Ep #119: The Prayer for Chaos – How to Stop the Habit of Worrying

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Welcome to Co-parenting with Confidence, a podcast for those courageous moms out there who wanna move past the conflict and frustration of divorce and show up as the mom they truly wanna be. My name is Mikki Gardner, I'm a certified life and conscious parenting coach with my own personal dose of co-parenting experience. Throughout my co-parenting journey, I have learned to become confident in who I am as a woman and a mother, and I'm here to help you do the same. If you're ready to learn what it takes to become a great co-parent and an amazing example to your children, well get ready and let's dive into today's episode.

Welcome back to the pod friend. I'm excited to be here and to talk to you today because we're continuing this idea and this month of cleaning up. A fresh start to the New Year, and we're really looking at ways that we can clean up our co-parenting and clean up our lives. And today, I wanted to talk about something that I think comes up across the board for all of us. It doesn't matter who you are, I don't know that any of us escape this when it comes to our human experience. And what is that? It's worry. This is one of those mental patterns that really, really impact us and can be so debilitating. And there are times in life I think that bring on worry more than others. But as a parent, a lot of us worry. We worry a lot. I read a study that one in three people struggle with debilitating worry. They're trapped in a loop of catastrophizing and worrying about future events. And really what they're doing is they're just feeling the awfulness now in the present moment. And listen, they're not trying to do this, nobody tries to worry. I understand that, but what we wanna do is really understand what is worry, why does it happen and start to shift out of it because I know that it comes up in every conversation with every mom and dad that I have around co-parenting.

The way that I define worry is it's simply a prayer for chaos. That's all worrying is. It's a continued prayer for more and more and more chaotic thinking. And when our thinking is chaotic, we feel chaotic. When we feel chaotic, we act in a chaotic way, and that creates more and more dysfunction. So we really have to get into understanding what is worry and how can we stop it because worry is a habit, it's just a mental habit that we've practiced. And again, some people are more prone to it, some of us experience it situationally, and I know there's many, many tools that we're gonna go through today. But I just wanted to start off by saying that what I want for you and the reason I'm doing this episode is because so many of us worry and I want you to stop the prayer for chaos and really start to step into a cleaner mental space so that you have more mental capacity, emotional capacity, and more energy for bringing in the good that you want in your life.

So there's so many worries that we have as parents and co-parents. What if I'm not equipped to parent? What if I don't know how to do this? What if I don't know how to take care of my kids on my own? What if I'm always gonna be alone? What if I can't take care of the bills? What if I lose my job? What if I can't find a job? What if they end up loving the other parent more and they have more fun there and they don't wanna be with me anymore? What if I never find love again? What if my kids never forgive me? What if the other co-parent always is so difficult?

What if we never get along? What if this is what the next 18 years of my life is gonna look like? Do you hear all of these? These are those what if questions that we start to ask ourselves that just creates more and more and more worry. Have you ever had the type of worry where everything is going totally fine, but then all of a sudden you have this really awful, horrific negative thought that then just consumes all of your thinking? I'm gonna be really honest and raise my hand. I'm a warrior. I am one of these people that has sort of the tendency to worry like this and this catastrophic thinking, and I do it almost every night. And it's usually when I'm alone, when my son is with the other co-parents, and I am getting ready for bed, everything's fine. And then I have this horrible thought, I won't go into detail, but it's this very visceral thought and experience of what if I am hurt, what if I'm attacked, what if something happens? And it's the same thing every night, and I start to feel very panicked, I start to put the alarm on, check the doors, I start to get very nervous. I'm experiencing this fearful feeling in my body, even though nothing has changed. I was still just washing my face to get ready for bed.

This is the kind of worry and catastrophic thinking that impacts so many people and really leads to a loop that is debilitating. And I know for me, I have to really stop and interrupt that pattern so that I don't lose sleep, so that I can still go to bed, so that I can move through it. But that's only since I've learned how to do this. When I've learned these skills, and I wanted to talk about it today because I think so many of us sort of worry in the little ways, but also the big ways that impact us more than we'd like to admit. I was listening to a great podcast by Mel Robbins on worry. And if you haven't listened to it, I highly recommend that you do. She has one of the best mantras for anxiety and worry that I've heard. When I was reading off all of those sort of worries that we have about co-parenting, what if I'm always gonna be alone, what if we never get along and my next 18 years is like this, what if the kids love the other co-parent more? All of those things, they started with one thing. What if. And here's the thing, worry is a question. It is not something that we're certain about, we don't know the answer to it, but we ask our brain a question of what if. What if this, what if that?

So what we have to do is counteract that kind of worry with a question, recognizing that we're uncertain about the outcome and we need to understand that we're uncertain, but offer another question for our brain. Remember, our brain is just a lovely little super computer, very powerful, but it wants to answer questions quickly and efficiently. So if you ask it a bad question or a negative question, it is going to find you negative answers. If you ask it the what if question about, what if I can't do this, what if I can't do that, what if this is always this way, it's going to continue to give you the evidence in support of that. So what Mel says is instead of what we need to offer our brain is, what if it works out? What if that doesn't happen? And that alone sometimes can be enough to interrupt the brain pattern of habitual worry of saying, okay, what if it does work out? What if that doesn't come true? And here's an interesting fact that she pointed out that I wanted to bring to you and I looked it up, there's researchers at Penn State that really started to look at worry and had participants write down their worries four times a day, and they were prompted to do so.

But what this study found was 91% of our worries are false alarms. 91%. That's huge. And the remaining 9% of the worries that did come true, the outcome was better than the participants expected, about a third of the time. For about one in four participants, exactly zero of their worries ever materialized. So what is this telling us? What this is telling us is that the majority of the time, 91% of the time, the worries are totally false. So it's not worth our time, our mental capacity, our emotional capacity, our energy to continue with the worry, and so that's where we really have to interrupt this. I love the study because it just goes to show, most of the time, not even most, 91% of the time, it's totally false, and of the other 9%, the majority of that time, and actually the outcome is better than you imagined. So that's just the science, that's just the research around it. But also let's look at some tools and strategies and to understand why we're worrying and how can we start to get ourselves out of it. Worrying is a normal part of life.

We have the negativity bias. That is the part of the brain that is always geared towards the negative as a survival mechanism. Again, remembering back to caveman days, we needed to always be looking out for danger 'cause you never knew where a tiger might be, when your last meal would be, so you had to kind of be negative assuming just to be safe. But that's not the world we're living in. I know it feels that way with a lot of the headlines going on, but we actually are much safer. And for those of us that are listening to this podcast, likely from the safety of your car or your home, hopefully your life is relatively safe. And so when we think about safety, then we can start to understand that our brain is still geared towards this negativity, but also we experience negative things because that's life. And we lose people, we lose experiences, we have disappointments, we have frustrations, we have conflict, all of these things happen because they're just part of life. And that's like understanding that we get hit with those things, those experiences, and we feel sadness, shock, grief, anger. All of these things happen and we feel something, but then we have the worry part that comes in.

When this negative thing happens, okay, that's sort of the shock to your heart where you feel it, again, with a primary emotion. But then we start to think about it. And when we start to get into a worry loop, a patterning in our brain where we're worrying about it, well, here is... This is the part that I wanted to talk about because this is the part that is self-inflicted pain, and this is the part we wanna interrupt. Because when we start to think about the worry in our head and we worry and we worry and we worry, and we start to run all of these scenarios in our head over and over in the loop, this is where we start to feel anxiety, overwhelm, more worry, more anticipatory pain, this is where we start to catastrophize, we start to one up it. It's like, okay, what if that happened? What if that happened? What if that happened? What if that happened? And the only thing we're doing is dysregulating ourselves because we're feeling the emotion now of having that dysregulated nervous system if that thing were to happen. So we're actually just bringing in the pain by continuing the thought loop.

Does that make sense? And this is the part that we wanna interrupt. We wanna stop and disrupt the mental load of worrying so that we stop feeling the pain. Because here's the other interesting fact that the research has shown, is that when we're stuck in that worry loop, we actually make ourselves less capable of handling things, of problem-solving. Why? Because we're continuing to keep ourself dysregulated, we're continuing to keep ourselves in the worry, in the heightened anxiety, in the state of dysregulation, so that even if the bad thing were to happen, even if it happens, we're so dysregulated that we don't have the capacity to handle it, to problem solve, to be our highest version of us. So instead what we have to do is learn to stop the prayer for chaos, interrupt the worry and start to ground ourselves to what is true, what is happening in this moment. Part of worrying is noticing that we're in the worry so that we can stop and become aware of it. Once we're aware of it, we can start to understand, okay, well, what can I do here? What is true? What is reality telling me? What are my options? Do I wanna continue with the mental load of worrying, or do I wanna step into the agency that I have so that I can keep myself more in a regulated state so that even if things happen, even if these things come true, even if one of the 9% happens, how can I be ready to problem solve, how can I be ready to move around it, how can I handle it?

We don't want the worrying restricting your ability to do that, but that's what worrying does. So how do we do it? Well, I think Mel Robbins, what if it all works out, or what if it doesn't happen, is a great start. But for me, every night when the catastrophic thinking comes and the worry starts to come in, I've learned to stop and take a breath. I take a deep breath in through my nose, out through my mouth, and I put my hand on my heart, and I say in this moment, I am okay. In this moment, I am safe. And what that does is it grounds me into the present moment, because in the present moment, you are safe. And in this present moment, if you're listening to this or the present moment when you're in the worry, it's understanding that if we get wrapped up in the past, that's regret, or we get wrapped up in the future, which is worry, a prayer for chaos, we don't have any control in the past or the future, we only have control in the present moment. And so really grounding yourself back to the present moment to say, I am safe, I am okay, or to be willing to acknowledge what is happening and how do I wanna move forward? That's the most powerful thing we can do, and it starts by really interrupting the habit of worry and stepping into calm.

And the last analogy I'll leave you with because I think it's a powerful one, every thought is like a train. We get on the train and it's going to take us to a destination. If we get on the worry train, you know where that's headed. It's nowhere good, it's to the catastrophizing, it's to the self-inflicted torture, it's into all the what-ifs, it's into the feeling, the anticipatory negative feeling right now. We don't want that. So instead, when you start to realize you're on the worry train, I want you to pull the emergency stop button on it and stop your brain and literally say, stop and get off that train, get on to the platform and we're gonna choose a different thought to get on. We're gonna choose a different thought that is more in line with how you wanna feel. And listen, you might have to get on and off the train many, many, many times. I know I do sometimes, and that's okay. But it's just the fact that you're aware of. As soon as you become aware that you're in the worry spiral and you can stop it, take a breath, root into where you are in the present moment, you stop that prayer for chaos and you start stepping into calm, connected energy, and that is where all your power is.

Listen, my friend, you have so much power to create more of the life that you want, to have less of the worry, less of the anxiety when we learn how to step into regulating our emotions, regulating our nervous system and keeping ourselves in a more calm, grounded state more often than not. And it's totally possible. And speaking of, I want you to join me. It's coming up quick, but on January 24th, Noon Eastern 9:00 AM Pacific, I am doing a workshop all about this. It is a free workshop where you can come and it's all about how not to lose your, you know what, in co-parenting. It's really learning to understand emotional regulation so you can understand your emotions, yours, your kids, the other co-parents. You can learn how to manage the big feelings and the big reactions that we have so that you can really decide how you wanna show up. We're gonna learn how to navigate co-parenting even when it's hard from a more settled place. We're gonna learn how to step out of this worry and really step into empowered communication, empowered parenting and empowered co-parenting. So if this sounds like something that you're after, who wouldn't? Join me. You can go to mikkigardner.com/workshop and sign up. You do have to register to get in. I can't wait to see you there. And in the meantime, I hope this episode has given you some ideas and some tools to stop the prayer for chaos, to break that habit of worry.

We all know that we worry. Worry is just part of being human. But what we don't wanna do is get lost in that thought loop that keeps us in a debilitated state. I want you to be able to interrupt that thought, to get off that worry train and get on to a different one, one that gives you more feelings of peace, more feelings of calm and more feelings of being empowered. You don't have to feel the anxiety and the overwhelm that comes with worrying all the time, there are ways around it. And if you need more help, my friend, you know I am always here for you. Until next time, take really, really good care of you, and I hope to see at the workshop soon.

Oh, and one more thing, the legal stuff. This podcast is solely intended for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for any medical advice. Please consult your physician or a qualified medical professional for personalized medical advice. Thanks for listening to Co-parenting with Confidence. If you want more information or resources from this podcast, visit co-parentingwithconfidence.com. I'll see you next week.