Want to Worry Less? Make a List
A family vacation leads to a discovery about worry and how to deal with it.
by Gary Hirsch
It’s three o’clock of December 20th, 2015, I’m in in Cusco, Peru and I am unable to sleep. My heart is pounding in triple time. My hands and feet are drenched in a cold sweat. I am hyperventilating, and my stomach is doing somersaults.
Why am I so freaked out? Because, ironically, of my need to NOT be worried.
You see, for weeks my family has been getting ready for this Peru trip, talking, preparing, packing, and yes, worrying, about what will happen once the four of us arrive.
We have signed up for a five-day hike through the Salkantay mountains that will eventually bring us up to a maximum of 16,000 feet (don’t people just keel over and die at that altitude?).
AS we get ready for the the trip, every expedition documentary I’ve ever seen keeps replaying through my head-the ones with stories of people freezing to death on a mountain, drifting off to sleep, to never wake up again.
Getting Prepared
Our visit to the travel clinic before we left didn’t help matters. Our doctor, who was arguably a clone of the high-pitched exorcist in the original Poltergeist movie said some less than reassuring things like:
“Use hand sanitizer after touching anything. Never touch an animal because if they have rabies you will die. You might want to get yellow fever and malaria treatments… totally up to you.”
And my favorite:
“Some people can get a stroke when over-exerting themselves at high altitudes… Have fun!”
So 500 dollars, three different insect repellants, two types of antibiotics, and one altitude sickness reduction prescription later, I was armed to the teeth with treatments and absolutely terrified to start my journey with my 16-year-old daughter (who of course will be abducted and harvested for black market organs. This is how an over anxious hypochondriac brain works ).
My daughter and I were traveling alone for the first leg of the trip, and my anxiety wasn’t doing anything to help hers. Out of desperation, we tried something- we created a Worry List- writing down everything that we imagined could possibly go wrong (see above).
The idea was simple: write down everything we were worried about, and then at the end of our journey check to see which of the worries came true.
The Night From Hell
That first day in Peru I had the voice of the Poltergeist travel doctor in my head reminding me how bad altitude sickness can be. So in an attempt to stop my worrying, I took a Diamox, an anti altitude sickness pill, at dinner.
After I swallowed the pill, my son informed me that I was only supposed to take half of one. Shit!
The side-effect of this double dose was something akin to a full-fledged panic attack. I lay awake the entire night imagining all of the horrific things that we were about to experience. The drug that I was taking to stop my worry had cranked up my worry to an 11!
What Actually Happened
After that first night we hiked. A lot. We didn’t freeze to death, because when it was cold, we put on coats. Sure, I was prepared to do this because I had the foresight to bring one. But I didn’t have to agonize about hypothermia for hours leading up to the trip, because our brains served us in the moment and we figured things out.
Nobody died on our vacation. Nobody got food poisoning, or an altitude-related stroke, or had their eyes pop out. We didn’t need a well-constructed plan. We figured it out in the moment. We left Peru with a bag full of unused artifacts of our worry—full oxygen canisters and enough assorted over- and under-the-counter drugs that could have saved the Incas from any disease at the height of their reign.
After the trip, Emma and I went over our Worry List. True to form, the only things we were worried about that actually happened were:
#1 Sleeping poorly. This only happened during our first night in Cusco, thanks to me accidentally taking a double dose Diamox.
#11 Panic from sensory overload. My daughter says yes, she experienced some panic, but only during our unplanned delay in Vegas on the way home when I took her to see a casino for the first time.
#14 Luggage being lost. This did happen but it was from Vegas to home, so we got it delivered the next day, and it couldn’t have been less of a big deal.
Nothing else on the list came to fruition! I am sort of amazed by this. We had spent endless hours talking and worrying about all of the possibilities for our own destruction and we returned with a night of jet lag and some delayed luggage.
Make a worry list of your own
1) Write down everything you are worried about at this moment in time.
2) Put your list away in a drawer for one month
3) After one month take it out to see what on your list has actually come to pass.
