The Worst Possible Scenario

"Don't worry!"   It's harder than it sounds.

Have you ever been stuck in a fury of worry?  Most of us at some point have obsessive, negative thoughts about the future.  That's what worry is.  To me, it means putting all your attention into the future instead of the present and seeing the future through a very gloomy lens instead of clarity.

Imagine that your company is going through layoffs and you're worried that you will not have a job by Friday. You envision your boss calling you into her office to break the news.  You imagine your heart plummeting to the floor, telling your family, their panic, your despair.  You visualize scrounging for quarters under the sofa cushions to buy ramen noodles with double coupons.  You imagine the feeling of ineptitude as you fruitlessly search for a new job, the disappointment in your children's eyes as you tell them you can't afford their polo lessons anymore, finding your partner in a puddle of tears on the bathroom floor...

How does your body react to this kind of worry?  Maybe your heart is racing, your chest is tight, you feel the stress buzzing through your system but are simultaneously exhausted.  So your body is reacting to the worry, your mind is not paying attention to anything but the worry, and your spirit feels crushed.  Worry sucks.

Stop.  Try this.  Set aside a few minutes to imagine The Worst Possible Scenario.  Commit to really diving deep for a few moments.  Conjure up your tale of woe and all its implications for your life situation.  Can you make the scenario any worse?  Then go for it. 

Now ask yourself: am I ok?  Put down Debbie Downer's foggy lens of negativity.  In this, The Worst Possible Scenario, am I ok?  Did I survive?  In the layoff scenario, are you still able to buy your family ketchup sandwiches, even if it means you have to temporarily flip veggieburgers at the cafe where all the emo high school kids loiter?  Can you still experience joy? love?  inner peace?  Can you still improve your situation?  Yes, yes, I know you just lost your job and potentially have been set back in your career.  But is your life intact?  I bet so.  The Worst Possible Scenario is survivable.  I am not claiming you will prefer it over The Best Possible Scenario, or that it would be easy to get back to a happy place, but it would be ok.  It's even possible that it would not be as bad as your wildly creative mind thought.  It's even possible that The Worst Possible Scenario could be the catalyst for a life better than what you ever imagined.

What if your Worst Possible Scenario is death?  Do you know that it would be a negative experience?  After you died, would you be able to suffer any longer?  Would your spirit vanish or just move somewhere else?  Would your loved ones still feel your love?  Besides your body dying, can you know for sure that your soul won't carry on?  Just see whether this scenario --over which you may have no control-- is as bad as you imagine when you really let it sit there and look through a clear lens.  It would be ok, if for no other reason than because you can't really be not ok about death once you're dead.  ha!  And death is inevitable for all of us who are human.

Once you have made the difficult journey into The Worst Possible Scenario and realize it would all be ok, that necessarily means that all scenarios would turn out ok.  The second worst scenario, and the twentieth worst scenario (wow, you really went wild!)...yep, those would all be ok.  Ergo, any and all imaginable situations would be ok.  Whatever was the worst thing that happened in your past, you are here regardless of it.  It was ok.

Explore the deepest part of your anxiety inferno so that you can gain some perspective.  It is really difficult for me to find peace when I am engulfed in mental agony.  I know deep down that I could escape it at any time through connecting to the present moment, but sometimes that seems impossible.  For those times, I wonder if you could try first diving into The Worst Possible Scenario, seeing if that scenario would be ok (be honest about this...you will always be ok, and you can cope with any scenario), and then focusing your attention back to the only place that matters: the present moment.  Worry cannot survive there.