Yes, you read that right.
But wait aren’t you supposed to tell us how not to worry?
Maybe…
Most of us are familiar with at least the first part of the Serenity Prayer:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
The prayer was written by Reinhold Niebuhr and made even more famous by the recovery movement, beginning with Alcoholics Anonymous.
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What does this have to do with anything? I thought we were talking about worry.
Yep, we are! If you’re a chronic worrier, like we can be, then you can probably get really frustrated with people who simply tell you, “Don’t worry. It will be ok.” When someone says that to us, we think things like, “How do you know it will be ok?! “Be quiet! That’s easy for you to say!” “I just can’t turn my brain off like that!” “Don’t they see how important these things I worry about are?!”
Are we right?
This is because when we worry, we tend to have mixed feelings about the worry. On the one hand it’s driving us up a wall. On the other hand, it kind of feels useful. We somehow think the worry will resolve a problem, prepare or even motivate us. And in some ways, this can definitely be true.
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But not always. Sometimes it’s just plain useless. How can we tell the difference?
And that’s where the Serenity Prayer comes in.
Whether you are a praying person and actually pray these words or simply use the words as a way to structure your thoughts, it’s a useful way to distinguish between “productive worry” and “unproductive worry.”
Unproductive worry is worry that is focused on things that nothing can be done about. They are usually recognizable by the explicit or implied, “What if…?”
“What if I can’t find a job?” “What if I lose my home and become homeless?”
“What if I fail the test” “What if I flunk out of school?”
“What if he (or she) never calls me?” “What if I’m single forever?”
“What if I have cancer?” “What if I die?”
The outcomes of these are things we do not have control over today. (As the prayer says, ‘things we cannot change’) Telling someone not to worry in these cases, doesn’t help. Because we honestly don’t know the answer. We may know the likelihood or unlikelihood. But we don’t know the answer.
“Productive worry” is basically something that you can turn into an immediate action plan. This is what the prayer refers to as ‘the courage to change the things I can.’ So while I can do nothing about the problem of “never finding a job’ because ‘never’ isn’t here yet. I can, in response to the problem of not having a job today, decide to apply to several jobs today. That turns the ‘unproductive worry’ into a ‘productive worry’ and an accompanying action plan.
So when we are stuck in worry mode, we need to, as the Serenity Prayer says, seek the wisdom to identify the difference between what we can and can’t do anything about. We need to ask ourselves, “What can I do about this today?” Then we can create an action plan. And since we will always worry more about things that we aren’t taking action on; once we’ve identified what we can do…we need to do it!
So the next time you’re worrying…think about the Serenity Prayer…and let it teach you how to worry.
Take care of you…
