Worried Sick!

Hey, everyone, I'm live on Cadre here. Doctor Kerry, have you ever heard the term worried sick? I'm sure you've heard of this term and I want to explain a little bit about what that means because worried sick, you can actually become sick from worry. And I'll explain how this works. So when you worry, your body goes under stress. And it's similar to like, when your sympathetic nervous system is activated. But the main hormone that's released when your body is under stress is cortisol. And I'm sure you've heard this, a lot of fitness experts talk about how cortisol is so bad, but cortisol is actually a really healthy hormone when your body needs it because your body responds to the stress by using the cortisol to make things function so your heart rate can increase, your blood sugar increases, all of the things that you would need, like, let's say, if you're going to the gym and working out.

So cortisol is a really healthy hormone, but what happens when you worry is your body thinks that you're under stress and you release cortisol and it's actually not helpful. So you have all this extra cortisol in your bloodstream and your body doesn't know what to do with it. And what it does is it actually suppresses your immune system because when you're at the gym, you don't need your immune system in high gear. You need your muscles working. You need things like that to function really well.

So it actually starts to suppress your immune system when you have this excess cortisol running around. So you actually become sick. So you can actually worry yourself sick. I want to share with you a little bit about my experience with worrying and how it actually impacted my health. When I was a kid, I suffered from extreme worry. I would lay up at night for two, 3 hours not able to fall asleep because I was worrying about everything in life. I worried about a test I had the next day. I worried that maybe something I said that day at school to my friend, maybe they misconstrued it and they were going to think something different and judge me.

I worried about, like, the world ending. I worried about catastrophic things that were just, like, never going to happen. And it just kind of became my mo, to be a worrier for years of my life. And I always told myself that I'm worrying because it's healthy to prepare, because I don't want to be unprepared for something happening. I don't want to be unprepared for a disappointment in life. But I can tell you, given the stuff that's happened in my life, a lot of these things, I couldn't have prepared for good and bad.

So you can't really worry yourself to prepare. It's not effective, and it's very unnatural, actually. So as a result of being such a worrier, I was a sick kid. I was sick all the time. I had chronic ear infections, chronic sinus infections. I had five surgeries before I was 20 years old, and I just constantly was sick. And if I think back to this, I'm like, well, of course it makes sense that I was sick all the time because I just worried all the time. And it was in, like, my college the second time around, when I went back to nursing school, that I really started to kind of break free from this.

And really, only in the last five years have I found true peace from worrying by understanding that, first of all, worry isn't helpful. Regardless of what you think the reason is for your worrying, it's never helpful. It doesn't prepare you. It's not effective. It's not healthy for your body. There's really nothing good that comes from worrying. I'm sure you've heard that phrase, that worrying is like a rocking chair. You can rock and rock and never get anywhere. Pretty much. There's, like, nothing good that comes from worrying.

Now, I'm not to say that you should never have a stress or anxiety or worry, because that's very natural as human beings, to be scared when something happens. Like, let's say you're, your 16 year old son is out with his friends, and he doesn't come home on time, you're probably gonna worry. That's normal. But excessive worry, and doing this on a daily basis is really unhealthy and unnatural and unnecessary. So I first had to come to that realization that, like, this isn't actually helping me, and it's not preparing me for anything in life.

So I need to stop worrying. And then I used my worst case scenario technique, which I've also done a video about, which is basically where you start to think, okay, what is the worst thing that could possibly happen if this happened? Okay, well, then what is the worst thing that could possibly happen? So you can take your worry to the extreme, and sometimes this is effective, sometimes it's not. But if you're worried about something that's probably not going to happen and you start to kind of fantasize about, like, what could possibly go wrong, you get to the point where it's actually really ridiculous.

What you are worrying about, and you kind of start to laugh at it because you're like, this is just this feedback loop in my head that's not helping me at all. And it's really just taking me down this pathway that's never going to happen. So I could stop worrying about it now and then. The other thing was to incorporate gratitude and staying in the present. I am a futuristic thinker. I love planning things. I love visions for the future. I love making plans. I love planning vacations. Anything futuristic, my mind is always in the future, and that's just how I was made.

But for a warrior, that doesn't help because then you're starting to worry about things that haven't even happened yet. Yet. So for me, a lot of my staying present in the moment, staying present in the day was to incorporate gratitude practices into every day. So I would start to, when I wake up in the morning, start to list off the things that I'm grateful for. And then throughout the day, just taking a pause and saying, what am I grateful for? Because what it does is it pulls you back into the present to stay grateful.

So you're not looking at the past, you're not looking into the future and worrying. So I don't about know if that's a helpful tip for you, but it really helped me to start to live more in the present and then just to surround myself with other people who aren't worriers. I realized that a lot of my friends really struggled from this, too, because they were just highly anxious people. And so to surround myself with more positive, uplifting people, I used to be grossed out by positive people. I just thought they were super annoying.

But now I'm probably one of those super annoying positive people because I really love to stay in the moment and cherish everything that happens throughout the day and just really find the joy in everything going on, which really makes it hard to worry. When you're in a joyful posture, it's really hard to worry. So I hope this was helpful. I hope you learned some things. And I just want to encourage you that if you are a worrier, you can break free from this. It is not something you have to struggle with the rest of your life.

And there are some tactical things you can do. I would love to hear your experience with this as well because there are times when I still slip into this. So share with me what you guys have done, and I would love to learn from you as well. Take care. God bless.