I believe that worry and anxiety are the root causes of many health issues . . . High Blood Pressure, Heart failure, and even cancer. My wife believes that “resentment” is the leading cause of cancer.

So . . . WHY do we fret so much?

What issues do we solve by worrying?

Worry and anxiety often lead to us deciding to QUIT and crawl into a hole (resulting in NOTHING getting done) . . . OR we get angry and WORK WORK WORK thinking that if we work HARDER and/or LONGER, we will “fix” the problem (Resulting in LOTS of STUFF getting done but not necessarily solving the problem at hand).

Why?

I learned some terms in my college economics class:

Insanity

Definition

“Doing the same things and expecting different results”

We drive our selves to Insanity by allowing worry and anxiety to capture us in this trap of working harder/longer . . . Like a mouse on a wheel . . . running, running, running . . . and going nowhere.

Where we are “failing” in this effort lies in the:

point of diminishing returns

Definition (from Businessdictionary.com)

“Input quantity at which a marginal product is maximized and beyond which it declines.”

There’s that point at which eustress converts to DISTRESS (and worry and anxiety tips to the unhealthy side)

eustress

Definition

 the Point of Diminishing returns is that point at which eustress shifts to distress.

This is when our productivity begins to “peter out” . . .

Peter principle 

Definition

Observation that in an hierarchy people tend to rise to “their level of incompetence.” Thus, as people are promoted, they become progressively less-effective because good performance in one job does not guaranty similar performance in another. Named after the Canadian researcher Dr. Laurence J. Peter (1910-90) who popularized this observation in his 1969 book ‘The Peter Principle.