There was this one time when I worried about something. I obsessed over it. It kept me up at night.
Then it didn’t happen.
And this is what Mark Twain meant when he said, “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”
There’s a book I just read.
It’s called 30 Lesson For Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans.
The author interviewed hundreds of elderly Americans, most between 70 and 90 years old.
He was trying to figure out the best advice for living a good life from what he called the experts—experts at living.
This book is excellent, you should read it. It makes a great gift.
At the end of the book, he cited the most commonly recommend bit of advice from most of the experts he interviewed.
It was to stop worrying.
Worrying is an insidious and toxic habit of the mind. It’s a bad habit that serves no purpose and often makes things worse.
You don’t win an award because you worry a lot about something. It doesn’t prove you care. It is instead rooted in fear of the unknown.
Along with its close cousin, anxiety, worry has become one of the most prevalent mind states of the modern human.
Mindfulness and meditation are great strategies for destroying the worry habit. But I’ve found that it takes more than that to overcome chronic worry since focusing your mind on the Now does not remove the root causes.
Solving worry (and anxiety) is a foundational goal of the Better Mind program. One of the foundational BM8 principles we use is called The Stoic Framework of control.
When you truly internalize what you can and cannot control in life, you grant yourself the ultimate power. It gives you everything you need to identify what you should be focusing on and what is a waste of time because it is entirely out of your control.
The areas in life this principle applies are limitless.
First, figure out what you can and can’t control.
Second, apply what you learned in step 1 to your worry muscle—identify that worry is pointless.
To learn how to kill worry and anxiety and stress for good, as well as level up your thinking and get UNSTUCK in your personal and professional life, head over to BetterHuman.School to learn more about The Better Mind course and training program.
