Wring Out Your Worry Written by Caterina Rando
You know what it’s like—you spend an afternoon distracted about presentation you have tomorrow morning, or you spend evening preoccupied about upcoming airline flight, or you spend drive home anxiously wondering if you left garage door open when you left this morning. Worry can be paralyzing—it fills our life with unnecessary pressure. Worry is fear about something that does not even exist. If you stop to think about it, worry is ridiculous.Worrying is an emotional malady so prevalent among our species that we rarely recognize it and almost never talk about it. Worry contaminates our thoughts, our sense of well-being, and even our ability to take action. Worry is so much a part of our thinking that we do not even notice when we are doing it. Take a moment and try to remember what was on your mind today. What thoughts raised your heart rate and scrunched your brow? Are you worrying about your new job, your low bank account, who your daughter might be meeting at college, your long to-do list, or what your neighbors think of your new boyfriend? Whatever it is, let it go. Worrying is a waste of time and energy—all it does is stress you out and bring you down. You know it would serve you to stop worrying, but trying to do so can be challenging. For most of us, this concept is a great idea that is very difficult to implement. Many people seem to have been born with a worry gene. Instead of trying to eliminate all worry, begin with a different approach. Wring out and restrict your worrying: 1. Start with Awareness Start to become more aware of when you are worrying. By becoming conscious of it, you can begin to change your behavior. When you notice you are worrying, take a deep breath and then let it out to relax you a bit. 2. Be Present Now When you become aware that you are worrying, ask yourself if what you are worrying about is related to today. For example, if you are worrying about a speech, a business meeting or a potential promotion, is that something that is going to happen today? If answer is no, then you are not allowed to worry about it.
| | Who’s Responsible for My Feelings?Written by Margaret Paul, Ph.D.
The following article is offered for free use in your ezine, print publication or on your web site, so long as author resource box at end is included. Notification of publication would be appreciated.Title: Who’s Responsible for My Feelings? Author: Margaret Paul, Ph.D. E-mail: mailto:margaret@innerbonding.com Copyright: © 2003 by Margaret Paul Web Address: http://www.innerbonding.com Word Count: 664 Category: Relationships/Emotional Healing WHO’S RESPONSIBLE FOR MY FEELINGS? by Margaret Paul, Ph.D. I have counseled individuals, couples, families and business partners for past 35 years and authored eight published books. All this experience has resulted in development of a profound healing process, called Inner Bonding, which anyone can learn and use throughout day (free course available - see resource box at end of article). Inner Bonding is a process that, when practiced, creates ability to take full responsibility for all our own feelings and behavior. One of our greatest challenges is to understand what it means to take personal responsibility for our own feelings and behavior. This is especially difficult when someone is behaving in a way that feels unloving to us -- attacking, blaming, lying, guilting, and so on. It is so easy to believe that our unhappy feelings are coming from their behavior rather than from our own response to their behavior. If we pay careful attention to our feelings, we will discover that it is not another's behavior that is creating our unhappiness but rather our own unloving response. When we respond to another's unloving behavior by getting angry, blaming, withdrawing, complying, or ignoring it, we will likely end up feeling badly. Our own unloving behavior towards another is also unloving toward our own Inner Child. For example, if we respond to another's anger by getting angry back rather than setting an appropriate limit against being attacked, our Inner Child will not feel safe. We have not responded from our loving Adult in a way that leads to being treated respectfully. Instead, we have responded from our wounded self, trying to have control over other's behavior. Since other is likely to respond with more anger or withdrawal, our Inner Child ends up feeling badly from interaction.
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