If any of you have successfully given up worrying...

It certainly does Gally - along with other life altering events.

I bet it does, Gally! Thank you once more.

I used to worry a lot - about anything and everything, especially the children. Since I was widowed, I seem, apart from obvious worries, to have become calmer and more down to earth. I just say to myself, it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things - what will be will be, so long as I do my best to sort out this problem and arrange for 'that' to be done, does it really matter? The children are all grown up and are 'big enough and ugly enough' to sort themselves out, so I remove myself directly from their problems, although always there to offer advice and help if required. I' m not saying it takes a tragedy like widowhood to make you calmer, but it certainly puts a lot of unnecessary worries and problems into perspective!

Middle of the night herbal sleeping tablets calm me down a bit.

Oh Marelli you say in your post that you wish you could have done better. You did ( as we all do) your best in the circumstances. we can all look back and say " I could have done" or " I should have done" but at the time we had to do what we could with the hand of cards we had been dealt.

I have come to the conclusion that I am one of those people who will always worry. I am one of life's worriers.

Like everyone else I used to worry about everything, money, kids etc and envied my husband who never seemed to worry about anything then he had a brain haemorrage and I found out all the things he'd been doing to ease my worries and make our lives run easier when I had to take them on myself, like insurance,MOT's car maintainance,DIY etc and I realised he was probably just as worried as me but he coped with it better than I did. He always said why worry about things you can't change just get on with tackling the things you can. I still worry but I write lots of lists of things I need to do or worry me and then cross out the ones I have no power to change then get on with whats left. Sometimes it works other times not but at least it's a start. I've also learnt to talk through my worries, don't they say a problem shared is a problem halved?

And it does tend to do that, juneh! I remember reading somewhere that 'worry is a wasted emotion' - and so it is.

Thanks for your reply. How I do deal with it is to say to myself that the worry will pass soon.

I just saw Louise Hay say to deal with stress by writing it a letter.

Dear stress
Let's break up. We are not compatible
Bye june

Oops - sorry, juneh, I've just looked at your profile, and seen that you joined in 2011. (I hadn't seen any of your posts before. )

juneh, are you new to Gransnet? If you are, then I'm pleased to meet you. .
I was a very young mum as well, and on looking back on my life, I wish I could have done better. However, I did my best with what I had (which was very, very little).
It's all in the past now, though, and my eldest daughter is only a couple of years younger than yours. Many of us have similar starts to motherhood. I hope that talking to us here will help you.

I do meditate but I also have atrial fibrilation which can be brought on by stress. I am sorry to say I could with some good ideas myself. I know this doesn't help you but sharing does I think.

I do not worry about everyday events but I spend a lot of time and energy on my relationship with my daughter. I always feel as if I have been a poor mother, I was very young , my daughter is 48 now with 2young children. I sometimes think I will never measure up this causes me lots of upset and concern. I never seem to come to terms with it.

GrandmaH, I have a similar trick that I taught myself after having a couple of years of broken nights due to night worrying.
I have a glass of water by my bed - It has to be there!
If I wake I take a sip and then repeat a mantra of 'Nothing'.....'Nothing'....... Its taken a while and I had to work at it but now it works for me. I used to lay there with all sorts rattling around my head until I would have to get up and go down stairs. The loss of sleep soon makes everything ten times worse and a vicious circle develops.
It might be very simple but its now my magic trick.

I am a terrible middle of the night worrier- 'catastrophing' my husband calls it & he has had several breakdown & a lot of therapy so he knows a bit about worrying! Although all he ever tells me is to stop doing it. No help at all.
However I have found that if I lie with my eyes shut & concentrate on nothing- like the back of the eyelids & try to see a small light or tiny dot then after a few minutes you do see it & if you concentrate on that & pull yourself back to it when you find your mind slipping back to a worry it DOES eventually help. It is something my husband was taught in therapy so it must have some credence. I can get back to sleep eventually by doing this but it does take a little practice. Sometimes the 'lights' you 'see' are lovely too but sometimes it is just a small dot. It does work if you keep at it.
Also lying on back in shavasana position helps to settle me so when I turn over to sleep I am calmer.

I am much less of a worrier than I have been in the past. One strategy that works for me is to work out a plan for what I would do if ... So if I was awake at 3am worrying about how to cope if I lost my job I would direct all my thoughts into working out a detailed plan of what I would do. Then I could always move on to a planB, planC etc. etc.

I think a lot of worrying is about not feeling able to control things - devising a strategy for coping can help.

When I was going through a very worrying time in my life I would wake at 4 am when things always seem 100 times worse when everyone is sleeping. Worries just bounced around and got bigger and bigger the only way I could deal with it was take myself off to a place where I had been happy and carefree and would imagine myself there and 9/10 it would settle me.

I try (not very successfully sometimes mind you) to place my worries on a kind of scale. I have done this for my entire life. As a child I remember a visit to the dentist (I was terrified of the dentist) was definitely a 10 , homework late in 7 , falling out with friend 9 etc.

I still do this today and lie in bed feeding all my worries into the scale and shifting them around until I am happy.

Crazy? Me?

Like the Serenity Prayer - Desiderata is also something that brings some reason into worrying. Doesn't help, but makes sense in the end. I worry about everything and as I get older worry about things I did in the past which were probably really silly or unthinking, and then I think well, there's probably no one alive who remembers that, so stop worrying, and whatever is going to happen in the world today will happen, all I have to do is make sure we are safe and cause no harm. A bit selfish really.

When will we learn. I have two conditions that worry agrivates: Diverticulitis and psoriasis. You would think that I could work it out, wouldn't you?
A few people have mentioned two things that do help. Deep breathing and a good walk.

Nelliemoser "whatifying" That is my life you are describing and your description is perfect! Now when I worry I will think that I am "whatifing".

Grossi You asked what non-worriers think about first thing in the morning.
(I can become concerned about things, but on the whole I'm not a great worrier).

Most mornings the first thing I do is to try to guess the time! The village I live in has no street lighting and the velux window has a black-out curtain, but the little window is un-curtained. So as the light/weather changes ......... and so on. It's a small amusement, a little personal challenge.

I then make coffee, pad around and open the shutters for the day, and then turn on my old steam computer to warm up - which takes about 10 mins!

.....and the day has started.

I'm not a great worrier. I like to think about things; I think of a problem and envisage the worst case scenario - then I plan how I might deal with it - and then I think, well if the worst happens it will be awful, but at least I have a plan. It may sound a bit blasé (it's really not), but when my son in law was killed in Afghanistan I had already 'imagined' that happening (although if I'm honest there's a part of me that thought it couldn't really happen to us) and I decided that as a family we would pull together and get through. I won't say I wasn't anxious while he was out there, but I allayed my worries by thinking, well, if worst comes to worst we will deal with it. I must confess that I did worry about my daughter afterwards though.

I really try not to worry needlessly, for example: recently a few people shared that they are worried about a mutual friend as they think he might be having problems. My response was to say, okay I'll ask him, which was met with horror, but as far as I'm concerned it was the obvious thing to do. If he has a problem I'd like to help and if not there's no need to worry. [simples no?]

It makes perfect sense to me Tegan

That's my take on it as well! It's like I'm doing a sort of permanent penance which will [hopefully] stop anything bad happening [does that make sense?]. I did used to escape into studying the form for my horse racing but, since my computer became so slow [and I gave up betting anyway even though I only bet in pennies] I stopped doing it.