This is one of the most useless feelings in the world.

There is never a time for it, and subjecting yourself puts you in the “stupid” category. However, humans spend most of their lives worrying, and teaching their children to worry so they can grow up to have an emotionally unhealthy life. So why do we do it? Because we think that this feeling is somehow useful to us, that it will make our lives better. Or simply because we think we are not able to control our own emotions.

Worrying can be defined as:

“Feeling badly for something that hasn’t happened yet.”

Do you see how ridiculous this emotion is? The past and future are not happening, nor will they ever happen. The past won’t happen again unless someone builds a time machine, and even then would feeling guilty be useless. The future won’t ever happen because there is no future, the future is a mind-made idea and is not real. You can’t see or touch the future, there is no television that displays the future, there is no person that can see the future in their minds, it is impossible. Let’s do a little math, since the future is made from your mind, you have no idea what will actually happen, just guesses. Now take your guess of the future, and compare it to the chances of what will actually happen. Since the present moment happens only by chance, there are infinite possibilities to what can happen in this moment. Take your calculator, and divide your one guess into the infinite chances of what will happen. That is 1/Infinity. What did you get on your calculator? The answer is zero! There is no chance that your exact guess will happen, ever. You’ve just proved to yourself that the future is not real.

When you worry, it makes you unable to fully and confidently deal with the most important time in your life: the present moment.

When you are worrying, you are spending more time in your head than in the now. The ironic thing is that when that worrisome time comes, your performance will undoubtedly become aggravated by the worrying itself. Worrying makes situations dramatically worse than they really are, life is never that serious enough to worry about something. Nothing is ever worth worrying about, ever.
But you may argue, “I had a huge meeting last month where if I didn’t worry about it for the entire week prior, I would have been totally unprepared.” It is wrong to use worrying as a motivational tool, as worrying only brings anxiety, and there is never a payoff for making yourself feel like crap. You can just as easily motivate yourself without bringing on stress, preparing for a meeting is totally possible without worrying. On the contrary, worrying, like feeling guilty, is a way to avoid confronting the issue. If you worry, it is because you are not doing your job. People who are doing their job are never worrying, they are halfway finished with their tasks while you are still worrying about the consequences of being unprepared for them. In the words of Nike, “Just do it.”

And just like putting guilt upon your children to control them, it is possible to use worry to get your child to do things. Here are some examples:

• “Hurry up, if you don’t get to baseball practice on time, your team will think you’re lazy.”
• “I’ll worry like crazy if you don’t come back on time.”

Teaching your child the concept of worrying will make them feel as if worrying is a healthy and okay practice, like feeling guilty. If the parent does it, my life guide, then it must be good. Worrying for someone does not make you love that person any more than you would without the worry. Worrying accomplishes absolutely nothing, it gives low confidence and stops you from doing the things you really want because of fear of consequences. Teaching worry to your children will keep your child from taking risks in life, and will result in success barriers for your child. A success barrier is fear that keeps you from achieving success, something that worrying does a great job at bringing forth into your psyche.

The Difference Between Acting and Being

As stated earlier, kids pick up on subtle cues to evaluate a situation, just as we do. If you are acting a certain way to hide your negative emotion, they will know and grow to hide their negative emotions as well. Being free from worry and guilt does not mean saying or thinking, “I don’t care, it’s not bothering me,” while deep down you truly feel anxious about it. Understand that these negative emotions are not only ruining your own life, they are setting your child up for a life full of anxiety as well. End this useless “mind chatter” and start enjoying every second of the present moment, your surroundings, the people around you, the way your body feels in the current moment without wasting time on pain from the future or past. Appreciate this moment right now, it is the only time there ever was and the only time there ever will be.