Us humans are built to worry.
Last Tuesday I was on a call with a client who is fast-forwarding a couple of years ahead worrying about whether he will have enough money to retire.
Now, as he already knows, the worry is irrational, he has tons of money, but his brain hasn’t yet received the memo…
That night I had dinner with friends in Vail who are worried about the same thing. Truth is, they have many millions of dollars less than my client, but they too know the worry is irrational.
Often people say, “Just stop worrying,” but the brain doesn’t work that way. As I have written about before, the brain is built with a negativity bias which means we are biologically built to worry (great for survival, less great for happiness :).
But the reason my friends haven’t yet stopped worrying about an irrational fear has less to do with how your brain is built, and more to do with how you use it.
Perhaps the most powerful conclusion in all of my research on the brain is that the way we think and feel is little more than a product of our conditioning.
If every day you show up at the gym and only do left arm bicep curls, of course over time that muscle will get strong relative to the rest of your body, and your brain works the same way.
This is because the particular sequence of neurons that are activated when you worry for instance get stronger every time you run that “pattern” of thinking.
Therefore, the key to stop worrying is to use that worry “pattern” less and keep strengthening and conditioning the other “muscles” of your brain.
Here’s three steps to do this:
1. Interrupt the old pattern of thinking: This is the number one reason most therapy and personal change fails. It’s intuitive that we try to confront the problem by say listing out the reasons not to worry, but that has the reverse effect of only strengthening that worry pattern (e.g. imagine arm wrestling that left bicep and you see it only gets stronger). Instead, like starving a fire of oxygen, stop thinking about the old problem.
2. Shift your thinking to what you want: Instead of attacking the problem, go straight to the solution by focusing on one thing—how do you want to feel? And I don’t mean, “not-worried about money,” but how do you feel with all the money you want? Here you want to spend at least 2-3 minutes building up this feeling and imagining your future working out exactly as you would like…
3. Focus on actions: Nearly every thing that us humans worry about is outside of our control (especially if you pay attention to the noise of the world). Instead, keep taking action on the things you can control and imagine those things working out exactly as you would like…
Now because you are conditioning a new way of thinking and feeling, you want to run this process over and over and over again until some point soon you’re looking back noticing that your brain no longer runs that old irrational pattern…