When I was 11 years old, I was visiting a neighbour with my mother when a framed picture hanging on the wall up the side of their staircase spoke to me. It was a little line drawing of a child sitting on a rocking horse in an old-fashioned nursery littered with toys and books. Underneath the image were the words: “Worry is like a rocking horse: you can sit and rock all day, but it won’t get you anywhere”.
I was stopped in my tracks. I was going through a difficult period, handling some very heavy stuff for my age, and I had plenty of fears for the future. I also happen to be one of life’s worriers, with a very active imagination so at the time, it felt like the image and proverb were directed at me personally. They helped me during a tough time, and have proved valuable again and again over the years since. I quote the words and invoke the image often both for myself and other people.
Why it works
At a basic level, the image of a rocking horse is helpful as a simple reminder that worry is utterly futile. When I find myself ruminating and playing host to nebulous anxious thoughts, remembering this simile is sometimes enough to jolt me into the realisation that whether I spend an hour or a day or a week worrying about whatever is on my mind, it will literally make zero difference to the future. Time spent on worrying does not move me forward. It simply stresses me out and ruins my sleep. When my worry is free-floating and generalised, the memory of that picture is often enough to snap me out of my thinking and bring me back to the here and now, where everything is fine and there is nothing for me to fix.
The upside of worry
There are times, however, when it feels like worrying is absolutely useful. Often, when I worry, what I’m actually doing is trying to anticipate every eventuality so that I can take action to prevent unexpected or undesirable outcomes. I know that when I’m in this particularly fun mood, worry spills over into hypervigilance based on a misguided but deep-rooted belief that if I play through every potential scenario in which something goes wrong, I can get ahead of the game and head off disaster before it strikes.
Often, of course, this tendency to anticipate, think things through, consider options, and make contingency plans is an asset to both me and my family. It means I am always on time for meetings and client sessions despite the challenges of Parisian public transport; my children rarely get caught in the rain without the appropriate clothing; and we never miss deadlines for booking shows we want to see, activity camps for the kids, or ordering for guaranteed delivery in time for Christmas. That’s the upside.
The downside of this characteristic comes when it goes too far and my mind spirals into an anxiety-inducing game-show entitled “Are you sure you’ve thought of EVERYTHING?!” When this happens, the level of detail in which I am imagining every scenario becomes infinitesimally tiny. It goes beyond anticipating things that might actually happen and planning accordingly (take my presentation on a flash drive in case my computer crashes during the workshop; make sure I have the phone number of the kids’ school saved in my phone in case I’m late to pick them up…) and imagining all kinds of improbable, and sometimes even illogical scenarios. It is at times like these that I find the mental image of a rocking horse really comes into its own as a reminder that what I am doing to myself is unproductive and even actively harmful. It also has the added advantage of cuing me to direct my mind towards more productive ways to ensure successful endeavours and prevent problems.
How do you get off the horse?
Often, simply remembering that worry is an exercise in futility is enough to help me dismount. But when the mind is strong, it can help to have a few other tools in your box.
In my experience, the first thing to try is distraction. My worry hates activity, and getting off the sofa or out of bed and doing something that engages mind (and body, if possible) works a treat. This might mean reading a book in the middle of the night or even rolling out the yoga mat. Or it might involve some batch cooking or cleaning. Another option might be tackling a nagging task for work like updating all my client files or spending time reaching out to interesting people on LinkedIn. Worry hits me most often when, in the words of my aunt, I “don’t have enough to think about”, so my first port of call is always to give myself something else to think about and, where possible, to do!
If that’s not enough, it helps me to write down, or say out loud, all of the worst possible scenarios I’m imagining. I think of this as mindful catastrophising. Speaking out loud the irrational fears I am harbouring makes me truly hear myself (and sometimes even laugh at how imaginative I’m being) to become aware of how unlikely they are to become reality. Often, they evaporate all on their own as a result.
An alternative to this is to imagine best possible scenarios. I figure that if I’m going to spend time imagining everything that could go wrong, and all the ways in which I might mess up, I can at least spend a few a minutes visualising all the things that might go right and in which I might succeed. There is a quotation I love from the French philosopher, Michel de Montaigne: “My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened”. To me, his words encapsulate perfectly the fact that while most worries never actually materialise, the act of worrying can make us feel almost as awful as if they had.
One last thought that helps me stop flogging the dead rocking horse of worry is the fact that the life events that have caused me the most pain have invariably been things about which I never even thought to worry. You might think this would have the effect of making me think I should really worry more and actively go looking for potential problems, but it does not. There’s something very fatalistic about the notion that, no matter how much you worry (and here I quote the famous Sunscreen song by Baz Luhrmann), “The real troubles in your life will always be things that never crossed your worried mind.”
Like a rocking horse, a certain amount of worry has its place; it can be useful in anticipating and averting problems. Ultimately, though, it gets you nowhere, no matter how long or hard you rock.
How has your inner monologue been treating you recently? Have your thoughts been racing, your worries taking over? Would you like to get back into the driving seat of your mind and put some distance between your thoughts and your reactions to your thoughts? Working with an experienced, empathetic and insightful coach can help you to find new ways to engage with your own thinking and ensure that any inner critics and mental bullies stay in their place. Contact me to find out more about working together.