Get Bad at Worrying

I didn’t come crawling to mindfulness practice because I was good at it.

It was challenging the first time I naively walked into a yoga class, trying to focus on how my body felt in different positions. What I initially thought was a test of flexibility turned out to be more of a mental and emotional challenge. Instead of connecting with my body, I found myself obsessing over its limitations and comparing my lack of flexibility to the agility of all the other barefoot students in the room.

I’ve always been extremely talented at worrying. Why tackle my own problems and needs when I could focus on everyone else’s? Until I was thirty-six, most major life decisions I made, including pursuing a career in social work and entering my first marriage, were aimed at easing the emotional pain I believed others were going through.

It was during my first silent retreat in October 2002 that I realized I had no skills for sitting with myself without fighting internally with whatever might be going on in my mind and body. The yoga classes had prepared me for developing a skill nobody had ever told me I needed to work on. The years I’d spent learning to play the piano and the marathons I’d trained for also contributed to this.

Through yoga, I learned to shift the urge to compare toward noticing sensations in my own body. The impulse didn’t go away, but I kept practicing the redirection. With the piano, I learned it could take years of interpreting sheet music and moving my fingers across the keyboard before I could play something anyone would want to hear. With marathon training, I discovered that I could do something in three or four months that I couldn't do on the first day.

Mindfulness meditation is surprisingly similar to running, though the impulses involved are reversed. As I increased my running mileage, I inevitably reached a point where I was at the limits of my abilities. My body would signal, through physical sensations, that we had run far enough, and it would be a great time to stop and enjoy some blueberry donuts. By continuing to run a bit longer against this impulse, I gradually built my capacity to complete a marathon of 26.2 miles.

Similarly, after sitting several times a day during silent meditation retreats, my body signals when it’s ready to get up and put some distance between my butt and whatever so-called cushion. Every instance of waiting for the bell to ring at the end of a practice session helped me develop the ability to sit more comfortably with physical and emotional discomfort.

In both cases, my mind uses words and images to distract me from what I’m feeling. This is where my natural talent comes in. To find comfort and certainty, I tried to use my worrying skills to get rid of any pain or confusion. Staying with the sensations instead of trying to change or escape them made me feel like I was intentionally getting bad at a sport I’ve excelled at my whole life: worrying.

If they awarded trophies for imagining worst-case scenarios, it would take a gymnasium full of cases to hold them all. Never mind that 99.9% of my worries never materialize. It always feels like they might, which is what makes the hobby so captivating.

People tell me they don’t have time to practice mindfulness. They often say they can't slow their minds at all, even though this mistaken expectation makes it more difficult to practice mindfulness. But I believe what truly prevents more people from developing mindful awareness skills is that trying to observe their thoughts and feelings, rather than being completely caught up in them, feels like not caring at first.

A few years into my daily meditation practice, Matt developed a strange stomach ache that kept getting worse and better. Over the years, he’s become better at recognizing medical symptoms, but back then, he kept convincing himself that the pain was minor and temporary. After a couple of weeks of this uncertainty, I woke up early one morning to him shouting about an urgent need to get to the hospital right away.

When we arrived at the emergency room, however, he downplayed the severity of his pain, which made it difficult for the doctors and nurses to diagnose his condition. I found myself with little to contribute, and they planned to do surgery to figure out what was going on, even though his descriptions made them see it as less urgent.

What I decided to do probably sounds odd, just like taking breaks from worrying doesn’t seem right when the stakes feel high. I knew my mind could be busy generating scenarios involving pain, death, and funeral planning. I knew that calling friends and family without any facts could actually escalate my fears rather than calm them. So I went home, felt the signals my body sent, watched the movies my mind and emotions created, but decided to treat it all as fiction that felt real until the real story’s facts were revealed.

Similar to the feelings that art can evoke, words fail to adequately describe the emotional complexity, but I did my messy, imperfect best to stay with it as sensations that were begging to be interpreted rather than actual data that could be acted on. I told myself that if freaking out became warranted, I would dive into it, but until then, try to stay with the reality of the raw sensations and perceptions themselves. After probably an hour of this, I went back to the hospital and kept waiting in the same way.

His appendix had ruptured, and the abscess that formed also burst. His body had been filling with lethal toxins, but they addressed all of this in time and he felt better immediately. I called to pass on the facts to all the people who love him. And I felt gratitude for the effort I’d been putting into this practice, not to force myself to feel calm when I’m terrified, but to feel terrified without allowing it to catch fire and explode into misery over imagined outcomes.

Caring doesn’t always feel good, and worrying can sometimes seem like caring, even though they are different responses to what’s beyond our control.

To get bad at worrying, we have to remind ourselves, again and again, that it’s not the same as getting bad at caring. It can feel like that, but it turns out, it’s paradoxically the complete opposite. Practicing mindfulness helps us redirect the narrative pull to worry and shift it toward feeling the related bodily sensations.

If a talented worrier like me can learn to occasionally worry poorly, with some practice, so can you.

Exercise

This exercise develops focus, sensory awareness, and composure by attending to all bodily sensations at once.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Waking up in the middle of the night

• Waiting for medical test results

• Worrying about breaking news