Transfer Your Worries | Day 3: Improving Your Life in 31 Days

This is the third post in the “Improving Your Life in 31 Days” series. For more information, and to view an index of all the posts in this series, please click here to go to the central page.

Worry is one of those things that can work directly against improving your life, which is why I’ve written quite a bit about it here on this blog already. Today we’re going to focus on being “worry free” and hopefully you’ll learn a thing or two and want to continue this practice even after today.

Break Out That Journal

Remember the journal we started the other day? Well go get it, or if you prefer, just use anything you can write or type on. Now, make sure you have some time to yourself where you won’t be interrupted, and where nobody is going to be peaking over your shoulder distracting, or possibly even judging what you’re going to be writing.

You’re about to go through a little practice that I like to call “Transferring Your Worries”, which I’ll fully explain in a moment… but just bare with me for now. On that piece of paper (or whatever you’re using), begin writing down anything and everything you can possibly be worried about, even down to the smallest thing.

Imagine all of your worries, both big and small, as weeds and begin pulling them out one-by-one in your mind as you write them down on paper. I recommend writing them down with a bulleted list, but you can write in whatever format you personally prefer. When you’re done, title the page “My Worries”. Fold it up, and put it in a drawer.

What Was the Point in That?

Great question… I don’t know! But that was fun right? (Ha ha… Just kidding)

Okay, on a serious note, of course that exercise didn’t magically *fix* all of your problems, but what it did was help to transfer all of your worries from your head to that piece of paper (poor, poor paper).

You see, worrying is mostly the need to “stay on top of” and remember all the little challenges we face on a day-to-day basis, many of which are things we can’t control. When you’re constantly juggling between worry after worry in your mind, it becomes overwhelming and that’s what causes all the stress you experience from worrying… apart from the severity of whatever situation you’re worried about.

The exercise of writing down your worries, and imagining them as weeds in your mind being pulled out (yes, you were really supposed to do that!) works on your subconscious mind that will help ease the “load” off of you. While you won’t be cured of all your worries instantly, there will be a certain part of you that stops worrying because you know that if you forget, you can easily look back on the piece of paper and remember what it is you’re concerned about. The good news is, with continued practice, you’ll get better and better at it.

It’s the same concept as making a to-do list. Rather than stressing out about all the things you need to remember throughout the day, you write them down and let the paper do it for you (wow, papers sure are good friends).

The Power of Mental Imagery

A little background information of mine that I normally like to keep locked away in the “past” closet…

When I was in the military at a low rank, I was constantly being disrespected and talked down to by those who ranked higher than me. Not being used to having to deal with that kind of treatment, it was really hard for me to put up with. However, I kept my mouth shut despite the fact that it really made me feel low at times.

Eventually, whenever something was said to me that I didn’t like and that I couldn’t do anything about, I got into the practice of making the motion of brushing dirt off of my shoulder when I was alone. I’d imagine what they said was a bunch of dirt, and all I had to do to make all the negative emotions I was experiencing go away was to simply “brush it off”. It really helped me move on and let go of negativity in many situations.

The same thing happens when you not only write your worries down, but when you’re imagining them as weeds that are littering your brain. Little mental imageries like this are effective because your subconscious mind can’t differentiate between what’s going on in just your mind and what’s really going on in reality. So therefore, to an extent, your worries really are weeds and the process of ripping them out is saving you from them.

Go Get Started Now!

So if you haven’t already, try this one out for yourself. If you like it, I highly encourage you to continue doing this practice on a regular basis. If you get used to doing this practice often, eventually your mind will be “trained” to not worry and you’ll have improved your life significantly just by automatically eliminating a large amount of worry from it.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s course of action, where I’ll go over something that can make or break your daily level of energy, motivation, and health.

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