I would be lying if I said there was nothing to worry about right now. As I write, people are self-isolating and, apparently, toilet roll is the new gold. The adage ‘keep calm and carry on’ is an apt mantra as the uncertainty of COVID-19 impacts households and companies alike.
So now seems as good a time as any to focus on worrying. What is it for? Why do we do it? How do we keep on top of it? And can it actually be helpful? In short, does it really help to keep calm and carry on?
Worrying is a natural process. It’s our mind’s way of making us pay attention to something. Noticing what we are worrying about gives us clues about actions we need to take.
The point at which worrying becomes unhelpful is worrying without action. This is ruminating – going over and over something in our minds, endlessly looping over what we said or did not say, what we did or did not do.
This is a passive state, where we are ignoring our agency in the situation.
It is there to keep us in stasis, not moving forwards, not moving backwards, paralysed by the act of worrying. It’s an ingenious way of avoiding something that could be frightening, unpleasant or just too much hard work.
So, what can we do when worrying takes hold?
Grab a pen. Sounds like an odd solution – but bear with me. Grab a pen. And a piece of paper. Write down your name in the middle of it. Draw a stalk coming out of that. Now just take three minutes and scribble down all the things that are pressing on your mind – one issue per stalk, and just one word, not the whole story.
Now take one stalk and think of up to three main things you could do to resolve that worry. Keep going with the next stalk, and the next. You may not find an action for each one but that’s OK. Just keep going.
Then put your pen down. Take a step back and look at what’s on the page, focusing on the actions. Are any of them already happening? Strike them through with a clean line. Are any of them someone else’s job? Strike them through – they’re someone else’s to worry about.
You might struggle with that; but remind yourself about effective delegation and not rescuing other people from their responsibilities. Strike them through. If they’re actions that you can take yourself, put a circle around them.
Now look at the circled items. Are they truly your actions to take? Do they need to be yours? Or would it be better if someone else owned them? Are they actually someone else’s job? Either allocate these to you or make a note to delegate them to someone else and strike them through.
So, what’s left? Take a good look at these unactioned worries and ask yourself what you are minimising or ignoring in yourself, the other people involved or the wider environment that makes you think of them as worries.
What is it that you’re truly worried about? If you can’t trust others to get on with their job, whose problem is that? It might be yours. You might have the wrong people working with you, so plan to manage them better (we’ll cover this in a forthcoming article) or work with HR if their performance is so bad it requires deeper measures to be taken.
If you’re ignoring feelings that something will be painful or difficult, seek support from trusted colleagues and friends. If you’re worried about getting into trouble about something that is totally out of your control, ask yourself whether that’s a realistic worry.
If it is, and the item is truly out of your control, ask yourself whether you want to keep working where you are!
The important thing is to keep asking yourself what you are ignoring or discounting in the situation. Then you can start to see the true situation and start to get a foothold into resolving your worry.
This bit is important. You might not resolve the thing you are worrying about. It might not be resolvable. But you might be able to accept it for what it is and find the smaller areas where you can exercise choice for yourself to be able to resolve your worrying.
Take another look at the worry map you’ve drawn for yourself.
Is there anything on that piece of paper that you have always known that you had to do but you were really trying to avoid? If there is, this is the source of your worrying. Now ask yourself:
Hopefully by now you’re starting to feel a bit better about all this stuff.
It might also help to know why this process makes us feel better.
We are basically animals. Way back, our ancestors had to outrun tigers to survive. Today, our big scary animals may be that board presentation you’ve got to make or explaining to the boss that your hedging strategy hasn’t saved what you hoped it would.
When we over-worry, we can start to panic. At this point, the body’s survival centre (the limbic brain) takes over from the sensible, thinking part of the brain, the neocortex.
The amygdala fires off the fight, flight, freeze, flop alarm. The hypothalamus, the pharmacist of the brain, orders the release of adrenaline and cortisol into your system via the sympathetic nervous system. These mobilise your organs to be ready to run or fight the tiger.
The downside is that these chemicals also switch off the hippocampus, your brain’s memory recorder, and the thinking neocortex part of your brain. This is because the limbic brain is busy surviving.
You don’t need to do sums or remember things when you’re being chased by a tiger. Breathing in and out quickly is much more important.
So, we need to stand the sympathetic nervous system down and get the parasympathetic system working. That’s why people give the deeply patronising advice to “take a deep breath”.
Annoyingly, it works. It signals that the danger is passing and tells the parasympathetic nervous system to switch off the chemicals, bringing the body out of its highly activated state. Next, we ask ourselves questions. What is worrying me? What action can I take?
Questions come from the higher brain function in the neocortex, further decommissioning the sympathetic nervous system – there really can’t be a tiger there if you’re forming questions.
The hard bit comes when there are things that you just can’t do anything about. I can’t stop my mother from hang-gliding. She loves it. There’s nothing I can do about it. I wish she wouldn’t. I have to work on letting that one go.
You’re already taking action to change the things you can change. Accepting the things that you can’t is the next step. And, if you’ve done everything you can, and you’re still worrying, it’s time to talk to someone you trust about your worrying.
Keeping calm and carrying on doesn’t mean ignoring what you’re worried about. It works best if we listen to and resolve our worries so we can keep calm and carry on.
Sometimes acting as if everything is going to be all right is the best course of action, but as is so often the case, it’s better if we actively choose to do that rather than ignoring ourselves altogether.
Amanda Bradley FCT is an executive coach at Liberty EQ
This article was taken from the April/May 2020 issue of The Treasurer magazine. For more great insights, log in to view the full issue or sign up for eAffiliate membership