A Guide To... Worrying

THERE’S an old adage that worry is like a rocking horse. It keeps you busy and it gets you nowhere. These people clearly aren’t doing it properly since every serious worrier knows that if you worry hard enough, you can grind a hole through the floorboards and drop down to a whole new level.

There’s no point worrying about your mum worrying, though. Like a heat seeking missile, once mums have been set off, they won’t stop until they’re de-activated – ie. dead, and even then you might well be haunted by them asking whether you’ve been going out with wet hair.

Some people enjoy worrying so much that they do it on auto pilot, occasionally managing to worry whilst having forgotten what it is they were worrying about in the first place. This can go either way: when you do finally track that prickle of anxiety back to its source, you either get to heave a huge sigh with relief when you find that you were only fretting about running out of Eccles cakes or vomit in fear when you remember that you slept with somebody else’s husband, your house is due for repossession and you found a funny lump in your nether regions.

“I am an old man and I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened” so said Mark Twain, encapsulating the essence of worrying. Worriers believe that, if they can consider every possible eventuality, then they can control what’s going to happen or re-configure past events. It’s like having a super-power except instead of a cape or a snazzy headband your allotted uniform is eczema and a chronic case of IBS.

Women these days have never had it so good, apparently, so why have we still got so much to worry about?  Probably because we learned our worrying habits from our mothers.  Mum-worriers are the worst; they’re  pre-programmed with Terminator-like precision to worry about the problems of anyone in the general vicinity – neighbours, lollipop ladies, war criminals – they’ll worry about them all.  This is why you could be a millionaire business-person with an adoring spouse, a fleet of yachts and a close personal friendship with the Dalai Llama, but your mum is sill fretting about your athlete’s foot. There’s no point worrying about your mum worrying, though. Like a heat seeking missile, once mums have been set off, they won’t stop until they’re de-activated – ie. dead, and even then you might well be haunted by them asking whether you’ve been going out with wet hair.

There are many ways to combat worry. In Guatemala, they have small woven worry dolls that they keep under their pillow – tell the doll your worries at night and the doll will take them away. In Greek and Cyprus culture, people use worry beads, sliding the beads down the thread to alleviate their stressful thoughts. In Britain, we have another tradition. We called it get shit-faced.

Another technique for avoiding worry is to tell yourself that you can only worry for half an hour a day. That’s your allotted time, and there’s no budging on it. This is eminently sensible. After all, if you consider worry to be a necessary task, like cleaning the bathroom, then you should get it done once and thoroughly. After all, you can’t keep darting back to shine the taps or squeegee  the shower screen in the middle of a meeting/lunch date/having sex, can you?  NB If you do frequently interrupt sex to squeegee the shower screen, someone is not worrying sufficiently about their sex life.

Since worry is really just a nasty addiction, like smoking cigarettes or watching Coach Trip, the only real way to stop worrying is to let it go.  Just say F*** it.

After all, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow. 

Now stop worrying about making sure you have clean underwear.

Follow Nicola Mostyn on Twitter @NicolaMostyn