We are chronically worried about our finances, health, and stock market relationships in this modern world. People often doubt themselves that they are good enough are they in good body shape.

 

Thinking about a question like:
Am I good enough? 
Should I stay in this marriage or not?
And the list of all such questions goes on and on.

But once, when we all were cavemen, all we worried about was the saber-tooth tiger wild bears or any attack on the tribe. We have evolved through our ‘fight-or-flight’ responses to escape these dangers, worry, and anxiety. And these anxieties serve us to be safe from time to time. The short bursts of adrenaline and a feeling of dread kept the species alive.

There is a part of our brain named the amygdala triggers the fight-or-flight. This response is responsible for safeguarding us. But today, we are living in much safer times in human history. No wild bears or saber-toothed Tigers are chasing us. Yet our amygdala actively engages in thinking and strategizing every time it interprets challenges as immediate dangers. It misinterprets everyday challenges and irritations from giving a presentation to flying on a plane to receiving a large bill in the post as life-or-death situations. It fires up our survival response pouring adrenaline into our bloodstream and making sure that we are on high alert.

A bit of worry and anxiety is helpful and adaptive. It's essential for fight or flight situations and the force to pressure you to do things before the deadline.

For example, a student might need to achieve a specific score on a test to be accepted into medical school. His anxiety motivates them to study, take a test prep course, and spend considerable time on practice tests. The fear of failure can act as a catalyst and make him work harder.

Short term worry can be productive if it helps you to plan and solve problems. Anxiety is a normal stress response, and in some situations, it can even be beneficial.

When you're in a large crowd, most people question how to overcome anxiety. That's an immediate answer where the problem lies. They're trying to stop, and what would happen if you bring your attention to start asking a different kind of question like:
"What must I begin to do to develop more confidence and strength in my life?"

We believe that you can develop your strengths and confidence in life to such a degree. You stop experiencing as much anxiety without even working on the anxiety today. You should focus on the plan to develop your strengths in such a way that it is much more than just stopping you from taking action. A little bit of stress can give a sharp edge to your performance as long as it's managed and utilized as a tool.

How can you use it as a tool to develop your edge?
Let us consider an example. Suppose you are going to play a game and you are nervous about it. You can use this nervousness to focus on making strategies and game plans.

Similarly, you can use these things in almost every aspect of your life, like socially, financially, physically, and spiritually. When you start doing it, those anxieties start to diminish as it leads to new perspectives on the problem.

Still, worry becomes a problem if it is uncontrollable and stops you from enjoying life. This happens when that anxiety increases to a certain level that you cannot handle it. And that becomes a problem when it interferes with your relationships' daily functioning, your performance at work or home, your ability to manage the tasks that are your responsibilities on a day-to-day basis.
Some people think worrying will help them avoid bad things, prevent problems, and prepare you for the worst or lead to solutions. The downside of this is that worrying can turn into a habit that you can lose control over.

Worrying is an imaginative thinking process or an attempt to engage in mental problem-solving on an issue whose outcome is uncertain or hostile. We worry about avoiding unpleasant emotions like anxiety, shame, guilt, pain, sorrow, failure, etc.
People who worry a lot overthink rather than feeling the emotional impact of negative event evidence. From ages, it indicates that people who worry a lot of show more significant activity in the cortical or thinking sections of their brains and suppress activity in the limbic amygdala or emotional area of the brain. Thus they are relying on the non-emotional part of their minds.

The cortical sections handle the threat, i.e., if worry is thinking, then anxiety is feeling. Many people worry about avoiding anxiety, but we trigger anxiety when we overthink or worry too much.
Thinking feelings and behaviors are very much interconnected. Worrying too much is one of the anxiety symptoms.

 

Anxiety has three main components: Emotional, physiological, and cognitive.

Worry is the cognitive component of thinking negatively and anticipating a negative outcome. So worry is the thinking part of anxiety. It happens in our frontal lobes, the part of our brain that plans and thinks and uses words. and it has to do with thoughts like "is she mad at me or what's gonna happen at my upcoming performance or task."
Now humans have developed this part of their brain for fundamental reasons. Worry helps us solve complex problems by thinking about them. Perhaps if you repeatedly worry about something, it will become distorted compulsive or stuck into a repetitive cycle. You can develop disorders like depression and anxiety. Anxiety isn't just a problem of overreacting to things happening around us, but our anxiety response can be triggered by things that exist only in our minds. This happens when you worry about the worst-case scenarios, which may never happen.

 

Remember that the cognitive birthplace of anxiety is a worrying habit.

Occasional worrying is no problem, but when worry turns into rumination, there is a big problem. Rumination is a persistent and repetitive worry in which you revisit the same information repeatedly without finding any new answers. Worrying can trigger the stressor by bringing up more negative possibilities without landing on any positive outcome. One negative thought leads to another, and you start feeling more and more stressed.

Also, excessive worrying will start with one domain that you worry about, but sooner it triggers other parts of your life like a domino effect. This makes you feel that the worst is already happening and sadly. Our brains don't always distinguish between what is imagination and what is real. Rumination goes beyond trying to solve a problem or deal with the stressor.

Have you ever heard of the term Rumination?

Rumination is something a cow does when it chews its food repeatedly—you depressives very much like cows. But instead of chewing your food, you chew your thoughts over and over again. You ruminate on your thoughts, and most of these thoughts are negative. For example, have you ever caught yourself thinking about the same thing over and over and over again?

It could be the breakup of a marriage or a job loss, or a bad investment you made. That one thought chewing in your mind over and over again deepens into a hole. It reinforces your brain's negative circuits and makes it hard to get out of that hole that you have dug for yourself by chewing over those thoughts again and again.

There's no analogy of this process. Imagine yourself in the ditch that you dug. The more you dig, the bigger the ditch becomes, and the more you’re stuck in it. That's what ruminating does.

That's digging yourself into a ditch of worries and rumination resulting from a feedback loop between your amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. When your amygdala sends out its alarm signals, your prefrontal cortex analyzes the alarm through whirring, and then instead of calming down, your amygdala comes up with other things that might go wrong. This creates a vicious cycle of escalating and self-perpetuating alarm and worry between your amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. Research using brain scans shows that rumination is associated with increased amygdala activity during emotional stimuli processing.

So, what are you worried about?
Even though most of your worry is about the future, overthink the past and anxious about the present.

Worry affects all three timelines of your life, the past, the present, and the future. You worry about what happened in the past. You know stressful events or significant emotional events of what happened to you in the past. Traumatic experiences can leave you with the scars of the present things like your parents' acrimonious divorce or death or someone close to you, experiencing abuse, or being in an accident. All this can be highly stressful, and these traumatic experiences can leave you feeling unsafe and uncertain in the present. In this context, even the worry helps you with the coping mechanism or our protection mechanism to shield you from the present, the future danger. But the sheer habit of worrying can be also be induced by just experiencing these past events. Your past emotional events, traumas, regrets, guilt, shame, resentment, and depression can put us in a state of mind where you can perceive most things as threats leading you to worry too much.

In his book "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself," Dr. Joe Dispenza explains how emotions can lead to moods and moods - temperaments and personality traits. Your brain always works through repetition and association. It doesn't take a significant trauma to produce the body's effect becoming the mind minor triggers can stimulate emotional responses that feel as though they are beyond your control. For example, let's assume you fought with your spouse, and emotion of unsettling anger lingers on by sulking you prolonged emotional reaction for quite some time. Now that problematic anger and hurt can turn into a bad mood in a few hours or days.

When the chemical refractory period of an emotional reaction lasts for hours two days, that's a mood. If the mood continues for weeks and months, then it becomes a temperament. Eventually, if you let the refractory period of emotion going on for months and years, that tendency turns into a personality trait. At that point, others will describe you as bitter or resentful or angry or judgmental.

According to Dr. Joe Dispenza, your personality traits are frequently based on your past emotions. Most of the time, personality, how you think, act, and feel is anchored in the past. So to change the characters, you have to change the emotions that you memorize. You have to move out of the experience that created an emotional reaction. A prolonged recollection of it from time to time can turn that into a mood and then into temperament and then finally into a personality trait. The truth is that you may confirm with your past, but the history may not be real with you. If you have a wearing habit, and most of your worries are about the future, then the exact pattern of worrying is something you are picked up in the past. Maybe something did not go according to your plan. Perhaps all those things happened several times now. You worry about unfavorable consequences, which will not happen your way because it never happened in the past.
Now you're becoming more and more particular about unfavorable and adverse outcomes, and you're getting more certainty about the uncertain outcomes and adverse effects. Now, this is playing in your mind, and it becomes more like a self-fulfilling prophecy. What you worry about is becoming more like what you keep manifesting in your life. Many people also worry about the present, engaged in negative thinking, overwhelmed by tasks, and deadlines at hand. They worry when they encounter unpleasant people and situations. Their fear of missing out leads you always to become addicted to social media. As research says, people check their phones up to eighty-five times a day. That's a lot of potential for added stress and information overload.
You try to control things that you can't have control over. You worry about the diseases you don’t have. You worry about your loved ones for the uncertain future or adverse outcomes that might never happen in their lives.

Before you board an uncertain future for what media depicts today - breaking news and other stories, you should think about the future and have a pessimistic interpretation of it, which lies in these unpleasant fictional scenarios. So repeatedly, it becomes a fixture story of the future that can often manifest as a reality.

Dr. Stan Beecham, the author of Elite Minds, writes that a negative belief about the future almost always leads to anxiety and stress. That is what anxiety or worry is a negative belief about the future.

Anxiety is future-based, while depression is past found.

If you ask people what they are anxious about, they will tell you a story of something they're fearful of, which will happen soon. When talking to depressed people, their story typically begins with the past and the unfortunate events they have had to endure. Depression and anxiety are two different sides of the same coin.

Now depression and anxieties are nothing but reviews and rehearsals of the past and the left brain's future. Now depression plays the tapes of 'would have,' 'should have,' and 'could have' of the past, whereas anxiety locks onto the uncertainty and unpredictability of the future.

Studies have proved that a whirring habit is the central component of all the anxiety disorders, and depression research shows that worry precedes the onset of depression. You worry yourself into depression. The starting point is a fearful thought that leads to a parade of more fearful thoughts. Your thoughts are not about what happened in the past. But it's the emotional and rational interpretation of what happened to you. Two people can go through a similar traumatic experience. One can get over it while the other can be depressed all their life about it. Therefore worrying is a narrative either about the past or about the future.

Millions of people suffer worldwide for lacking a life skill on how to create a lively narrative about their past tragedies and future fears.