Who on earth could have predicted Covid 😲?
And how quickly did it force us all to adjust to an entirely new way of life overnight?
MikeyM™'s father Mick Senior, passed with mum too young bless him, used to have a saying to the effect that “you can’t change the past and you can’t control the future, so you might as well focus on the present”.
This is all well and good, but what if it is the present sending you curveballs like, say, covid or cancer on a moment’s notice?
Life is more unpredictable now than it has ever been and modern technology means we are made more aware of every single risk to our equilibrium more of the time.
A famous Buddhist once commented that worry is like a “constantly peeling onion”, once you peel back the last rung there is another, then another and so on, it just never ends.
That is simply the nature of the human condition which cannot be altered – it is a survival instinct stretching back to the Stone Age and beyond, when imminent threats to life were a daily risk.
So, if that instinct can’t be eradicated, then the question has to become how to manage it successfully.
The human condition can struggle to determine the difference between a genuine threat worthy of worry and one which is not.
We humans as a race only stood up from our natural crouched position, after all, so we could better spot risks in advance (causing thousands of years of back problems in the process 😆).
Disruption caused by major life events such as covid, ill health, financial concerns and care concerns can blur this process even more.
We find that reading too much news which is so readily accessible as a result of the Internet can be overwhelming.
Therefore we set our mobiles not to receive constant “pop ups” and allocate time for “phone free zones” to give us that all important space to breathe.
The first key question we ask ourselves with what appears on its face to be a worry is “can we actually do anything about what we are supposedly worrying about?”.
If so, we work out a best means of addressing the matter, act accordingly then forget about it.
If not, we write the worry on a piece of paper and throw it in the bin 🥳.
This task is extremely powerful, symbolic and therapeutic, as it gives the worry its own "physical identity" (in the form of the paper it is written on), meaning it can then be physically "disposed of" as opposed to being internalised.
The second question we ask is “is this issue which is using up our valuable mind time something that actually seriously affects us?”.
If so, then we again agree on a course of action to best control the effect on us, act, then leave the matter behind.
If it does not affect us, then we agree that the worry is a false alarm, thank ourselves for raising it (an important step of self validation) but let it move on.
Whenever we decide a course of action and act, we never look back and reflect, as that is a futile process as it simply replaces one addressed worry with another new one asking “could I have done something differently” – this is the “the constantly peeling onion” rearing its head again!
One of MikeyM™'s good friends is a Master Practitioner of NLP who explained to him what she described as the human ‘FEAR Factor’.
What this means is that most evidence that presents itself to humans as a problem is actually FEAR - "False Evidence Appearing Real".
Research shows that only 10% of what we worry about can, from an objective point of view, genuinely be categorised as a source of personal concern and only 2% relates to an issue we can do anything about.
That means it is only 1 in 50 worries that are worthy of our valuable time!
The challenge of course is that we have to process all 50 to decipher the 1 that merits our attention.
Our approach to this is therefore not to consider processing of what could be worries as “worries” but rather to consider issues and learn from them.
In other words, worry is part of life’s journey from which you grow, and without growth their is no development, so celebrate it.
The constant need to be ready to react to change in the very uncertain and fast moving climate in which we all live now is possibly the greatest worry of all.
But if this challenge is approached with positivity as a personal development tool it becomes easier to manage and equally less stressful.
And the recognition that all humans, no matter how confident, wealthy or “together” they may appear or like to give the impression of on the outside, endure exactly the same challenges, helps stave off isolation.
To use a financial analogy to illustrate this point, research shows that the vast majority of what society terms “poor” people worry most about not having enough to live securely or comfortably, while the vast majority of of what society terms “wealthy” people worry most about having money taken away from them! 🙈
The concern at having to adapt to change and self protect are exactly the same, they merely emanate from different perspectives.
So, realise that adaption to change is a challenge we can and should rise to as it enhances our human experience in the end and makes us stronger people.
The process may at times feel exhausting and isolating, but we are all in exactly the same boat.
And without change there truly is no progress.
So embrace it with the context and tools that render it a self improvement rather than a trauma ato be endured!
Love, LouLoU™&MikeyM™ ☺😍💖 xxx