 Worry, I think it's a lot of bad press because we don't use it very well. And so when I call it worrying well It's really about what is worry. How do we do it? What's the purpose of it? Is it possible that worry has a positive function which it does? Worry basically is an adaptive function It's some it's something that allows us to go over and over something in our minds in an attempt to solve a problem Or resolve a situation so I think that that's the adaptive You know we humans have been born with Faculties in our brain that as far as we know don't belong to any other creature on earth and it has allowed us to you know to Come from being a pretty vulnerable prey animal on the African savannah to becoming the dominant creature on earth It's you know, we we don't have many tools for survival if you look at a human as an animal You know, we're pretty vulnerable, you know, we don't run very fast. We don't have big teeth. We don't have big claws You know, we can swim a little bit but not very well. We can't fly very well So out there, you know without a lot of technology and on the African savannah we are meat basically and And we've got systems built into our system that we inherited and from the development of other Pre-animals that lead to things like fight-and-flight response, which are adaptive in some situations and maladaptive in another But one of the things that are that one of the qualities that we've developed is or one of the mental abilities and functions is you may as Imagination it's I could really make a strong case that Imagination is is one of the key things and maybe the key mental faculty that separates the human from the knot from all other forms of life and imagination lets us Remember things from the past it lets us Project things into the future and think about how things would be in the future if you did something this way or that way You know and everything that Exists on earth that wasn't made by God or nature Whatever pick take your pick or some combination of the two everything else that exists Everything that humankind has created started in somebody's imagination. That's where it made its first appearance On earth is somebody's imagination. Oh, we could do that You know could make it round in a roll We could chip these you know they notice that two rocks chipping together makes fire and they Figured out a way to do that so imagination You could make a case that outside of God or nature that the human imagination is the most powerful force on earth and The thing is very few of us have ever really been taught how to use it most of our education Especially all the way through to higher education is on using other mental faculties Which also have made us very powerful the ability to analyze the ability to calculate the you know Linear logical rational scientific ways of thinking have also contributed to us being very powerful Because they allow us to take the things that we imagine and make them real In a certain way, but a lot starts in the imagination Worry is a function of imagination if you didn't have an imagination you wouldn't be worried That's what lobotomies are about And that's what a lot of that's what certain medications are about So we used to joke at our Academy for guided imagery, you know that if we could find a simple non-toxic way to do an imaginectomy We could resolve everybody's worry stress problems, you know, you wouldn't you just wouldn't be very worried you wouldn't do much either It wouldn't be creative, you know, you wouldn't but you wouldn't be worried if we could do that So I think rather than taking the imagination out What we want to do is learn how to use it better And so a lot of what I'm going to share with you about worrying well or worrying more effectively has to do with how you use your imagination So worry and stress have a lot of overlap Right and we often use them interchangeably I'm going to spend a little time to differentiate these things a little bit But they do overlap quite a bit and then anxiety also overlaps with worry and stress They're all a little bit different in the very interrelated They share in a lot of different kinds of ways The reason this is important is because our consciousness and our ability to become self-conscious is Potentially the greatest tool that we have for improving our lives And it also if we don't know how to use it can be something that can make our life Miserable so I like this Ashley brilliant quote, you know due to circumstances beyond my control I am master of my fate and captain of my soul. So like you're it If you want to do something about your anxiety your stress the way that you think the way that you create your life You know you you are the captain whether you whether you like it or not So we might as well learn how to use these capacities because there's really no going back. I Think sometimes unconsciously we try to go back with other ways of managing anxiety and stress like Drinking too much or taking drugs or medications or eating too much or all the millions of ways we have of going unconscious and Kind of trying to just put our head in the sand and maybe it'll go away Which it frequently does so it's it's not that it's not a good strategy in the short run But as a total life plan, it's kind of lacking Okay, it won't take you where you want to go So how are worry stress and anxiety? Different so worry is a type of this is how I think about it and I can be argued with I'm not sure that any of this is absolutely true Kind of throwing it out there. I'm writing a book on it. So if I'm wrong, please tell me before the book is written But it seems to me that worry is a type of thinking Okay, it's a and our friend here Ziggy says the figments of my imagination are out to get me That's kind of the most common use of the imagination is Just letting your imagination kind of go to the worst-seen scenarios getting kind of entranced or hypnotized by by your worries, you know and Letting your imagination scare you because I think in a sense the most common The most common unconscious use of the imagination is to drive ourselves crazy or worry or so sick So the bars set pretty low. That's the good news We can learn to use it more on purpose and do better than that. So worries a type of thinking It's a repetitive kind of thinking of sometimes a rumination. It's generally troubled It often has to do with things that are either in the past or in the future Okay, it's it's the opposite of be here now It's the opposite of present-centered. That doesn't mean it's bad and that doesn't mean that it doesn't have a function but it's we're in our brain we're thinking about something we're going over and over and over it and Again, I think that's because the adaptive function of worry I always assume that something is there is an attempt By by nature or by life to solve a problem or to give us an advantage So if you think about what could the advantage be of being able to go over a problem over and over and over in my mind well To I think it's kind of like if you have a big tangled ball of yarn or or thread You know and you're you're trying to untangle it and you find a place That's loose and you pull it for a while and you get some some looseness And then you get stuck against so you turn the ball over and you find another loose place and you free up some more stuff and You turn it over again, and you free up some more stuff And if you keep doing that turning it over and over looking at it from different angles finding the loose places finding where things are knotted together Excuse me if you persevere with it more, you know more often than not you're gonna get that whole thing untangled and Then go on to the next tangled mess that you find okay, but you are likely to get that one Untangled and I think that's the function of worry. It lets us it makes our it makes our concerns transportable You know so you can think about it at any time and that can be an advantage or a disadvantage And I think that that depends on whether you're using your brain or or you're being run by it Your brain is an incredible organ your mind has something to do with it and At least in certain circumstances your mind can learn to use your brain in better ways. That's what this is about So it's very easy though for this adaptive function of problem-solving and turning things over and over to become a habit or to become repetitive and to become ruminative and Just kind of become its own thing and I and I think there's a couple reasons for that one is that Worry can serve kind of a magical function There's a magical unconscious function of worry a Couple of them actually so one is that most things that you worry about never happened Most things that you worry about never happened and if you you know That's an old rubric that we've all heard and I found myself wondering. Well, is that really true? So I've been teaching this as a six-week class this worrying well class. I've taught it a few times now and I've asked people Over there at the beginning of the class to list all the things that they find themselves repetitively worrying about and then Sometime later on we've just checked in with the first class Which is about nine months ago to see how many of those things have happened and not very many of them have happened So I don't know if anybody's ever studied that Really before but you could do it yourself by writing them down and then check in in about six months or a year Now the interesting thing about that the way that the brain works is At some unconscious level of the brain it the brain could Conclude that the thing didn't happen because you worried about it Right That's a function of and there's an old story About a woman who walks around her house. She's an old woman. She's walking around her house every day Mumbling walking around her house walking around her house who walks around her house all day long until she's Carved a rut around her house and then goes up to about the middle of her thighs And finally one of their neighbors can't take it anymore He goes over and he says, you know, I hope you don't mind if I ask you why you walk around your house all the day every day And she says well, I'm keeping it safe from tigers And he says well, you know, we're in Indiana. There aren't any tigers here and she says see Okay, so it's possible that we get rewarded For worrying because so many of those things don't happen and at some magical unconscious primitive level of thought those two things could possibly be Connected the other thing that has been researched Is that in sometimes worrying about things? Distracts us from things that are actually bothering us So that worrying about little things and do lists and so on and so forth and always fussing and always Worrying and always having something to fuss up about and to worry about Actually distracts us from something that might be deeper and more emotional and And actually be harder for us to take so and and we know that that's a function That's actually been studied so that worry prevents Deeper richer more Emotion-lated thing emotion laden thinking which typically comes in images and comes in the quiet times You know, so if there's a lot of feeling there that's hard to process or hard to feel or that's unprocessed and that and that We've never dealt with It's in a sense useful to keep the mind very busy Because if you get quiet your emotions will come up and Ultimately, we think that that's a good thing emotions are natural. They're healthy They have a wisdom to them that most of us have not also been educated in But they can be hard to feel, you know, nobody very few people have very much trouble feeling joy Although a lot of times we're blocked from feeling joy because we are unable or unwilling to feel other emotions When you start feeling one emotion, you know, the others go, hey the door is open and They might want to kind of come up and be felt So there are functions of worry and again some of them unconscious magical Maybe not in our best interest over time Others adaptive problem solving go over the problem. So it behooves us to kind of learn what we're doing with the worry and That gives us choices in terms of what we're doing with the rest. Okay, so worries at the thinking function whereas anxiety Anxiety is a you know is an uncomfortable feeling. It's usually in the chest or the upper abdomen not always But it's most often up in this area or this area It's an uncomfortable feeling of fear or apprehension or dread dread is a it's a it's that feeling Oh my god, something bad is going to happen. I know it something bad is going to happen You don't know you mean it may be attached to something or it may be free-floating and not attached to to anything Anxiety often comes with physical symptoms like rapid heartbeat Pain in the chest sweating, you know shortness of breath There's often a feeling with anxiety if anxiety is very strong like panic attacks There's often a very characteristic feeling that comes with panic attacks and the feeling is of it is impending doom people with panic attacks they feel they're about to die and It's often again since the symptoms are often in the chest or in the abdomen We see these things in medicine all the time and you could you could really make a case for you know one of the Maybe the primary function of a primary care doctor is seeing if there's anything else but anxiety going on Because anxiety can cause so many symptoms in so many systems of the body and make us and make us afraid Since it's something bad it's going to happen Anxiety is a function of a part of the brain that is a the emotional part of the brain It's called a limbic system or the emotional brain So worry belongs to the thinking part of the brain, you know, and there's a lot of interaction But worry belongs in the thinking part of the brain the cortex Anxiety typically comes from the limbic or emotional part of the brain and I'll show you what that looks like and stress Which is the third leg of our uncomfortable stool here is actually a physical response to a threat real or imagined and and in modern life most of the threats are Either perceived or imagined, but they're not you know we So somebody's probably told you the story of the saber-tooth tiger in the fight-or-flight response and so on You know that this was a response we think was designed by nature So when you walked out of the cave and you ran into a big predator like a saber-tooth tiger your party or nervous system fires off and you get a big shot of adrenaline and your heart beats faster and you Your blood clots faster and your blood pressure goes up and your muscles get supercharged and you're ready to run or You know run the fastest two miles you've ever run in your life or fight the tiger to death You know and then it supercharges you it's that kind of thing we hear about when the mother moves a car to save the save the baby The thing is that this response can go off in response to threats That are not predators that are not it can go off in response to stock market movements Economic changes Thinking about aging Thinking about whether you can meet your responsibilities all kinds of stuff and all kinds of stuff that is That unless you know where the off button is on your television or your radio or your computer That you can just literally pump into your into your brain You know 24-7 if you stay up all the bad news of Every bad thing that has happened around the world to anybody Or if it's a slow news day what could happen? Okay, you know like the H1N1 flu because it's not a terribly doesn't look like a terribly dangerous flu right now But it could become really dangerous You know and that's what's got everybody scared and everybody freaked out and standing like what could happen So and yes, there's a balance between again being able to predict the future and take measures to prevent things happening that don't need to happen and Freaking out for months about something that probably will never happen It's a yin-yang kind of relationship. So stress is the important thing here is that stress is a physical response It's not stuff that happens to you. It's a physical response that your body has to survive a short-term Stress and if you survive that short-term stress like fight like the saber-tooth tiger You know you've either killed it or you've run away from it and Run the you know as fast as you can climb the highest tree that you can you burned up all these stress chemicals And when the tiger goes away you kind of limp back to the cave and breathe a big sigh of relief and tell everybody But how you killed the tiger or ran away from the tiger and and your body rested and compensated and recharged itself and replaced all the Chemicals that it used during that intense 20 to 30 minute fight, you know Or else the tiger has eaten you and you don't have any more stress, you know But one way or another it's all over in about 20 or 30 minutes Okay, so there's none in this like Years, you know of stress that go on if you're a good warrior where you wake up in the morning And the first thing on your mind is oh my god, what's gonna happen with this? I'm gonna be able to do this and you're gonna be able to meet that and so on and so forth And of course the really good warriors are not only doing it during the daytime you're up at night too because you can't sleep Right, and so it's taking you so and that takes your resilience away, and it becomes a real You know negative vicious cycle so to review Worry is a type of repetitive circular thinking Anxieties and uncomfortable feeling of fear or dread stress is a physical response that prepares you to meet challenges