Worrying is a word that comes from the animal kingdom. It's what dogs do. When a dog picks up a bone, or a rag, or a small animal, grips it in its teeth and shakes it violently back and forth, that's called worrying. When people do it, it's when they imagine a problem, or a negative scenario playing out, they grip it in their imagination and shake it until it's shredded. My question is, why do we do this?

Mostly, it's a habit we've learned all our lives. Our parents and role models probably worried a lot as we grew up and we just picked up the habit. We also have adages like Murphey's Law that constanly reminds us "If anything can go wrong, it will." Worry eventually takes over our daily lives, leaves us in constant stress and panic, and shaves years off our lives. Why? Because our imagination can't let go of a dead rat. It even creeps into our dreams at night, dragging us through horrible nightmares and robbing us of valuable rest.

Studies show that the human brain cannot tell the difference between the past and the present, reality or the imagination. If you imagine a scenario where the worst case scenario happens to you, your body goes into a physical state to match the exact situation playing out in your imagination, even though technically you're just sitting in a comfortable chair at home, or in your car. If you sit around remembering, replaying past events that traumatized you, your body goes back into the state of stress and shock as though it were happening right this minute. Your brain does not know the difference and simply reacts. This stress on your body releases chemicals that can be as addictive as substance abuse, which is perhaps why so many people are addicted to worrying.

If your mind makes your body feel whatever it's focused on, what do you suppose it's doing when you worry about getting sick?

The other problem of worry is the concept of the self-fulling prophecy. That's basically a situation where a prediction comes true because you believed it would, not necessarily because it was gonna happen on its own anyway. For example, a woman is constantly worrying that her man is going to leave her, because that's what happened in the past. She puts herself in a state of stress, and the next thing you know all kinds of stupid fights arise. The guy eventually can't handle it, gets fed up and leaves her. Why? Because he was a jerk, just like all the other guys she's known? Maybe. But maybe he just couldn't handle the drama. Maybe she brought out the worst in him with her worry and stress. Maybe it came true only because that's what she was focused on the most.

Most of our worries are insane, if you really examined them and broke them down. A mathemetician might look at the typical scenarios of our everyday worries and calculate that the probabily of such bad luck happening to one single person over and over is as small as winning the lottery, one in thirty million or something like that. The odds are so small, but we still do it anyway. A doctor would also tell you that if you constantly pick at a wound that's trying to heal, the odds of infection and scarring increase. Meanwhile, if you just leave it alone, you may not be perfectly fine, but at least it'll heal up more quickly.

But what if our brains were magically re-wired to play out insanely positive scenarios all day? What if someone disconnected the wire of our imagination from the negative battery pole and reattached it to the positive one? What if we woke up one day and realized we'd lost our ability to worry? Instead, we just kept imagining the absolute best case scenario. Instead of losing our jobs and winding up in the streets with nowhere to turn, what if we imagined getting the promotion, a big raise, and a new office? What if instead of worrying that our kids will fall in with a bad crowd, turn to drugs and drinking, and utterly fail at life, what if we imagined them getting straight A's, going to an awesome school, and living happily ever after? What if we imagined winning the lottery? What if we imagined that even our enemies suddenly turned around and realized that they were being idiots and decided to get on our side?

Imagine what your body would feel like all day every day if you couldn't stop "worrying" that the best possibly scenario would continually happen to you? You'd constantly feel ecstatic, excited, energetic, pumped with adreneline, love and joy. Imagine how amazingly happy your lover would be if you constantly imagined them doing wonderful, thoughtful, romantic things for you, just out of the blue, and walked around bursting with love and appreciation for them. Why, they might actually start doing these things just because you believe in it so strongly. Basically your life would be heaven on earth, wouldn't it? Your brain would start putting your body into a state as though these things were actually happening, even if they weren't, and you'd feel awesome.

How good would you feel waking up every morning from dreams where absolutely everything went right for you?

The question is, if the absolute worst case sceneario is as unlikely as winning the lottery, why not worry about winning the lottery instead? Why not reconnect the negative to the positive, and focus on the best possible situation coming to pass? If life is totally random anyway, why not believe for the best? Or, if you're a person who believes in a Higher Power, what if you imagined that this Higher Power was actually good, and all-powerful and decided to do nothing by bless you for the rest of your days, just because Higher Power is full of goodness, love, and light?

What if you imagined that the bad things that have happened to you in the past were actually good for you? They seemed horrible, ugly, and unfair at the time, but imagine if the real reason they happened was to make you stronger, to fill you with gratitude for every good moment and person of your life. What if you decided that no matter what kind of crap happened to you, there was always a reason for it, and that reason is always something that's ultimately good, like the little boy digging frantically through the pile of horse shit crying out "There's gotta be a pony for me in here somewhere!"

Maybe you believe in a universe where God is in control of everything. Or maybe you believe we're all just floating around accidental like on a breeze, as Forest Gump said. Or maybe you believe that you create your own destiny as you go, by the choices you make and the things you believe. Maybe you believe that all three of these things is happening at the same time. Whatever the case may be, you can see how worry would really mess up your plans, and how the opposite of worry would make your life a "living heaven". So then the question comes down to whether or not we have a choice in the matter.

Do you have a choice? Are you in control of your thoughts? Of course we are. The trouble is, we've been thinking a certain way for so long that we've let our brains go on automatic pilot, like the remote control in the Adam Sandler movie "Click", and now we feel like we don't even have a choice anymore. We always have a choice. But sometimes we have to stop what we're doing and actually take charge of ourselves. It starts with deciding that we actually do have a choice in the matter.

Go buy a notebook. Just an ordinary notebook. Or it can be fancy if you prefer, with sparkles, and rainbows and such on it. It doesn't really matter what's on the outside because it's a magic book. You're gonna make it magic. But you have to write a magic phrase on the top of the first page: EVERYTHING I WRITE IN THIS BOOK WILL COME TRUE!

Then start writing. Call it your "worry" book. You're basically just forcing yourself to take charge of your thoughts instead of letting it go on automatic pilot all day. The very act of writing something down stops your brain from racing forward like a bull in a china shop, or a mad dog, if you will. You actually have to put your thoughts into words, and that makes you examine your thoughts. And in this case, that's a good thing.

Whenever you find yourself worrying again, grab your worry book and walk through these thoughts, rejecting the bad ones and writing down the good ones. Your ultimate goal is to tell yourself the story of what life would be like if everything went completely and totally right no matter what you did. And since it's a magic book, everything you write in there really will come true. What's so magic about it? Well, you're magic. Everything you believe comes true anyway. You're just writing down what you believe will come true, and it's all stuff you reall do want to happen.

After filling up a whole notebook, you get another one. You fill up a second one and you keep going until either the world runs out of notebooks or your brain switches onto automatic pilot and basically dreams about the best case scenarios all day every day without you even thinking about doing it. Some people believe a habit only takes 21 repetitions to become part of who you are. When you attach emotions to the habit, it anchors even more quickly. You might have to do this all day every day at first, if you worry a lot. You might find that you actually like feeling awesome about what might happen. No matter what happens, don't give up. Keep writing. Don't stop believing. Beat that dog down until he knows exactly who's boss and starts standing at attention instead of gnawing on dead rats all day.

The opposite of worry is dreams. Wouldn't you rather have a life that's a dream come true instead of a worry come true? Just get a magic notebook and start deciding for yourself what kind of magic is gonna happen for you. Even if you believe the world is all random anyway, at the very least you'll put yourself in a positive state and feel good no matter what's going on. But the odds are you don't believe the world is all random. You're a dreamer. You believe in awesome things. Just hook your imaginination up to the dream battery instead of the life-sucking worry one. You'll live happily ever after.