Eckhart Tolle argues that worry is useless and the mind creates fake problems. He offers a simple fix: ask yourself "Am I breathing?" and focus on your breath to interrupt the thought loop and find real solutions.
Take attention away from the stream of useless thinking. Completely useless thinking. No great solution to any problem has ever been found by anybody who was worrying about something. True solutions arise out of a different state of consciousness. Worry does not worry, creates fictitious problems, but no solutions. And again, the mind is deceptive. It tries to convince you that you need to worry about this because otherwise you're not taking responsibility for your life. The opposite is true. So you realize the futility of worry. But how do you get out of it? Because the next moment you may be drawn back in and you're completely lost again. Ask yourself, am I breathing? Most likely you are breathing. But of course it's an unconscious process. You don't know you're breathing, but now you make it conscious. Am I breathing? Let me check. And in order to check whether you're breathing or not, you need to take some attention or consciousness away from thinking. And then it moves into the attention, moves into the in flood. The breath flows in.
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