When Your Thoughts Turn to Worry, Return to Your Body
When your thoughts turn to worry, return to your body.
Thoughts can be helpful and they can be harmful. Many of us are used to allowing our thoughts, helpful or not, to run the show unchecked, as if our thoughts were just "us." They're not.
Our thoughts are our brain processing. And even then, thoughts are a small part of all our brain is doing. Just knowing that can be a relief:
The thoughts running through your head—thoughts that can feel all-consuming and can seem one-and-the-same as "you"—are not all there is to you. They're just one small part of you—a function of your brain, meant to serve you when helpful, not run your life.
If that feels like a scary or impossible idea, it's because you're thinking about it using thoughts. That is the only way your thoughts are able to see it. And that's the opportunity: to expand your experience of life and yourself beyond thoughts.
If our thoughts are just a small part of us, what is the rest? What an exciting question. It's like opening the door of a room you've lived your whole life in only to find there's an entire house you haven't yet explored!
There is so much more of you to explore, to know, to be.
And one of the best places I can see to start exploring is the moment of worry.
Everyone from Jesus to modern scientists agrees that worry is a very unhelpful use of the brain. And yet it accounts for an incredibly large percentage of what we use our brain to do. Tons of our creative energy goes to imagining what will go wrong in the future, or the negative things others are thinking about us, or the ways we're failing in life. Many of us run a constant stream of worry behind every moment of our life. We've become so used to worry that we don't even notice it anymore. But our body does. And it is also reflected in the world we create around ourselves.
But what if we used this habitual worry in a helpful way?
What if we could use the onset of worry as a guide toward healing?
What would happen if we started paying attention to our thoughts, rather than leaving them unchecked, and when a worry-thought came up, instead of believing it, we used it as a reminder? A string around our finger that signals us to come back? To come back to reality. To come back to our senses. Literally.
This is not the same as ignoring our worries. We've tried that, and there are thousands of tools available to help us do it. But ignoring and numbing only make them louder.
We can actually give our worry attention by not ignoring it, but instead loving it. To see the worry and to have compassion for the part of us that is trying to process something uncomfortable, confusing, scary, or sad. We can't do that if we're living inside our thoughts, and we can't do it if we're ignoring them. But if we are more than our thoughts, we can notice a worry, see it as it is, and give it compassion. Not fix it. Not ignore it. Love it. And then...
We will remember that this is not all we are. That is how we come back.
The easiest way I've found to do this is to notice that I have a body, as strange as that sounds. To feel my feet. My hands. My neck. To use my real eyes and real ears rather than my imagination for a moment. To literally come back to my senses. The worry is still there, but it's a part of a much larger whole.
You and I are that larger whole.
I've noticed that this process can happen in an instant: I feel worried, I register it as a thought and give it compassion, I expand my attention to my physical body by just feeling what it's like to be here right now, aside from thoughts.
Every time I do this I feel freed. As if a prison I was living in had been opened. And I no longer feel worried—I notice it, but I'm no longer in it; it is in me. A me that is so much more than only thoughts.
Try this today. Every time you're lucky enough to notice a worry come up, give the worry a nod (I see you, I feel you), then return to your body—feel what it's like to be a whole person, including the worry and so much more.