How to Stop Worrying Today
17 May 2023 · 12 min
Rob Dial explains why 85% of our worries never happen and shares a three-step fix: notice the worry in your body, stop the mental loop, then take one concrete action toward the problem. Motion creates emotion, and action kills anxiety.
Chapters
Instagram Teen accounts have automatic protections for what teens see and who can contact them, plus time management tools and Instagram will continue adding built in safety features to help create age appropriate experiences. Learn more about teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online@instagram.com teenaccounts.
Oh joy. Another day, another buzz delayed.
Look on the bright side, you can finally catch up on podcasts.
You don't mind running late. What's your deal?
What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees. I got one line of 5G for just $25 a month, kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee for my talk text and data.
Only $25. I'm going to Metro when we hop off get that mon for your money
feeling only a Metro by T Mobile. Just bring your number. $30 first month and $25 after with auto pay price guarantee exceptions apply. See
Adobe Acrobat Studio. Your team's home base. Collaborate within a shared PDF space. You've got your docs, your plans, your specs and then invite the crew to build what's next. Talk up the teamwork. Here's an updated render. They think that this design could be a contender. And when somebody wonders what's the next step? AI helps you finish the rest. Bolts are tight now. Your plan's refined. Run a smoother business when you're on the line. Do that with Acrobat. Learn more@adobe.com dothatwith acrobat foreign. Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you love this podcast, do me a favor. Give us a rating and review. However you listen to us. The more positive reviews that we get on the platforms that you listen to this on, the more that those platforms show this to people who have never listened to it before, allowing us to be able to expand our reach but also change more people's lives. So if you do that, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it. Today we're going to be talking about how to stop worrying, and we're going to talk about what to replace your worrying with in order to be more productive. And we're going to talk about the fun thing that everyone loves. Your worry, your stress, your things that you get anxious over. All of that. And we're going to talk about how to get past that. And there's no secret sauce. Sorry I'm gonna tell you, but we're gonna go through it today. Because when you really think about worry, I'll be honest with you, I used to be a big worrier when I was younger, and then I just realized it was a fricking waste of time. Like, it was just a waste of time. It was a waste of energy, it was a waste of space. So I would waste time, you know, 30 minutes worrying about something, and then I would waste energy, because mental energy to be able to think about something, especially something that has a high emotional charge to it, end up taking a lot of energy from you. So I'm wasting time, and I'm wasting energy on something that literally gets me nowhere. And if you've been listening to this podcast long enough, you know, I've said this statistic many times. Psychologists have found that 85% of what you worry about will never happen. 85% will never happen. Out of all of that, the there's an only 3% will actually happen the way that you think that it will, which means that 12% of the stuff will actually happen, but it will happen way better than you think it's going to be. So there's not as much catastrophizing is needed. And so when you look at it, that means 3% of what you worry about will happen. 97% of what you worry about won't happen or won't happen the way that you think it's going to happen, and not as bad. Which means that if 1 out of 33 times that you worry is actually relevant. So that means 32 times that you're worrying out of 33, it is completely irrelevant. It's a waste of your time. So what do we do? Well, here's what we do. The first thing that we do is we have to become aware of when we're worrying. Now, how do you become aware of when you're worrying? The best way of finding out if you're worrying or not is usually how your body feels. And so a lot of times we will slip into worrying because it is basically just built into us. It's something that we've been doing for so long, we unconsciously just go into worry. We have these unconscious thoughts. In behavioral therapy, these unconscious thoughts are just called automatic thoughts. They pop up. We don't even notice the thoughts. What we do notice, though, is we notice the emotion and the feeling in our body, and then we can start thinking about emotions. So what happens is when we start to notice the feeling in our body, we go, what? Was I just thinking about. Oh, I was thinking about what I'm worried about. I was thinking about, you know, this presentation that I have to give later on at work. Or I was thinking about, you know, xyz. Well, instead of noticing that we're there and getting wrapped up in the worry, knowing. So now it's like you have to res. We have now noticed. We, we were worrying. We've now noticed that we're worrying. Instead of breaking down, why am I worrying? Where is this coming from? And just digging a hole deeper and just thinking about worry and using our time and our energy. And time and energy. Because you can waste your money, you can waste your time and energy on worrying, but you can also waste your time and energy on thinking about why you're worrying. So if we're not going to waste our time doing that, what's something we could do to be more productive? Here's what it is when you notice yourself slipping into worry. Take some action. Take some action. Doesn't really matter what it is. If you can take a step in the right direction to get rid of your worry or to work through whatever it is that you're working through. I'll give you a couple of explanations of what I mean by that in a little bit. Whenever you start to worry, become self aware and then figure out a way to take action. Here's the reason why worrying tends to die down when we're making progress towards some destination that we're working towards. That's interesting. We usually worry when we're not doing shit. Like when we're sitting on the couch thinking about the things that we have to do. That's when we're worrying. So I can tell you this because I noticed myself get stuck in it. And as soon as I notice myself gets stuck in it, I'm like, move your body, get up, Move. Do something. And if you could start moving towards some sort of progress towards the thing that you're worrying about, your worry dies down immensely when you're making progress towards the destination that you're trying to get to. Worry dies when progress is made. So let me give you an example, right? So let's, let's say that, you know, you are in sales and you need to make $1,000 this week to be able to pay your mortgage. Like it's, it's struck. You're on the struggle bus. You're. It's. Oh man, it's getting there, right? You need to make $1,000 this week to pay for your mortgage. You can sit around and Start to worry about how you will pay your bills. You know, what if. What if I make all these phone calls and nobody answers? What if I make all these phone calls and everybody says no? What if I make all these phone calls and I start working really hard and then somebody starts to get interested and they say no later on down the road and you can worry about all of the things that could possibly happen while trying to make that thousand dollars. How many times do we do this? We do this all of the time, right? We have something that we're worrying about and then we think of all the things that could go wrong when in reality there's a problem. The problem is I need to make $1,000 this week. The solution is not sitting around and worrying. The solution is I need to do something. Right? What good is sitting around and worrying about all the things that might happen? What good does that ever do for you? Right? Worrying does nothing. Worrying takes energy. It uses your energy and uses your time. Guess what also uses your energy and time as well? Taking action. So you can have a choice at that moment. Okay, hold on. I'm noticing that I'm worrying about making this $1,000 this week, but by worrying that I'm making, if I am or I'm not going to make $1,000 this week, I'm actually not going to make any money by doing that. So if you're worried about how to pay your bills or your mortgage, well, worrying about it can feel crippling. Or you could just ask yourself, what can I do right now about this? Okay, I'm worried about making thousand dollars this week. What can I do right now about this? I can replace my worry with action. There was that podcaster guy that told me that whenever I start to feel worrying, so it starts to feel worried, I should do some action, take some action. You know what I can do? I can get up and I can make some phone calls. That's what. I could stop feeling sorry for myself like I'm a child. And I can do this and actually start to get positive momentum towards what I'm trying to get, towards where I'm trying to get, to what I'm trying to create, the money I'm trying to make. So the thing that I know that I can do that will make me move in the right direction is I can replace worry with action. I can get up, I can do something, I can start making some calls. I can stop feeling sorry for myself and stop acting like a little child that's just a victim of their circumstance. Even though I'm the person who signed up for my mortgage and I'm also the person who makes the money, but somehow I'm still acting like I'm the victim of my circumstance. I can stop feeling sorry for myself. I can be an adult. I can start taking action towards what it is that I want to create in my life. I can start creating some form of positive movement by taking some sort of action. So something, anything small movement towards your goal is better than standing still. You know, there's a book that Dale Carnegie has and it's called Stop Worrying and Start Living. And he said the secret to being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you're happy or not. So don't bother to think about it. Spit on your hands and get busy. Your blood will start circulating, your mind will start ticking, and pretty soon this whole positive upsurge of life will show up in your body and will drive worry from your mind. So get busy, keep busy. It's the cheapest kind of medicine that there is on this earth, and one of the best. And so what does he mean by that? He means that when we're doing nothing, you're going to feel miserable, you're going to feel worry. But the easiest way to get past it is to just take some action. At the beginning of the year, we tend to think more about our habits and reflect on things we do every day. One area that often comes into focus is food. How much is actually consumed, how much gets wasted, and how easily money can slip away. That's where Too Good To Go comes in. For anyone unfamiliar, Too Good to Go is a food surplus saving app where local cafes, bakeries and restaurants sell their perfectly good surplus food at half the original price or even less. I've been using Too Good to Go for a while now and it's amazing. You just go on every single day. You see what people have, you can get a massive discount and you get amazing food for half the price. Download the Too Good to Go app and just grab one bag a week to make a big impact this year. And right now you can save $2 with the promo code MINDSETMENTOR off your first bag. Terms apply. Try it once and see how it naturally fits into your routine.
Instagram teen accounts have automatic protections for what teens see and who can contact them. Plus time management tools. And Instagram will continue adding built in safety features to help create age appropriate experiences. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online@instagram.com teenaccounts.
Oh joy. Another day, another buzz delayed.
Look on the bright side, you can finally catch up on podcasts.
You don't mind running late. What's your deal?
What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fee. I got one line of 5G for just $25 a month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee for my talk text and data.
Only $25. I'm going to Metro when we hop off. Get that more for your money feeling
only a Metro by T mobile. Just bring your number. $30 first month and $25 after with auto pay price guarantee exceptions apply.
See cipher details if you've listened to this podcast for a while. How many times have I said inaction creates more inaction, action creates more action. But it's not like you can just motivate yourself to take action. A lot of times it takes brute force. It takes you talking to yourself in your mind and saying, fuck you, I'm doing it anyways. Sometimes it takes that. Sometimes it takes some self love, sometimes it takes some brute force. What do you need at this moment in order to start taking the action that you need to? Because no one's gonna come and save you. The successful person goes about life and does what they need to do, takes the action that they need to, regardless of how they feel. I did a video a couple, a couple days ago that we put on Instagram and I was talking about, you know, what do I think the, the actual unknown, like secret is to achieving your goals. The secret to achieving your goals is to stop focusing on your goals and to just start focusing on being consistent. To strive to be the type of person that does what they're supposed to do every single day, regardless of how to, how they feel. To strive to be the type of person who takes the action that they need to because they said they were going to do it. To strive to be the type of person that's going to get it done no matter what, because they know they need to get it done. And it's more important for them to work towards the life they want to create than it is to not feel like they're out of their comfort zone or not feel like they're being triggered in some sort of way. Right? It doesn't mean that you won't feel worry sometimes. You, of course you will feel worried. But when you do, what you need to do is you need to take action in spite of worry. People always are like, like one of the things I hate is when somebody's introducing somebody else, and they say, here comes our fearless leader. And that's a bunch of BS Just because someone's a leader doesn't mean they're fearless. And I guarantee you that person has all of the same fears. It's just that maybe, just maybe, they've gotten a little bit better at not listening to their fears. They're still there. They just don't listen to them. So, you know, you have to realize that the person who's successful, whether they're worried or sad or sick, they do what needs to be done. They take action, no matter how they feel, because they know how important it is. And so instead of striving to be the type of person who's a millionaire one day or striving to be the person that's in perfect shape, why don't you just strive to be the person who shows up every day, who's consistent every single day? Right? That's where your confidence will come from. Your worry will start to subside, and your confidence will start to grow when you start progressing towards your goals, when you start getting a little bit better. And, you know, and you've heard me say that motion creates emotion. So instead of sitting around and worrying about what might happen, successful people, they get off their butts, they get their blood moving, and they make things happen. And it's like, imagine that you're sitting here and you're listening to this, and, you know, you listen to this podcast on your phone, and you look down at your phone and you see the battery is at 1%. You could sit there and you could be like, oh, no. Oh, what if it runs out of battery? What if I can't. You know, what if I can't do this? You know, I know there's one across the room. I know I could go ahead and run to my charger across the room. But what. It. It's so much. It's far away, and my. My feet. My feetsies hurt because I worked out yesterday and I went for a run. And you start worrying and thinking about all of the blocks and the barriers that are in front of you in order to go and plug your phone into the wall. Do you do that? No. What do you do? You just stand up and walk to the wall and plug your phone in. How ridiculous is it if you were to sit and worry about the route to go from standing up to plugging in your phone? It'd be ridiculous, right? That's exactly what you're doing when you're sitting around and worrying about creating the life that you want. You're putting blocks and barriers in front of you that don't even exist. And what did I say? I told you this statistic. 85% of what you worry about will never happen. So you're literally putting mental blocks and barriers, fears in front of you to worry about that will never happen in the first place. So what is it that you've been worrying about too much? You've been holding yourself back, not doing whatever it is you need to. What's the mental barriers that you've been putting in front of yourself? And then really start to think to yourself, what action can you take to overcome those barriers and stop worrying so much, you know? So instead of worrying about money or how you don't have money right now, why don't you ask yourself, what can I do right now to make money? Like, the cool thing is, like, if you live in America and you live in a decent sized city, you could make money at any moment that if you really wanted to. Like, if you guys wanted to learn how to make money online, you can make money online anytime that you wanted to. But let's just say that you live in, you know, Austin, where I live, and you're going, oh, my gosh, you know what? In two weeks, my mortgage is due and I'm short $1,000. You could sit around, you could be like, oh, my gosh, I don't know if I'd make that thousand dollars. Or you could be like, how can I make money to be able to pay my mortgage in two weeks? Okay, what could I do? I could sign up for Uber. I can sign up for Lyft, I can sign up for Instacart. I get signed up for all these delivery services, and instead of worrying about making the money, I can get off my ass and just go make the money. That's pretty awesome, isn't it? There's never been opportunity like that where you could just decide that you want to make money. You sign up on these apps, you give them your Social Security number so they know that the IRS is going to know that you're making money. And then you can just immediately start making money with them. You can, you can deliver for Amazon. There's so many different ways that you can make money. So instead of worrying about it, just take some action towards it. Instead of worrying about your, you know, how to, how to make money, why don't you just figure out, what can I do right now to make money? Instead of worrying about your health, ask yourself, what can I do to Improve my health right now, because what you focus on expands. If you worry about the bad that could possibly happen, more bad's gonna happen to you. If you replace that worry with taking action to combat the outcome that you're worried about, and then you're pushing the outcome that you're worrying about away. I don't know how the universe works, but I do know that what I'm telling you is completely true. And if you're worrying about money, it's gonna be hard to make money. But if you decide that you're just gonna take some action to make money, you'll make some money. If you're worried about your health, your health is going to be hurt. If you just decide, what can I do right now to. To make my health better? It will make it better, but it requires action. And you don't need to believe in yourself in order to take action. You don't. There's no universal law that says, hey, before this person takes any action and becomes successful, they need to know 100% with absolute certainty that they are going to be successful. No, most people who are successful don't believe in themselves, but they're just like, I don't want to be where I am. I'm just going to work my ass off and try to get myself out of the circumstance that I'm in. And the thing that I do know is that the universe will be on your side when you take action. Ask yourself the question, what is it that I'm worrying about that's taking away from my happiness, that's taken away from my success, that's taken away from my joy, that's taken away from my peace, that's taken away from my relationship with my children? And what action can I take to overcome the outcome that I'm worried about? How can I make sure that I take so much damn action that there is no way on God's green earth that what I'm worried about will ever happen? You ever thought about that way? Instead of worrying about it, why don't I just be like, you know what? I'm going to work my ass off to make sure that this. There is no way that this thing that I'm worried about could ever possibly happen? That is how you start to take action. That is how you start to create the life that you want. And that is how you replace your worrying with taking action. And when you do that, you'll start to kill your worrying, and your worrying will start to subside, and you'll start to build more confidence in yourself. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode and you feel like people in this world need to hear this episode, do me a favor. Go to your Instagram, share this podcast episode on your Instagram and tag me Obdial junior R O B D I A L J R. I love seeing you guys share it all the time and then get into conversation with you guys in DMS and stuff as well. So if you would do that, I would greatly appreciate it. And with that I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission. Make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.
Instagram Teen Accounts have automatic protections for what teens see and who can contact them. Plus time management tools and Instagram will continue adding built in safety features to help create age appropriate experiences. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online@instagram.com teenaccounts. You know what they say. Early Bird gets the ultimate vacation home. Book early and save over $120 with Robo because early gets you closer to the action, whether it's waves lapping at the shore or snoozing in a hammock that overlooks. Well, whatever you want it to so you can all enjoy the payoff come summer with Verbo's early booking deals. Rise and shine average savings $141 select homes only.