Let Go of Worry and Self Doubt

Focus your attention on this one thing & retrain your brain.

No matter who you are, we all tend worry about things and that worry turns into self doubt. This idea really hit me last year when I was going through a small legal battle and, as with may things in life, it caused a lot of stress and worry on my part. I was confident things would go my way, but I couldn’t help but let doubt creep in. Although I wholeheartedly believed that I was in the right, I couldn’t help but feel this overwhelming cloud hang over me as I worried about the outcome. Realistically, I knew that even if things didn’t go my way, it wouldn’t be the end of the world, but rather just a hassle to deal with and be an inconvenience. Knowing that, I still couldn’t keep myself from worrying and letting my mind wander into a hundred different directions. I knew, deep down, that the worry was for nothing and it would all turn out just fine, and you know what? It was fine. All that worry and none of it every came to fruition.

This experience made me realize that we do this to ourselves all the time.

Let me put it like this: If someone continued to give you bad advice, time and time again, you would stop listening to them, wouldn’t you? So why is it any different when we do it to ourselves? Why do continue to take bad advice from our own mind, again and again, knowing that things don’t ever turn out like the scenarios we imagine in our heads? Your mind will give you a hundred different ways something can turn out, yet they never happen. So why do we continue to listen to it?

Self doubt and Relationships

We are plagued by worry and self doubt and that self doubt can turn into sabotage, which can ruin your personal relationships and your work. Our relationships and our lives become negatively impacted because of our own worries, our own self doubts and our own perceptions of reality that aren’t even reality.

Recently, I’ve been reading about mindset, and absorbing as much information I can. I read a book that addresses this idea by Dale Carnegie, called How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. This is the book that prompted this discussion about how to deal with self imposed worry and doubt. I also read The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler, and together these books have really helped me take on a new perception of things.

So, how do we stop worrying and how can we train our brains to be happy? Happiness really is just training our minds to be happy. We all have it within us to be happy. Its our reality, our perception of reality and how we continue to train our minds to be happy and content.

“Don’t Let Tomorrow’s Worry Overshadow Today’s Accomplishment”

If you really want to eliminate worry in your life, there is only one thing you need to focus on. What you need to focus on is the ‘now’. Everything that has happened in the past, can’t be changed and has led to now. Anything that is to come in the future will be effected by this ‘now’ moment. Once we understand that and understand that nothing happens that isn’t effected by the ‘now’, we can learn to focus on the ‘now’. Right now is the only thing that matters.

And, the only thing that matters, in this moment, is this discussion on worry and self doubt, as this moment will help you deal with anything that comes your way in the future. This moment, can directly effect the future that lies ahead.

Any problems you may have to put out in the future doesn’t matter until they happen. Whatever happens tomorrow, doesn’t matter until tomorrow comes. When the tomorrow becomes the ‘now’, when we are in that moment, that is when we will deal with it, using the tools that we gathered in the ‘now’.

When have you ever met a problem head on, in a conscious state that you have not been able to attack and plow through? It is the mental obstacles leading up to the problem that leads to the worry, rather than the problem itself.

Gratitude

Too often we find ourselves worrying about the wrong things, anyway. Things that really don’t matter in the end. No matter where we are in life, we tend to worry about the things we don’t have, and we tend to focus on the things that will make our lives betters and so we think that we cannot be happy until we get it. If we’re young, we think once we move out and go to college, things will be better. Maybe if I had “this car” I will be happy. If I get more money, things will get better. If we only had “this”, our life would be better and then we will be happy.

The key here is gratitude. We need to be thankful for the things we do have, here in the now, not focus on the things we don’t have. There are millions of other people who don’t have what you have now. There are millions of other people who don’t know where their next meal will come from, let along have a roof over their head or running water. So many people don’t know when they will eat next, while we have everything we need, including food, right outside at our fingertips. We know that we are not going to go without today. You need to be truly grateful for what you do have and once you are, you won’t have time to worry about those thing you don’t have that you think you need to be happier. When we continuously want for things, we will never be able to fulfill that need no matter how much we may get. We will continuously try to fill a whole with ‘stuff’, yet we will never be able to. We always want what we don’t have and once we get it, we no longer want it anymore and we move onto something else and it becomes a vicious cycle.

We need to continue to be present on the only thing that matters. You must do your best today (#doyourbesttoday), as it is all you can do, and not worry about the future. I encourage you to focus on the present and be grateful.

What I want you to do is leave a comment and let me know one thing, the first thing that comes to your mind that you are grateful for. I know I am grateful for my family, for our health and so much more, but I want to know what you are grateful for. So many people face so many challenges, whether it is health or money related, but we can all find something that we are grateful for.

Now I’m not saying that you have to forget about your aspirations, but rather focus on the now and what you can do now, what you can do today, to reach those aspirations. If your aspiration is to be fit, what can you do today to get you there? If you want your diet to be healthier and more dialed in, what can you eat or not eat today to get you there?

So remember, focus on the present, be grateful for the things that you do have and you can let go of that worry and self doubt.