What, Me Worry?

Last week I gave a presentation on emotional health to a group of women with Parkinson’s disease.

It was a lovely experience. The women were friendly, interested in the subject and open to new ideas. We discussed how all emotions can be helpful or unhelpful to us in life, and healthy methods of dealing with difficult emotional states.

Towards the end, we took a detour from my original plan for the afternoon, and held an impromptu brainstorming session on ways to deal with feeling obsessive worry over children or grandchildren who are driving and can’t answer the phone to confirm they are ok. (An issue that most of the women the women there experienced.)

I felt that the ideas we came up with were both interesting and potentially helpful so I decided to share them with you:

1. Do everything you can to make sure they have a safe trip. Then, once they leave, remind yourself that you did what you could, and the rest is out of your control.

2. Say Tehillim.

3. Garden, water plants or go outside barefoot to connect to the earth.

4. Bake bread, knead the dough with your hands. Work out emotions while doing something quintessentially nurturing.

5. Bake cakes. Make treats for when the person you’re worrying about gets home.

6. Take care of something else that’s bothering you, or try and help another person. Put the worry energy to good use.

7. Eat a small slice of cake or one cookie. Let the sweet sooth you.

Why is that so interesting? Because worry, or overthinking, is the ’emotion’ that signifies that the Earth energy is out of balance, and the way these women came up with for coping with their worry were almost all traditional techniques for strengthening their internal Earth.

Connecting to the ground and the natural world, baking (the Earth method of cooking), bread (a food rich in Earth energy), nurturing – the responsibility of the Earth Qi, and sweet, the taste associated with Earth.

And I’m almost positive none of these women studied Chinese medicine 🙂

What do you think about these methods for dealing with worry? Do you have any of your own to suggest?

If so, feel free to leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you!

Hi! I’m Havva Mahler, a practitioner of Chinese medicine: acupuncture, Chinese herbs, tuina, reflexology, sotai and massage and a motivation and habit change consultant. You can normally find me at my clinic in Be’er Sheva or Sderot, or reading something about health and/or motivation. You can find out more about me here. Get in touch with me here. And sign up to get the next blog post delivered straight to your inbox here.