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Your quota of worry and how to shrink it

Sometimes I think we all have a worrying quota. An amount of worry we feel compelling to apply to the world. And if our lives get safe, and there isn’t much really worth worrying about, we fill up our quota by worrying about things that don’t really matter much at all. Experts call this chronic stress, an ongoing negative response to small negative events in life, not big ones like divorce or losing a job. And we develop habits that keep that chronic stress level high for no good reason.

Case in point: I had a deep, worried conversation with my brother about the criteria for accepting Facebook invites from people who were jerks 25 years ago when we went to grade school with them. Boy – do we need other things to fill our quotas of worry. Like the Facebook example, I catch myself worrying about ridiculous, trivial things now and then, and the trick that helps, that shrinks my worrying quota is Maslows hierarchy of needs.

It’s an old trick: put whatever is on your mind in some kind of perspective (What’s worse? What’s better?) and it loses its venom. Most of the time, whatever I’m worrying about scores on the top half of the pyramid, and while it might belong in my quota of worry, it certainly doesn’t deserve the amount of energy from my life it’s absorbing.

Sometimes decisions are so insignificant that simply flipping a coin to decide and getting the decision out of the way is the best and healthiest thing all around: neither end of the decision matters. The only bad choice is taking too much time to make one. I find I can shrink my quota of worry by deciding a) some decisions matter less than I think b) worrying won’t help me make a better decision c) get someone else to sanity check if I’m worrying too much about something.

How do you find ways to worry less about things that aren’t worth worrying about?

References:

(While I’m a fan of Maslow’s, anyone know of interesting alternative hierarchies of needs?)

[Updated with new link on stress 12/11/14]