“These are the Emotions in Your Neighborhood…”- The Story of WORRY

After addressing joy at length in the last post, I’d love to tell you about the jobs that some of the other emotions have in our bodies. Because maybe you didn’t know, but emotions help us mentally AND physically. For example, if you didn’t worry, you might not have much luck eating.
Emotions are wonderful saviors and signals to us every day. Can you imagine living a few minutes without one? Besides adding some spice to your life, emotions are critical in the functioning of the body and mind.

“Worry” is a good example.

I was talking with a friend of mine who is an acupuncturist, and I asked her what she thought the job of worry was in the body. If you remember, joy is responsible for harmonizing all of the functions in the body. It helps with self-love and literally brings nutrition (in the form of blood flow) to our cells.

So what about worry? My acupuncturist friend said that worry is an emotion that goes along with the spleen and the stomach in Chinese medicine. These are also the organs that govern the intellect and thinking processes of the body.

So worry has something to do with thinking and the intellect.

Each emotion has a healthy aspect and an imbalanced aspect. The imbalance is easy to conceptualize with worry. It’s a problem if you worry too much, and it’s a problem if you worry too little. The worry-wort vs. the stoner is the image that comes to my mind.

Interestingly, one thing that happens if you worry too much is that your thinking shuts down. Especially the higher levels of thinking. Chances are good that you are not going to make a good decision if you’re stressed out worrying what might happen if you make the decision. My guess is that you will end up making your choice based on fear; often not a good thing.

And if you worry too little, chances are you’re not thinking enough. Your intellect is not being put to work. The stoner came to my mind because pot kind of paralyzes the brain and makes everything seem great even when it’s not.

Maybe that’s it: if you don’t worry at all, then it’s hard to make an accurate judgement about anything. Same goes if you worry too much.
When I’m deciding whether or not to go to the store, I need to be able to assess what the likely outcomes will be. If I’m deficient in worry, I won’t care that I’m running low on food in the fridge- “ahh heck, I’ll be fine with a couple strawberries and some peanut butter for the next few days…” I could end up in serious trouble (or at least hungry) if I don’t exercise my intellect enough to be rational.

Conversely, worrying too much can be equally detrimental. “What should I buy? I don’t want food to spoil and I’ll be going out of town in three days and the cheese will go bad and I’m not sure if I should have cheese anyway because it makes me kind of congested but I’ve got to have something to eat if I don’t go now the store will close and I don’t think I can afford to go to a restaurant…” and so on.

Our intellect is a critical part of our everyday lives. We have a lot of processing of input from what we hear, read, see, feel, and smell. It takes a sharp-edged sword to cut through the BS and pay attention to what really matters to us, right now.

That sharp-edged sword is worry.
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Digestion as Worry

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Speaking of cutting through the BS: that’s kind of what your body does after you eat. The job of your stomach and small intestine is to sort through the food you eat and decide what’s useful. The useful stuff comes in, and the junk stays out.

Well…hopefully. If all you eat is junk, then your digestion is going to have to work especially hard to find something useful. lt can be hard to pull something good out of a McDonald’s Happy Meal. In fact, eating like cr*p can increase the amount of worry in your system. The extra worry is needed to help digest your food.

That might be why eating disorders and anxiety often go hand in hand.

Conversely, eating well gives your digestion a break. There’s no anxiety in decision-making when the choices are clear and all the options are beneficial.
So don’t worry, worry away. Worry’s not too bad, as long as you don’t worry too much.

I think.

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