In Baz Luhrmann's 'wear sunscreen' he explains why not to worry and suggests that worrying is about as useful as "trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum"
He goes on to say that the real things to worry about never cross your troubled mind but blindside you on some idle Tuesday afternoon.
It is interesting that when we are stressed we think the focus of our stress is absolute and real until something of significant stress arrives and all those things dissipate and seem to be insignificant.
This would be stress inflation (similar to academic inflation)
When I was a clinician in my early days I stabbed a patient in the lip by accident with a local anaesthetic needle. Here lip bled (from a tiny area) and the patient was relatively unconcerned, but I was horrified and assumed that I had committed clinical negligence and worried for weeks about the outcome of this and whether her lip would be infected and she would end up getting me struck off.
In the end, something else came along that I worried about more, then something again and something further until I was able to worry about things at a higher level and the lesser things didn't seem to be a problem anymore.
There are actually significant things to worry about in life. Health is a good example and the health of the ones that you love. Security and safety perhaps if you lived somewhere terrible in the UK or further afield. The other things, the day-to-day things, the things that we think stress us out, the deadlines, confrontations, criticisms are not things to be stressed about because they will soon disappear when the proper stress arrives.
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