Don't Worry. Be Lazy

Here’s a little blog I wrote.

You might wanna read it quote for quote.

Don’t Worry Be Lazy



Worrying takes a lot of energy, effort and not to mention, time.

Plus, it doesn’t result in anything positive. It just doesn’t. It’s a bad habit to have and takes way too much mental and emotional effort for the lazy man , or woman. The act of worrying neither solves problems or makes you feel better about them. All it does in drain you.








Choosing to worry is like volunteering to get bit by a mosquito, repeatedly, over and over again.

There’s absolutely no benefit to doing that and quite frankly it just makes you look like a dumb ass. Then you're just left feeling uncomfortable and in (itchy) pain. Not a good deal. Nope.

     


I don’t like to spend energy on doing, well just about. anything really. I’m lazy. And it makes absolutely no sense to spend what little energy I’m willing to invest in an activity in one that gives me neither pleasure or satisfaction.

All the time spent worrying could be spent watching movies, playing video games, or better yet spend time reassuring yourself and imagine yourself as a superhero, rather than a failure.

As Christina Winsey-Rudd once said:  Worrying about it takes precious time and attention away from your priorities and increases your feelings of dissatisfaction about life.




Worrying is a full time job.

Literally people describe it as getting “worked up” for a reason.

I don't want to work AT ALL, yet alone over time.

When worrying, your mind enters a state of struggle. You feel like you’re battling stormy waves  to keep your head a float, drowning in a pool of misery.

It can go on for hours on end, just like a desk job.  Your mind is awake and active, running through a series of thoughts that deplete your mental and emotional resources.

You’re exerting creative energy into something destructive, rather than constructive and this leads to fatigue. You are not resting or being lazy, in its true form, if you are a worry wart. You are being a hard worker in the mind.


You want to achieve a laid-back Lazy Mindset and just lean back and float on your back. Let the tides come and just ride the waves.


When you worry too much, you risk putting your mind in overdrive and burn out





While in a state of worry, your mind is active, alert, working.  And just like working at a day job, you tire out after doing it too long.

You’ll feel unmotivated to do things you actually enjoy, yet alone anything productive. You’ll just be too tired from all this worry to do ...anything really.

Be lazy. Don’t put your mind to work with worry.

“Our fatigue is often caused not by work, but by worry, frustration and resentment.” – Dale Carnegie


You can’t control everything. Don’t worry about it.

There are simply just things outside of your control. And that’s cool. Whatever man.

"There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will. " - Epictetus


Don’t work hard to try and solve problems that are either unsolvable or attempt to change things that can’t be changed. Ya gotta work with what ya got. Learn to accept.


Shut the aggressively alert mind off and turn on the passively smart mind.

When you worry, you’re living either in the past that’s gone or the future which doesn’t exist, instead of in the present. You rid yourself of the ability to live truly *in the moment*. To take a step back and breathe in the air, feeling it inflate your chest and cool the back of your throat then deflate as your exhale.




By worrying about things, you are taking energy that could be used today and keeping it in the past or preparing for the future apocalypse that'll never happen.

“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength”  - Corrie ten Boom



In regards to the past, a worry is just one moment you focus on and not the whole story.


Yes, there are sad things that happen and it’s completely natural to go through a healthy grieving process when we lose someone or something special or miss out on an opportunity or make the wrong decision. But to wallow in the pain, to bring it to mind as easily as you do your first name is not a healthy practice, nor is it a lazy one.


In regards to the future, a worry is just one possibility and is not set in stone.


*Even if* the odds are against you, even if you’re not likely to succeed, by worrying about all the bad possible outcomes, you loose sight of the potential victory

In Avengers Infinity War, Doctor Strange looks forward in the future and sees every single possible outcome, and, out of fourteen million six hundred and five possible scenarios, there’s only ONE. One single scenario in which they win.

The team doesn’t think about or sit around worrying about the other fourteen million six hundred and four scenarios in which they lose, no. They focus on that one chance to win and defeat Thanos, saving the whole universe. The odds are stacked against them, but they embrace the Lazy Mindset by saving their energy they could spend worrying on making that “one shot” work.





Worrying is simply the practice of imagination with a focus on the bad.

It is imagination gone wrong.

Growing up, my dad would always tell me this quote “iIf you live by and think about (imagine) your negative self reflection,your results will in fact be negative”

It stuck.

The more we worry and think about the negative possibilities and circumstances, the more likely they are to come.

Many professional athletes refer to the “inner game” and say that their performance in a race or competition is 90% mental and 10% physical, meaning if they worry about losing the race, fight or game, they’ve already lost it. On the flip side, if they think about winning and holding the medal or trophy, they’ll perform their absolute best.

Hitting their A game means shutting off the worrisome thoughts and just relaxing, man.



The great take away about that is a lazy person like me can become an amazing athlete or business person if I just think about it. Heck, even the fastest man in the world, Usain Bolt says that he's lazy. He's definitely on to something.


Okay, okay, so there may be a bit more involved than “just thinking about it” but our mind is like a machine and will output whatever you feed to it with the input. Feed in shit and it’ll produce shit. Feed it pizza and it’ll produce pizza.


You get the idea. Your brain can function on autopilot and drive you to your goals, with hardly any effort on your part, a lazy man’s dream.


That’s a whole other topic we can cover in depth  later ,but I just wanted to touch on it briefly for now. I suggest the book Pyschocybernetics by Maxwell Maltz if you’re interested in getting your brain “to work for you” until then.




Worrying literally solves nothing.

Either you can fix it or you can’t. But worrying certainly does NOT make things better.
You’re not going to be able to control every intricate detail in your life. There’s a bit of RNG...IRL

You just gotta embrace it as you navigate the procedural generated dungeon, even when things are far from favorable, yet alone even fair.

Sometimes you roll a Natural One. But you can’t sit there worrying about it.  You gotta play the game. You still have to fight the damn dragon, even if you slip on a rock and fall face down in the dirt while trying to raise your scimitar for an attack.

Shit happens. It’s no big deal



You can’t control everything that happens to you, but you can always control how you REACT to it.

React with cool, calm, laid back confidence like “Don’t worry. I got this, man. I’ll admit, this isn’t the best situation right now, but it’s all good dude. Whatever. Let’s just roll with it.”

Besides taking a toll on your mental and emotional well being, worrying can damage your physical health too.





You can literally lose sleep over things you worry about

Sleep is one of my favorite things to do, as a lazy procrastinator.  I enjoy my sleep.

And I don’t want to sacrifice a single minute of it “worrying” about shit that frankly doesn’t matter.

Lack of sleep not only makes me a cranky asshole, but can also lead to a plethora of physical problems like heart disease.




Furthermore, research has shown that when you worry, your body increases its cortisol levels (lack of sleep aside), which weakens your immune system.

That basically just means you become a target for germs and probably why people who worry about getting sick wind up getting sick the most often (or so it seems from anecdotal evidence. Most of the “germaphobes” I know are sick in bed a lot more than those who aren’t so fearful)

But if decreasing your body’s natural defense system isn’t enough, research has also found that there’s a strong correlation between cortisol and diabetes, osteoporosis, and heart disease and the lack of sleep just augments that risk even further.



You can quite literally “worry yourself to death”.

Furthermore, worrying induces high stress levels which can lead to serious mental illnesses like depression, bipolar disorder, and panic attacks.

It can make you crazy then kill you, basically.



Overall, Worrying makes your life a lot harder and more complex than it needs to be.



A Swedish Proverb says: ”Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow.”

Take it easy. Just say “Meh” Remember, Honey badger Don’t Care.

The less you care, the happier you’ll be.

Achieve the attitude of NGASF. Not Giving A Single Fuck.

Lay on back and embrace your inner sloth. The sloth doesn’t “worry” about how long it’ll take to climb back up  a tree or how hard ti’ll be if he falls, nah. He just sleeps ‘til he feels like doing it, then takes his slow ass time when he does.


You cannot control whether or not you have to take a piss, but you can control your decision in whether or not you are going to swim in it

You cannot control whether or not bad things happen to you. But you can control your decision in whether or not you are going to wallow in it.

Don’t jump in the toilet and swim in your own piss. Just relax, man.


- N8
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