Addicted to Worrying?

How Mindfulness Can Re-programme Our Thinking

Have you recently woken up in the middle of the night worrying about things? Can’t get back to sleep because you‘ve got so much on your mind?

To read the full article, members please log in here. To subscribe please click here.


Ever felt like you can’t slow down your mind enough in order to get the rest you crave? Most of us have experienced something like this and for many it’s happening more and more often and some are suffering almost
every night.

Anxiety, as it’s called, is a feeling of worry, nervous or unease about something, often coupled with a strong desire to do something or for something to happen. It’s a massive problem in our modern society.
According to a recent report in the New York Times, 41% of college students reported experiencing ‘overwhelming anxiety.’ The problem is not just restricted to college students from the U.S. It’s a big problem for
all ages here in New Zealand, too.

Sometimes there seems to be no logic or sense to the things we worry about. Our mind wakes us up at 2 a.m. with these problems to fix, but when we consider things in the cold light of day, we realise that actually there isn’t much of a problem at all. Unfortunately, understanding that
doesn’t help, nor does it take the anxious feelings away. Sometimes those feelings can stay with us for days or even months even after we realise that we don’t really have a problem.

A few years ago I myself went through a serious phase of anxiety. I was worrying about money. Now, I’m not a billionaire but I’m not broke, either. I don’t have money worries compared to those who have lost
everything in a natural disaster or those who are living on the streets. However, I used to wake up with a feeling of dread of what might happen if my financial circumstances did change. It was a feeling that I was heading for serious trouble and there was nothing I could do about it. That feeling would sometimes stay with me for days or even weeks and it seemed that there was nothing that would get rid of it.

Looking back, I can see that there wasn’t anything wrong with my money situation. I just couldn’t seem to stop worrying about it.

Only after learning about mindfulness did I start to realise what was happening and how I could fix it. I began to understand that the problem wasn’t in my bank accounts. It wasn’t anything to do with my level of activities or my abilities to run a business. The problem was that I had
trained my mind to worry about things.

Sorry to tell you this, but our anxiety is our own fault. Without knowing it, we have trained our mind to perform the activity of worrying even when we don’t have anything to worry about! Our mind is like a computer that’s designed to help us solve problems. Unfortunately for an increasingly
large number of us, our computer has developed a glitch and it needs rebooting. That’s where mindfulness comes in.

n order to experience anxiety we must think about the future. That’s exactly what all fear and all worry is: thinking about the future. We worry about what could go wrong, what might happen, what’s wrong with us and what will happen if we don’t change things. All of those things are in
the future. Mindfulness is the art of keeping the mind in the present: staying focused on what is happening right now. When you think about the present you can’t be thinking about the future, so you can’t worry!

Now I can hear you say – Well don’t we need to set goals and make action plans, John? That involves thinking about the future? Yes, we do sometimes need to goal set and make plans but we probably don’t need to do it as much as we currently are. Most people spend almost all their time
thinking about the past and the future and spend practically none of their time in the present moment, and that’s what causes the problems.

Mindfulness teaches us how to reprogramme our mind so that we can spend more time in the present and reduce our addiction to worrying. This simple but amazingly powerful process is available to anyone in any situation and it will solve any worry problems you may have.

Related Posts

Cultivating Wellness

Cultivating Wellness

Nurturing Physical Literacy

Nurturing Physical Literacy

Addressing Monday Morning Blues

Addressing Monday Morning Blues

Is Your Team Burning Out?

Is Your Team Burning Out?

John Shackleton


With a sports psychology and sports coaching background, John now shows international business audiences techniques that exercise and improve the biggest, most powerful muscle in the body – the brain. His clients include Coca-Cola, Air New Zealand, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Sony and Renault. www.JohnShack.com