System 13

According to my mom, I have her father to thank for a trait of mine: I worry. A lot. Except, truth be told, while I would’ve loved to have met him and spent time with him (he was dead long before I was “even a twinkle in my mom’s eye”, as the saying goes), I wouldn’t have thanked him for it. In fact, I might have thrown something at him. Nothing hard or overly dangerous, mind you, just enough to convey the message of “but gramps, that trait sucks, I don’t want that!”

I’ve been going through a recent bout with hardcore worrying over my health. I’ve had a few problems pop up recently, some stomach pain and an ugly mole³³, and so, logically, I’ve been worrying that I have some sort of cancer and that I’m going to die within a week. Which is clearly illogical, even total nonsense, and I know it. There’s an awful lot of things that can cause stomach pain, and an ugly mole can just be an ugly mole, rather than melanoma. Yeah, I tend to imagine I have the worst possible thing whenever I have health problems…

Knowing these things hasn’t helped in silencing my mind, though. My brain just keeps going through the same thought patterns over and over, and I’ve not had much luck in shutting the lump of grey matter up. The list just keeps looping – what if I’ve got a terrible illness, what if I’m going to die soon, what will my family do when I do, etc. When it reaches the end of the list, it just starts over.

It’s become rather tiresome, actually.

And of course, the real kicker is, even if what’s up with my mortal coil is serious – well, what’s worrying going to help? No one ever got better by worrying. In fact, if I don’t have some form of cancer or other terrible disease, sitting around worrying constantly will certainly push me towards having one. It’s goofy, really. And like I said, I know it’s goofy. I just don’t know how to stop it. When I’ve caught myself running the “Let’s Worry About What Might Be Wrong With You!” reruns in my head, I’ve tried to stop it by focusing on other things, but it hasn’t worked very well. It just leads to a tension in my head, a tug-of-war between the part of my mind that says “forget about it” and the part of my mind that screams “no, we must worry about it, now!”

I’ve also tried my standby, being mindful of the worry: looking at it in a detached matter, seeing how it manifests itself in my body (tense chest, slightly creased forehead, prominent frown), and seeing where it goes. It either gets better, gets worse, or stays the same³³. It gets better more often than it gets worse, but being mindful all the time is harder than it sounds, so I’ve still spent a lot of time in the past few weeks in worry mode.

I’ve been this way, a worry-wart, for as long as I can remember, but it’s reached new heights now that I’ve had to visit a doctor multiple times. Up until now, I’ve never had any health problems at all. No hospitalizations, no broken bones, nothing. Alas, health problems happen, and after seeing my internal responses to this crop of them, I’ve gotta’ say: I don’t want to keep doing this worrying nonsense. It’s no fun for me, and more importantly, it’s no fun for the people around me, because when I’m in Worry Mode (TM), I’m grumpy.

I’m not really sure what I’m going to do about the problem at this point. My family tells me “Just relax, stop worrying, you’re going to worry your life away” – okay, but how? Brute mental force directed at the worrying thoughts doesn’t work, at least not very well, nor does thinking about the issues logically. Where’s the little switch in my head labeled Worry, and how do I turn it off?

Maybe I’ve got a bit of OCD going on; maybe it should be brought up at the next doctor’s appointment. What say you lot?3

1. Removed today, actually, and so now I just have to wait to see what the lab’s verdict is; the dermatologist seemed pretty confident it wasn’t anything to worry about.333
2. This is something that Gil Fronsdal has pointed out in many of his talks, which I listen to via Zencast. It’s comical the way it sounds, but it’s true. Pain and emotions will always do one of these three things when you observe them mindfully. 333

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