That was so Funny!

It happens a lot in life that we experience anxiety, fear and worry because we think that something very bad or dangerous has happened or is going to happen. However, when later the truth is revealed and we realize that our fear or anxiety was absolutely unreasonable because ,in fact, what has happened or was going to happen was the complete opposite of what we expected, we recall our moments of fear and anxiety and describe them saying "Oh my God! That was so funny". If we reflect on these words for a while, we find that there is nothing funny about that churning feeling of fear and anxiety that we had, and we definitely weren't having any fun at that time.  Yet, we call that experience funny and it does sound funny because by then we know the truth of the things we were worried about and we know how meaningless, unreasonable and useless our worries were, besides, we are just happy that things turned out to be much better than what we thought.  Thus, it's not the fears or worries that are funny but rather their absurdity in the light of the facts and truths we become aware of later. This can be applied to the short-term worries or fears one may experience sometimes, such as when your spouse or friends start to act weirdly; they seem to be hiding something from you or be plotting against you while later you find out that they have been planning to throw you a surprise birthday party. Nonetheless, why can't this same rule be applied to the long-term worries, anxieties and fears we all experience throughout our lives such as worrying that we may not find a good job or may lose the one we already have, worrying that we may not find our other half or may lose the one we have, worrying that we may not be able to raise our children in a proper way or maybe they will still screw up no matter what we do and the list continues, these worries are time and energy consuming and when they don't turn out to be true, which is usually the case, we don't refer to them, to these long term fears and worries as funny but we rather hold regrets towards them and we wish we hadn't wasted so much precious time on them. But, the truth is, we can also describe these worries as funny, because they share both main points with the short-term worries, first, they are unreasonable and second they are probably not true. Still, since the idea of describing the fears and anxieties that have been eating us up for years and years as "funny", doesn’t sound any cool, why don't we start doing this now? If you take one minutes to think of the fact that there are no facts or tangible proofs to base your fears and anxieties upon, you realize how ridiculous and unreasonable your fears are and when you also think of how things may end up being so different from what you expected, you realize how funny and ridiculous these fears are.

Yes, we are still human and therefore we still can't control having certain fears and worries, and these are actually useful ones because they help us to be more cautious and more aware of ourselves and our actions as well as our surroundings. However, it is the energy and time consuming worries which distract us and hold us back that we need to control, but the good news is that these can be controlled and prevented through the very simple act of rational thinking. Therefore, we can say that there are two ways to deal with our fears and worries that have no real basis, one is to let them occupy and consume us till the day comes when the truth is finally unveiled and we find out how wrong we were and then we say "If I only knew how things were going to be I wouldn't have/would have….", the other way is to think of and visualize how everything we worry about is probably going to turn up to be different from what we think and shake those fears and worries off and say: Oh my God! This is so funny!