How to stop worrying so much

“Remember when Ella didn’t want to go to school because she was afraid of the desks?”

My sister said this the other day. I had completely forgotten about it. When I was five, and due to start “big school”, I got myself into an anxious tizzy about the desks. I was worried about a particular kind of desk — the type with the writing surface that doubles as a lid so you can store books, pencils and rotting apples beneath it. I had seen these desks in books and on TV, and, for some unknowable reason, they terrified me.

To this day I can’t fathom what would have been so worrying about The Desks. Perhaps the yawning chasm beneath the lid represented the emptiness of mortality. Maybe the notion of storing one’s possessions in a relatively public place felt threatening. Most likely I was just nervous about starting school, and projected this fear onto the most appropriate inanimate object. Whatever the underlying psychology, I look back now and think “Kid, you really need to learn to chill.”

When fear hits, worrying can feel like a productive use of your time. The logic is that by mulling over all the horrific possible outcomes of a situation, we protect ourselves against any badness happening ever again. Sounds sensible, right? Hello? Why are you looking at me like I’m made of nuts?

You know, it’s the damndest thing: bad things will happen. Sometimes you will have predicted them, sometimes they will jump out from around a corner wearing a Nixon mask and scare the living crap out of you. Either way, spending most of your life preparing for bad stuff means you are being ruled by fear. And fear is a complete bastard of an autocrat.

We fear so many things — disappointment, inadequacy, failure, success, running out of time. Having to confront parts of our character that we find distasteful. All this feels gross. So we try and ignore it. Fear then pops up in strange places. Like, say, the storage compartment of a school desk. But it’s never about the desk.

I’ll be discussing fear in a future post, but for now, here are some tips for tempering your worrywort tendencies:

• Don’t worry about it until it happens. I used to be quite the hypochondriac, and with the assistance of Dr. Wikipedia, MD, diagnosed myself with terminal cancer multiple times. Invariably I would spend a week thinking about palliative care options before finally visiting a real doctor and being diagnosed with an ingrown hair. Seven days of abject psychological misery, and the remedy was a pair of tweezers. The lesson is thus: don’t waste time worrying about anything that might not even be an issue.
• Put it all in a box. This one is for the insomniac late-shift worriers. Back when I was an alarmingly high-strung eight-year-old, my mum used to coach me back toward sanity with a nifty visualisation trick. She told me to gather all my worrisome thoughts in a big tangled heap and put them inside a box, which would be shut and locked until approximately 9am the following morning. Seventeen years later, I still use the box concept whenever I’m too worked up to sleep. Put it all away, lock it up, and open it in the morning.
• Do guided meditations. I know, I know: you’re too cool for that. Look, it feels dorky at first, but cramming some buds into your ears and sealing yourself away from the world with a calming podcast or CD does wonders. Lately I’ve been digging the free Meditation Oasis podcast. A honey-voiced woman named Mary guides you through 20 minutes or so of pure relaxation. If your days normally consist of doing 12 things at once, you will find it remarkable to just be still and focus on your breathing. You might even have an unexpected emotional response. The first time I did it, I lay on my wooden floor, pressed play, and found myself sobbing into the parquetry before the episode concluded.
  

• Make planning fun. That phrase sounds like a Women’s Weekly pull-out supplement, but what I mean is this: take all the energy you spend preparing for terrible things that may not happen, and put it toward awesome things that will happen. Research classes you can take. Plan a big party or a trip to Europe or a camping weekend.
  

• Take time out to look at photographs of adorable kittens. Because no matter how worked up you are, one look at Monorail Cat will make you feel better.

(The epilogue to the Desks Of Death: on my first day of school I got to the classroom and discovered that the desks were ordinary, table-style affairs. I then forgot about the whole thing for 20 years. Until my sister reminded me. Thanks, Claire.)