What Are You Holding That You Need to Release?

A reflection on control, worry, expectations, and the difference between caring about something and carrying it.

Try something. Without changing anything, notice your hands. Then your jaw. Then your shoulders.

Most of us are gripping something most of the time. Not only physically. We hold the outcome of a grown child's decisions. A parent's health. A colleague's opinion. The belief that if we let go of any of it for one afternoon, the whole structure comes down.

Some of what you carry is genuinely yours. A good deal of it is not, and never was. This article is about telling the two apart, and about setting the second pile down without pretending you have stopped caring.

Why we hold on

Holding on feels like love. It also feels like responsibility, and competence, and being a good daughter, mother, employee, friend.

The Family Caregiver Alliance, which works with people caring for relatives, lists beliefs that keep caregivers from looking after themselves. Two will sound familiar to almost any woman, caregiver or not: "If I don't do it, no one will," and the conviction that you are personally responsible for another adult's health.

These beliefs are not foolish. They usually began as something true: you were the reliable one, and things did go better when you handled them. The trouble is that a role that started as a strength becomes a weight when it has no off switch.

Then there is the pressure from outside. Researchers Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill analyzed data from more than 41,000 American, Canadian, and British college students collected between 1989 and 2016, published in Psychological Bulletin. Perfectionism rose across those years. The largest increase was in the kind where people feel that others demand perfection of them.

So if you sense that expectations have multiplied, you are not imagining it. But a standard being widespread does not make it yours to meet.

What worry is actually doing

Worry presents itself as preparation. Sometimes it is. Mostly it is rehearsal for events that never arrive.

Psychologists Lucas LaFreniere and Michelle Newman at Penn State asked 29 people with generalized anxiety disorder to write down their specific worries for ten days, then tracked what happened over the following weeks. The study, published in Behavior Therapy, was titled "Exposing worry's deceit." As reported at the time, about 91 percent of the worries did not come true.

That is a small study of people with a diagnosed anxiety condition, so it is not a universal law. But try the same test on your own history. Think of what kept you up a year ago. How much of it happened? And of what did happen, how much did the worrying help?

LaFreniere's own summary, given in an interview with Inverse, is hard to improve on: "Worry sucks the joy out of the 'here and now' to prevent an unrealistic 'then and there.'"

Releasing worry is not the same as not caring. It is declining to pay in advance for things that mostly never get delivered.

The inventory: three lists

This takes fifteen minutes and a piece of paper. Do it once properly, then repeat it whenever the weight builds.

Step 1. Write down everything you are holding right now. Tasks, fears, other people's problems, grudges, standards, "shoulds." Do not edit. Aim for at least fifteen items.

Step 2. Sort each item into one of three columns.

• Mine to do: I can act on this directly

  • Mine to influence: I can say or offer something, but the result belongs to someone else

  • Not mine: I have no real say, or it was never my job

• Mine to do: My own health appointment

  • Mine to influence: Whether my sister takes my advice

  • Not mine: A coworker's mood

• Mine to do: The conversation I've been avoiding

  • Mine to influence: How my teenager handles a friendship

  • Not mine: What my in-laws think of my choices

• Mine to do: What I agree to this month

  • Mine to influence: Whether my partner follows through on what we agreed

  • Not mine: The past; the weather; the diagnosis itself

Step 3. Treat each column differently.

• Mine to do: pick the next physical step and when you will take it.

• Mine to influence: decide what you will say or offer, once, clearly. Then the outcome goes to the third column.

• Not mine: this is the release pile.

The NHS, in its self-help guidance on worry, draws the same line between problems you can do something about and hypothetical worries beyond your control. For the first kind, it suggests asking what you would do, how, and when. For the second, it suggests acknowledging the worry and practicing letting it go.

Most people find the first column is shorter than they expected, and the third is very long.

Ways to set something down

Knowing an item is not yours does not make it evaporate. Release tends to need a gesture, something that marks the handover. Choose whichever fits your beliefs and temperament.

• Write it and put it away. Write the worry on paper, fold it, and put it in a jar, a box, or a drawer. Some people tear it up instead. The point is that it now lives somewhere other than your head.

• Hand it over. If you pray, pray it. Many traditions have words for exactly this: giving a burden to God, or to something larger than yourself. If you do not pray, you can say it aloud to the open air or to a trusted friend: "I am not in charge of this."

• Say the sentence. "I have done what is mine to do. The rest is not mine." Repeat as needed. It will be needed.

• Use the body. Make two fists, hold them tight for a slow count of five, and open your hands as you breathe out. It is simple, and it helps the idea land somewhere physical.

• Give worry an appointment. The NHS describes "worry time": set aside ten or fifteen minutes a day to write worries down and look for solutions. When a worry shows up outside that window, tell yourself you will deal with it then, and return to what you were doing.

You will pick some things back up. Everyone does. Releasing is less like dropping a stone in a lake and more like putting down a bag you keep absentmindedly lifting. You put it down again.

Handing things back to people

Some of what you hold belongs to a specific person who is perfectly capable of holding it. Giving it back is not unkind. Here are words for it.

• To an adult child: "I trust you to work this out. I'm here if you want to talk it through."

• To a partner: "I've been keeping track of this for both of us, and I'm going to stop. It's yours from here."

• To a sibling, about a parent's care: "I can't carry all of this. Here are the two things I can keep doing. Which of the others can you take?"

• To a colleague: "That one sits with your team. Let me know what you decide."

• About someone's opinion of you: no script. You simply do not answer it.

Expect some wobble. When you stop holding something, it may get done differently, later, or less well than you would have done it. That is the cost of release, and it is usually smaller than the cost of carrying everything.

One caution. Letting go of control is about ordinary burdens. It never means accepting mistreatment or staying quiet about being harmed. If you are in a relationship where you feel unsafe, that is not something to release. It is something to get help with.

Expectations: whose rule is this?

For each "should" on your list, ask three questions.

1. Who says? Name the actual source. A parent, a boss, a culture, a comparison, a version of you from fifteen years ago.

2. Do I agree? Not "would it be nice," but do you, today, hold this value?

3. What would good enough look like? Define it concretely, in one line.

A surprising number of standards dissolve at the first question. "The house should always be ready for guests." Who says? Possibly no one living.

When you cannot put it down

Sometimes the grip will not loosen, however many lists you write. If worry is constant, if it disrupts your sleep or your ability to function, or if you feel a sense of dread most days, please talk with a doctor or a licensed mental health professional. Persistent worry is something professionals can help with, and you do not need to be in crisis to ask.

If you ever feel hopeless or have thoughts of harming yourself, in the US you can call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, at any hour.

Try this today

1. Do the inventory. Write the full list, sort it into three columns, and circle one item in "Not mine."

2. Choose one release gesture for the circled item and do it before you go to bed.

3. Hand one thing back using a script above, changed into your own words.

You were never meant to hold all of it. Opening your hands is not giving up. It is making room for your own life.

Sources

• Family Caregiver Alliance: Taking Care of YOU: Self-Care for Family Caregivers

• Curran & Hill, "Perfectionism Is Increasing Over Time: A Meta-Analysis of Birth Cohort Differences From 1989 to 2016," Psychological Bulletin (American Psychological Association)

• Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies: Why Worry? (LaFreniere & Newman)

• Inverse: report on LaFreniere & Newman, "Exposing worry's deceit" (Behavior Therapy)

• NHS Every Mind Matters: Tackling your worries