their habits like that. Someone that gets me screen time. I worry about screen time and I get myself caught up in worrying other people, telling me all the research and things about screen time. It just adds to my worry. People tell us we should be worried about money, about what our house looks like about our spouse, cheating on us. They tell us we should be worried about being embarrassed or taken advantage of, or being treated fairly. People encourage us to worry about, you know, are you good enough? Are you pretty enough? Are you acceptable enough? They tell us, we should worry about having hard conversations. Like, oh, this is going to be a really hard conversation. You should be totally stressed or being honest or vulnerable, right. Like, oh, they got to worry about that. Now we don't necessarily need people to offer us worry. We do a great job on our own. But part of the reason we are so good at it is because we are fed it constantly. Advertisers thrive on worry. It can even feel like really well-meaning church leaders or church members want us to worry. Right there. Like, oh, this thing you should really be worried when Christ specifically tells us doubt, not fear, not. So in other words, Don't worry. So, again, not only does our brain offer us where all day, every day, everyone else does too. So in our area, like probably your area, people have a lot of opinions about the. Uh, schools. Here like this. This one's too full, that one's too old and run down that one's got all the bad kids in it, right. Or they have a ton of opinions about the teachers, you know, he's way too strict. She doesn't prepare the kids well enough for the exams they have to take. Or I've just heard that guy, such a terrible teacher. And it's just amazing how often people want to offer, worry to their friends who are parents of the kids potentially going to these schools. And so. Parents start to frantically try and get their kids out of a certain school or out of a certain class and all because they were just offered. Worry. Now again, I appreciate it. When someone gives me the heads up about something that really matters, but too often, one person's worry is something that they're just handing to you and not really carefully thought out information. And you can tell by the way they share that information. Just like I said before they share it and it's laced with worry, right? It's from this place where you feel their worry, it's not really from this place of clarity or calm or reason. Now, When I started homeschooling years ago. I certainly had my own worries about it, but every one. Except for other homeschoolers constantly offered me worry They would offer it in the form of kind of questions, but they were worry questions, right? Like no one really wanted to come straight out and say, your kids are gonna be idiots because you're doing this. But they would say things like. Like, what if your kids don't really know how to socialize well with other kids or adults as they get older or. Like how all your kids ever get opportunity to play sports. Like they'll never get to play on the high school basketball team or how can you be sure that you're going to actually be able to teach them everything they need to know to succeed in life? Or what do they need to learn? Something that you don't know about and you can't teach them. Now in truth, I actually had fantastic answers for all of these questions. Answers that I felt really confident in. Because I knew there were solutions to all of these problems and I knew that some of them weren't even problems. But I had my own worries because I just saw myself failing every day, trying to balance the care, a little babies and toddlers with teaching my older kids. Plus we're taught to worry and we're taught to adopt the worry other people offer us. So it felt like I was supposed to worry. So I did. And even though I was offered a lot of comfort and peace, especially through the holy ghost, I could never really grasp onto it. Well, because I was so caught up in the worry, it felt like I needed to worry, or I wouldn't make myself do a good job. And it felt like I needed to worry. So other people wouldn't have to worry for me. And I felt like I needed to worry so that if my kids turned out badly from it all, then I would just be able to say, yeah, I totally saw this coming. And by the way, I actually couldn't be happier with how my kids have turned out the ones who were mainly homeschooled and the ones that were mainly in the public school system. They're just awesome humans. And looking back, I just want to take that homeschool mom and tell her. Don't worry one more minute about it. I know it feels useful. I know everyone else wants you to worry. But it is completely unnecessary. And not useful at all. It isn't helping you show up as a caring mother or a confident homeschooler, and that's actually harder on your kids than anything else. I just wish so badly. I could go back and just tell her your okay, everything's going to be fine. And that is the thing that is so interesting about worry is it's so deceptive. We tell ourselves that it is useful and helpful when in reality it just keeps us stuck or it keeps us acting ways that aren't awesome. They just, aren't really the best ways to act. I felt like it was useful to worry about my kids at home learning with me, because then I thought, okay, then I'm going to be vigilant. And I'm going to hold myself to a really high standard. And then my fear of failing is going to help me keep on top of them. Right. Cause I don't want them to fail. But that's not really how it turned out. I was just driven by worry and anxiety. And I am sure that that showed up in the way I interacted with my kids and probably in a negative way, most of the time, in fact, For sure it did because worry is a negative emotion and you just can't show up great from that place. And it certainly didn't help me or my mental health or my confidence. I just beat myself up every day for years. But it felt like worry was the responsible way to feel that I needed to feel worried. I had no idea that it was actually making things worse. Instead of getting curious and getting creative. I just worried. But what would have been different for me if I had just taken time to ask myself, okay, listen, I'm worried about X, Y, and Z. Okay. So if that happens, what am I going to do about it? Or even to say, I can't control my kids or their experience with me, but I can control who I want to be. So who do I want to be as a homeschool mom? What do I want to do to make this fun and enjoyable and fruitful? Now. It's not that I never asked myself some of these questions a little bit, but more often than not, I was just stuck in worry. And honestly, I am so thankful for coaching because I worry so much less than I used to. Now that I see how useless it is. It catches me still at times for sure. But I indulge in it way less than I used to when I was constantly offered it by other people. And when I felt like a responsible loving mother needs to worry. Which brings me to the next thing I want to point out about worry. And that is worry is not love. I had this epiphany when I was coaching one day and then I heard it in a talk in general conference. The one that was by Tamara w Rooney. Maybe it's Tamara. I don't know, actually. Anyways, sorry. If you haven't read that talk or listen to what you need to go find it. October 20, 23 general conference of the church of Jesus Christ of latter day saints. It's a Saturday evening session and it's called seeing God's family through the overview lens. And it is so good. And in that talk, she also mentions how worry tricks us, because it feels like love, but it isn't. Love feels good. You guys. It feels so good. Guess what does not feel good? Worry. That is how you know it is not love. And only true feelings of love can move us to truly loving actions. Worry. Well, not. I've talked to many mothers who worry a lot about their kids, the ones at home and the ones not at home. And some of them feel like it would almost be a betrayal to their children to not worry about them. They feel like it would be the most unloving thing to do to stop worrying about them. But I would argue that we are better parents when we require ourselves to focus on loving our children and not worrying about them. Honestly don't think that our heavenly father and our heavenly mother and our savior Jesus Christ, the most loving beings in the universe, the only beings who really understand unconditional love, I don't think they are worried about us. I think they care about us, but I don't think they're sitting in heaven stewing about us. They think about us. They care deeply about us. They love us, but I honestly don't think they are worried. So if we want to take them, for example, I don't think it serves our kids to worry. Now again, we can express concern with reason and love. We can offer guidance from a place of love and thoughtfulness. But trust me when I say our kids can tell when we are worried. And that just makes them worried. And now if I go back to this talk by tomorrow, w Rooney says. She says in her talk. I went through a rough patch my senior year in high school, when I wasn't making great choices. I remember seeing my mom crying and I wondered if I disappointed her. At the time I worried that her tears meant she'd lost hope for me. And if she didn't feel hope for me, maybe there wasn't a way back. But my dad was more practiced at zooming out and taking the long view he learned from experience that worry feels a lot like love, but is not the same. He used the IFA to see that everything would work out and his hopeful approach changed me. I really wanted to use that story because I think it illustrates perfectly what I'm trying to teach you here. And to practice in my own life. Worry, isn't loving. Not only because then we act in ways that aren't helpful, but because our kids pick up on it and it affects their faith. They start to worry. They lose hope in themselves. Uh, they start to believe that they're not going to figure it out or work it out or come out on top. So, if you want to really help your kids stop worrying about them and start believing in them, start teaching yourself to have confidence in them. I've talked before about how you have a whole volleyball team of players who are working to help your child overcome whatever they need to overcome and succeed. You've got heavenly parents and Jesus Christ. You've got the holy ghost. You have leaders and teachers and coaches and friends and family, and all of these people are working for the good of your child. Knowing that helps me be more confident that everything's going to work out just fine, and I can drop the worry. It helps me move to truly feeling and showing love instead of counterfeiting it with worry. When I took my life coach training From Brooke Castillo, she taught about a few negative emotions that she described as indulgent emotions. So, what does it mean to indulge in something, right? It means that you're going to yield to the desire of something. And you're going to be unrestrained. So when you indulge in an emotion, it means you're going to give into it without restraint at all. So often I'll tell people that anger is indulgent. Not because you're never going to feel anger, but if you constantly indulge in it, if you make it your go-to and act on it all the time you are being indulgent. It is indulgent to constantly nurturing her and then to yell at people or throw things and have a tantrum that's indulgent behavior. Now anger can feel really powerful and make you feel like you have control when in reality you're out of control. Indulgent emotions deceive us that we are doing something helpful or useful when in reality, it is the opposite. It's the same with worry. It becomes habit. It becomes this go-to emotion for us. With certain people that we associate with or in certain situations and we just feed it. And so we worry and worry and worry because we think it's useful and helpful. But in reality, It usually just keeps us stuck. Nothing changes when we worry. We keep acting the same. We keep thinking the same and we never have access to our best, most mature grownup selves when we indulge in worry. My husband is a physician and he spends a few days a week helping people who suffer with chronic pain. This is a super tough field of medicine because chronic pain is no joke. And there's often no cure for it, right. There's just kind of better coping strategies, maybe ways to help you feel less pain. But a lot of the time. These people pain is going to be with them for their life. So when my husband gets a new patient, they often are asked to answer questions. To kind of put them on what's called the pain catastrophizing scale. So this scale tells the doctors and other therapists we're going to work with this patient. How much they one ruminate about their pain, right? Like how much are they thinking about this? Two. If they magnify their pain, are they saying like, I'm afraid. This is just going to get way worse and I'm going to have the worst life because it's going to be worse and worse and worse. And the third thing they look for is if they feel helpless to manage their pain, right. Are they kind of saying there's just nothing to do about my pain? Nothing helps. There's no help for me. Now patients who score high on the scale, the ones who really magnify their pain, ruminate about their pain all the time and feel totally and utterly helpless about their pain. Don't get better. My husband told me that the pain catastrophizing scale is actually really good at predicting whether their pain will resolve or not. And if they score high on it, it most likely won't resolve or get any better. And it has nothing to do with whether they have access to interventions or medicines or different therapies at all, what they think about their pain in the end, determines whether they have improvement or a cure for their pain. It is what they think. Now catastrophizing is just worry on steroids. It's always looking into the future and believing the worst case scenarios are coming or that your situation is worse than it actually is. And when you catastrophize you create the very things you don't want. When pain patients are high catastrophizers. They create more pain. And I think we can use this in our own lights. Are you a catastrophizer or even just a chronic worrier? Are you kind of addicted to it? Do you indulge in it? If there was a life catastrophizing scale, how high would you score on it? Really be honest with yourself with this, watch yourself for a few days and see, because if you score high because you chronically worry. I have to think just like the pain patients, it would be predictive that your life is not going to really get any better. So, what are some things we can do if we feel like we worry too much? If we feel like maybe we're a bit addicted to worry or we indulge in worry, I called one of my daughters to ask her if she felt like she had learned to worry by just watching me worry as she was growing up. And she's like, yeah, totally. So I hung up on her. Just kidding. I totally did not hang up on her that anyways. It was actually really good to listen to her. Kind of tell me the ways that she had felt my worry at times. And it made me take a closer look at myself right now. Because, like I said before, I worry way less than I used to, but I actually think I worry more than I realize still. And this is my work to do as well. So I have just a few suggestions of things to do to help you worry less. There are no particular order. It's not an exhaustive list, but I hope something on it will help you. First of all, it really helps me to remember that worry is the opposite of faith. When I feel faith, I feel trust. I feel hope. I feel confidence. So one thing you can do when worry is plaguing you is to ask yourself, what would faith say about this? Or if I had faith, what would I believe in stead? So let's say you're worried about the failing marks that your child has in school right now. And you worry, they won't be able to be successful as an adult. Because of how they're failing in school right now and not doing well. So then you would ask yourself, If I had faith, what would I believe instead? And maybe you would answer and say, well, you know what? I actually struggled in school and I've made actually a pretty good life for myself, despite struggling in high school. And I also know that when he's really ready to learn for real, he can take any high school course later in his life. And it might cost a lot more money, but he's going to get the education he wants and maybe paying for that course and taking it later. He's going to learn some valuable lessons and maybe even understand all the concepts better because he's a little older, a little more mature. And maybe faith would tell me that, you know what his marks in school matter way less than how I show up loving him right now. So maybe faith would say. You know what my job is to love him as best I can right now. And to stop focusing on how he's failing and focus on how much he means to me. Now, I don't know what faith would tell you. That's what you get to access, but it is a really good practice to get into when worry is overwhelming you, what would faith say? Another thing that has helped me is learning to be okay with others suffering. I know this sounds super heartless, but I want you to know it isn't that I revel in their suffering. But I just accept that there is suffering just like my suffering that I have. They're suffering is going to bring some really great life lessons. When we're worried, we too often work to disrupt the suffering or discomfort of others. And when we do that, we can interrupt important life learning. Now. Use wisdom and judgment here. I don't think you need to stand back and watch your child get bullied for a year and never say a word or change anything. That's not what I'm saying, but too often we suffer when someone we love suffers, so we want to stop their suffering. So we don't have to suffer. Once we can make peace with our own suffering and accept that it's okay for someone else to suffer as well. We will stop worrying so much. Now to do this requires you to grow yourself up because it requires faith that all afflictions and difficulties will be consecrated for their good. But it will decrease your worry so much. If you can do this. Don't be too hard on yourself. This takes practice, but keep practicing. This has been so helpful for me, even when I do it in perfectly. Uh, striving to allow other people to suffer and be okay, and just be there to support and help where I can so much more helpful than the worry or trying to get in the way of the lesson. Another thing you can do is Institute a worry time. So I had a daughter who would worry so much and all day long, she would want to talk to me about it. I'm so worried about this. I'm so worried about this. And it. It was almost my undoing because it becomes so difficult to try and manage their emotions and your own and the situation. So on the advice of a woman, much wiser than myself, my mother. I instituted worry time with this daughter. So at around nine o'clock at night, she was allowed to come into my room. And for 20 minutes she could just worry. She could tell me all about her worries. No interruptions, no judgment, no advice, unless you wanted some. And she could just go for 20 minutes. And the amazing thing about this was first, my life felt way better. Because I wasn't having to listen to the worries all day long. But more miraculous said that was her worry time. Just got shorter and shorter and shorter. I don't even know why that happened, whether it was because by verbalizing it, she was processing it. And so it was just able to kind of pass through. Or whether just hearing herself, she realized I actually don't really need to worry about this anymore. Or if just having someone really listened to her, made her feel like, oh, I'm understood and heard. And so it just all kind of settled down. I have no idea. But we didn't end up doing worry time for a long period of time because she just settled down. So you can do this with a child or with a spouse or with a friend. But you could also do it with yourself. This allows you to have a set aside time and a set length of time where you can write or talk out all your worries and you get to just worry as much as you want. Now, this is really good to let you kind of just process through your worry and just get it all out. But it's also good for you because it requires you to manage your mind when it isn't worry time. When we indulge in worry, worry is running the show. Worry is driving the car and no one is telling it. No. But when you only let yourself worry at a certain time of the day, you are in the driver's seat. Now worry might be winding in the back seat, but it's not driving. You're in charge, not worry. That's why this really helps. Also if worry feels especially overwhelming, or even if it's just a nagging feeling, you can do what I suggest with all emotions. Allow it and process it. Let it be in your body. Welcome it in. Now, watch that you don't go back up into your brain and start feeding it a bunch more things to be worried about. That's not what you're trying to do. The goal is to focus on the feeling of worry in your body, where do you feel it? What color is it? Does it move? Is it heavy? Is it light? Does it have a shape and just let it be with you until it's kind of had it say and drifts away. K. So you can always just allow it and process it. Another thing you can do when worry feels especially intense, is to bring yourself back to the present moment by engaging all of your senses. What do I hear right now? And then you'll have to listen. Right? So you can really like, oh, here's what I hear right now. I hear the clock ticking. What do I feel? What do I taste? What do I see? What am I smelling? Make yourself really focused on what you are. Presently experiencing. It takes you away from the worry for a moment. But it also reminds your brain that right now, in this moment, I M O K. And we know you're okay, because when you're in immediate danger or crisis, you're actually not worried anymore. Did you know that the future does not exist when you are in an absolute, immediate, pending danger? Your brain can only focus on what's happening right now. So if my house is on fire, I'm not worried about the talk I got to give in church on Sunday. So, if you're worrying right now, bring yourself back into the present moment with your five senses and it will help you remember that right now. You are O K. Another thing to do when your brain is wrapped up in worry is to ask yourself questions. Okay. Okay. I'm worried about this. If that happens. How do I want to handle it? Who do I want to be? What would I do? How could I be the most helpful if that situation comes up, getting curious about what you would want to do or would do or plan to do is much more helpful. I went into a meeting not long ago. And I was a little concerned because I'd had the heads up that some of the people attending the meeting were already upset. So to take myself out of worry, I started to ask myself questions like, okay, what are the chances? Things are really going to go well in this meeting, really? And I felt like, you know what? They actually have a really high chance of going well. The other people don't really know me. So I felt like they would be reasonable with me. And then I asked, okay, if it starts to go badly, for some reason, what do I want to do about that? And so I just thought about what could possibly go wrong. And in the end, I decided that the most important things that I could do would be one to keep the meeting focused on what it was really about. And to just show up honest and kind and thoughtful. And I am so glad that I took the time to really think about all of that because the meeting did end up going sideways for a little bit. And I was put on the spot that I had a plan. Now, I don't know what the experience was for everyone else in that meeting, but I left feeling like I had been who I decided to be. So when you're caught up in worry, it can just keep you spinning instead of problem solving. So when you're worried, require yourself to problem, solve a little bit. But remember to focus on what you actually have control over, which is you. So, what will you do? Who are you going to be? How are you going to help? And the last thing I want to offer you is that you can stop offering yourself. Worry whenever you want. I mean, your brain is always going to offer it to you all the time. Cause it's in the habit of doing that. It's just what it does, but you can stop taking that offering. You could try and go one day, worry free, and then try going to days where he free then a week and so on. It's okay. If the worry comes up, but you can just decide you're not going to take it. You're not going to do it. And I would add to this stop offering worry to your friends and to your kids, into your husband. Don't be the friend that feeds their worry or offers them new things to worry about. Be the friend who offers faith, be the friend who offers confidence. Be the friend who offers other options. I hope you all have a great week, everybody. Thank you so much. Worry less. See you later. Bye. Thanks for listening today. If you like what you hear on the podcast, and you'd like to learn more, feel free to head over to my website. Jamilin Stephan coaching.com or find me on Instagram or Facebook at Jamileh. step in coaching.