Can Excessive Worry Make You Physically Ill?

Are you an excessive worrier? Perhaps you unconsciously think that if you concern yourself over every little detail you can prevent bad things from happening. But the fact is, worrying can affect the body in ways that may surprise you. When worrying becomes excessive, it can lead to feelings of high anxiety and even cause you to be physically ill.

Worrying is allowing one's mind to dwell on difficulty or troubles without effectively dealing with any of them.  Worrying often centers on problems that cannot currently be solved. Worrying may interfere with your appetite, relationships, sleep, and job performance. Worrying can lead to habits such as overeating, cigarette smoking, or using alcohol and drugs.

Stress can be beneficial.  If you have an upcoming job interview or test, it can help you rise to the challenge and prepare for it. But excessive worry leads to fear and one can become so irrational that you cannot focus or think clearly.  This leads to physical consequences of the fight-or-flight system:

• Suppression of the immune system
• Suppression of digestion
• Muscle tension
• Short-term memory loss

In 1998 study, they began following 30,000 people for 8 years.  They found that those that reported the perception that stress affects health was associated with an increased likelihood of reporting psychological distress.  Those that reported a lot of stress and perceived that stress affects health a lot increased the risk of death by 43%.

Even more intriguing, those who reported high levels of stress but who did not believe their stress was harmful were not more likely to die. They actually had the lowest risk of death of anyone in the study, even lower than those with little stress.

So, it is not the stress that has been killing us but how we interpret that stress.

Just trying to change your belief system from the surface level of the mind does not work well.  

One of the most effective ways to change one’s relationship to their thoughts and beliefs is through the Ishayas’ Ascension. In the process of the Ascen­sion techniques, a specific and highly individualized thought is created by the teacher working with the student as a “vehicle” to “ride” inward to the Source of all thought.

Using these techniques to retrain the mind, it becomes unneces­sary to try to undo the previous beliefs and judgm­ents; the power of this wholly beneficial inward process is sufficient to remove all previous false percep­tions and under­standings and replace them with the direct experience of the transcen­dental beauty and perfection of the Source within.  

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