Planning vs. Worry: How to Feel Prepared and Stress Less

Planning vs. Worry: How to Feel Prepared and Stress Less

Click Here to Get Your Planning vs Worry Guidelines (it’s free!)

Worrying is exhausting. It can undermine your attempt at enjoying an experience, planning for an event, or completing your daily tasks.

Do you consider yourself a “planner” by nature? Perhaps you’ve named it as part of your personality. Now, however, you’ve realized that the “planning” makes you feel overwhelmed, tired, or unable to maintain control.

Worry gets a lot of its power by appearing as a means of honoring personal values like promptness, preparedness, organization, etc. Worry seems like a shortcut to figuring out every potential option and preventing the negative ones. Worry tells you that it will help you somehow control or predict the way a situation will unfold.

One of worry’s biggest lies is that we need it in order to feel prepared or in control. You can read more about this and other worry myths in the article: How To Stop Worrying About Everything: Debunking Worry’s Biggest Lie 

Worry wants you to believe that it makes you more prepared.

Do you believe that there is a benefit in worrying about something in the future?

If you worry or over-think about situations in the future that you don’t have all of the information about yet, you will feel like you’re powerless to handle the situation well, when in fact there are pieces missing to the puzzle since you aren’t actually in the situation yet.

Do you feel that you would be losing power over a situation if you didn’t worry about it?

It is tempting to worry when a situation’s outcome feels important. If you want to control the outcome, you will worry – especially if you are in a habit of anxious thinking.

Ironically, however, worrying often leaves you more irritable, reactive, or otherwise less prepared or capable when a situation arises.

Anxiety tries to convince you that worrying and imagining every possible negative outcome will help you handle future situations. Anxiety tells you that worrying or over-thinking is like a vaccine for a disease; suffering the minor pain of worrying will prevent major pain in the future.

However, worry is more like a parasite, slowly eating away at your confidence, focus and clarity and making you weaker against any difficult situations that may arise.

Feeling that it is necessary to worry and foresee every possible outcome tells your subconscious brain that you are incapable of handling anything unexpected. Allowing worry is like telling yourself that if anything doesn’t go according to plan, it will destroy you. This is how worry becomes a habit that controls you.

Your task now is to differentiate thoughtful, responsible planning from anxious, destructive worry.

Here are useful guidelines to help keep worry in check and make your planning efforts positive and productive.

Click Here to Get Your Planning vs Worry Guidelines (it’s free!)

Planning vs. Worry – How to know if you’re planning:

– You are listing the ways in which you are prepared rather than the ways you aren’t.

– You are taking steps to prepare yourself one at a time.

– You are aware of the things that you can control in the situation, and the things you cannot.

– You are deciding how to act based upon the things that you can control.

– You respect what you cannot control. For example, other people’s words or actions or other variables in a situation.

– You believe that even though unexpected things may happen, you will find a way to handle them when they do.

– You are considering the ways in which you can utilize assistance from other people or resources within the situation. You ask for this assistance at a reasonable time. You are clear in the way that you ask for what you need.

Planning vs. Worry – How to know if you’re worrying:

– You are thinking of all the ways in which you are not prepared.

– You are trying to think about many parts of the task or situation at once.

– You are spending time and energy thinking about or trying to predict parts of the situation that you cannot control.

– You feel fear or frustration toward the things that you cannot control. For example, other people’s words or actions or the many variables in a situation.

– You are thinking about the situation as if you need to handle it without any assistance from others. You delay until the last minute to ask for assistance. You ask for assistance in ways that are unclear.

With these guidelines you can transition from worry to planning at any moment – and then be free to think about something entirely new!

Keep these tools readily available. Download this article (and the guidelines) as a .pdf and check in anytime by clicking the box below.

You’ll soon be a calm and confident planner, ready to approach any situation with more ease and less worry.

Contact me to learn more about planning vs. worry. You can learn how to manage your own worry and feel confident and prepared.

Click Here to Get Your Planning vs Worry Guidelines (it’s free!)