This is quite different from the deliberate thinking you do when, say, you consider buying a car. There, you consciously compare possible purchases on the basis of reliability, fuel economy, durability, safety, appearance, price, and so on. You review facts to help you make a decision. Worry is more like the intrusive comments of an annoying coworker who keeps interrupting your work with negative remarks and innuendoes that you find disturbing and unhelpful.
The Comparison Game
If you’re a chronic worrier, you might think you’re one of a small group because you don’t see anyone who resembles your vision of yourself. Instead, you see people who seem so cool, calm, and collected that it appears they never worry, and this makes you feel inadequate by comparison.
My clients often tell me this. Seeing others who appear to be worry-free leads them to feel bad about themselves. I often feel the same way, if I’m at a party or a conference surrounded by people who seem super confident.
I usually figure I’m wrong about this, though, and if you have similar kinds of thoughts, you probably get fooled the same way I do. When you see people who appear to be cool and confident, you make this judgment from their outward physical appearance—the look on their face, their eye movements, how they hold their shoulders, the tone of their voice, their use of gestures, and so on. They look like they don’t have a care in the world. You see their outer appearance and compare it to how you feel inside.
This is how you get fooled. You compare what you experience through your nerve endings to what they display on the outside. It’s apples to alligators—no comparison.
What is different for some people—and this is a big difference—is how they respond to worry. That’s the ball game, how you respond to it, not whether or not worrisome thoughts occur to you.
It may surprise you to hear that what you worry about, the specific content of your worrisome thoughts, isn’t usually all that important. What’s most important is how you relate to your worrisome thoughts, whatever their content may be.
The Content of Worries
There are differences in the content of worries and the subjects that people worry about. Some people worry mostly about ordinary events, problems that occur to most people at some point in their lives. It’s common to worry about such topics in response to negative changes in life circumstances. During an economic downturn, for instance, lots of people experience thoughts about what they’d do if they lost their jobs or had trouble paying the rent or mortgage. They might have similar worries about losing their jobs or homes when there’s some other change, like a new boss or landlord, which increases the uncertainty in their business relationships.
Sometimes people respond to these worries by developing a plan of action, and then the worry often fades and can be considered to have served a useful purpose. It identified a potential problem and led you to prepare a solution.
Are You an Equal Opportunity Worrier?
Other times people experience worry not in response to negative developments, but quite the opposite—they worry when good things happen!
A parent might experience worries about losing a job, even when the economy is good and his work evaluations excellent, or when a child gets accepted at his first choice of (an expensive) college and congratulations would be in order. A person leaving for a dream vacation, who’s never forgotten to turn off the coffee pot and doesn’t usually ever give that a thought, may be plagued by worries about that coffee pot after having boarded the plane. “Good” events, maybe a job promotion or the arrival of a new child, can often be the trigger for persistent, unrealistic worries about other possible problems in life.
People worry in response to these positive events out of a superstitious thought that now would be a particularly “bad time” for the event to occur. Thoughts such as Wouldn’t it be ironic if the problem happened now, and Now I have so much more to lose are what often convert good developments into occasions for worry.
So people may experience an upsurge in worry in response to good events or bad. Worry usually has a very poor record for predicting what actually happens in the future because worry is based on ideas of what “would be bad” rather than what is likely. If worry was your stockbroker, you’d fire him!
Other times people get caught in a pattern of worrying about bad possibilities that seem far less likely, not only to most people but also to the worrier as well, at least most of the time. These are the kinds of worries that people sometimes identify as “irrational” or illogical worries. This might include worries about making some kind of mistake—leaving the stove on, accidentally pouring insecticide into the sugar bowl, driving over a pedestrian without noticing—that appears to be an extreme, unlikely, even bizarre possibility. However, the possible result of such an error seems so terrible to the worrier that he or she strives to “make sure” that it doesn’t happen, and this effort to be sure becomes a chronic worry activity.
To summarize, there are differences in the kinds of content people worry about. Some people experience occasional worry about fairly ordinary problems and don’t find this worry to be an ongoing problem, just an occasional nuisance they can dismiss. In fact, it often signals them to take some appropriate action and can therefore be considered to be helpful.
Others, however, have much more difficulty with worry. Sometimes people worry about ordinary possibilities but find themselves unable to dismiss those worries from their minds, and worry endlessly about fairly ordinary problems. Other times people worry about possibilities that seem extreme and unlikely, so much so that that it leads them to become chronically obsessed and preoccupied.
It’s not the content of the worries themselves that distinguishes ordinary from chronic worrying. The key is how we respond to worry, how we relate to it. This is what distinguishes a person with only modest, occasional worry from a person with chronic, persistently upsetting worry. It’s the relationship we establish with worry, how we try to live with it and manage it, that defines the kind of worry we have.
Let’s take a look.
Ordinary Worry: A Workable Relationship
Ordinary worry is sometimes unrealistic, but the unrealistic worries come and go. They don’t form a consistent pattern over time. A student may worry about a test sometimes but doesn’t anticipate flunking out every time there’s a quiz. An employee may worry as her annual review approaches but doesn’t anticipate getting fired every time she meets with her boss.
Ordinary worry is an occasional part of your life, one that doesn’t usually interfere too much with your activities. Sometimes it can help focus your attention on issues that need a solution and lead you to do some planning and problem solving. This kind of worry typically ends when you have identified a solution and taken action. That’s a good thing!
Other times it doesn’t particularly identify a problem and lead to a solution so much as it reflects a general state of anxiety. For instance, when you’re not feeling well because of several days of the flu, or you’re overtired, or you’re suffering a major disappointment in work or love, you may get more caught up in worries that you would ordinarily dismiss.
The ordinary worry relationship is similar to the kind of relationship you may have with a neighbor or coworker with whom you’re not closely tied. You see them but don’t interact very often, probably less than once a day. When you do, you say hello and are superficially nice, but you don’t have a strong emotional attachment to that person, good or bad. It doesn’t ruin your day if you have a disagreement with them. It doesn’t make your day if you have a nice encounter with them. They’re just not that important to you.
People who have this ordinary kind of relationship with worry might get into struggles with worries, but only occasionally. They know the worries pass, so they usually don’t usually spend a lot of time and energy responding to the worry. They just don’t care that much about the worrisome thoughts that occasionally come and go. And, perhaps the most important distinction, they don’t worry about ho
w much they worry.
The dysfunctional relationship of chronic worry, however, is something else entirely.
Chronic Worry: A Dysfunctional Relationship
Some people get more than their share of trouble with worry. Worry becomes your constant companion rather than an occasional nuisance and can seriously degrade the quality of your life.
If you experience chronic worry, you experience an excessive amount of worry over time. Who decides how much worry is excessive? The person doing the worrying! If you feel that you have too much worry in your life and want to have less, you can probably learn to shrink the role worry plays in your life.
The most important aspect of this chronic relationship with worry, however, is not the amount of worry but the way you respond to it. This most often takes the form of an argumentative, fighting kind of relationship in which you persistently struggle to control and change your worrisome thoughts, only to find that the more you resist and oppose them, the more persistent they become. The chronic relationship with worry is one in which you really care, all too much, about the worries, and try again and again to reform them.
What Does Chronic Worry Do to You?
Chronic worry involves spending time with thoughts of possible disappointments and catastrophes, even though you don’t want to. It involves a chaining of thoughts, the creation of an increasingly unlikely sequence of causes and effects which suggest that you will eventually suffer terrible catastrophes and lose your mind or your ability to function.
It’s frustrating. You’d like to relax and watch that TV show, or read a book in the park. Maybe you’re hoping to enjoy dinner with the family or lunch with a friend. But here come those worries again.
They seem uncontrollable! Just when you don’t want them, there they are.
What if I get laid off?
What if my daughter flunks out?
What if I get sick and can’t work?
What if a loved one dies?
What if the furnace conks out this winter?
What if I start screaming on the airplane?
What if I start shooting people like that crazy guy did?
What if the garage door opens by itself while I’m asleep?
What if I get cancer?
What if Joe can tell how nervous I feel?
What if I look nervous and the clerk thinks I’m a thief?
What if I pee in my pants during my presentation?
Chronic worry is likely to:
Be a major focus in your life for significant periods of time
Direct your focus toward unlikely catastrophes
Distract you from worthwhile tasks and responsibilities
Interfere with your relationships with loved ones and other key people
Generate obsessive thinking without leading to useful decisions
Continue until something else replaces it
Continue despite your recognition that you’re wasting your time with worry
Interfere with your participation in the present world
Leave you feeling helpless, hopeless, and out of control
People with chronic worry repeatedly think and rethink about the possibilities that concern them without coming up with new solutions or taking any effective action. There’s no natural end point with chronic worry. It just drones on, continuing as if it has a life of its own.
The Struggle Is Not Just in Your Head
Chronic worry is often accompanied by physical symptoms and behaviors. This includes feeling restless, where you may find it difficult to relax and enjoy a quiet moment or a movie. You might jiggle your leg, shift frequently in your chair, crack your knuckles, sigh repeatedly, check your phone, and so on. It includes irritability, in which otherwise unimportant sounds and interruptions fill you with a startled or angry reaction. It includes muscular tension—backaches, neck aches, headaches, and more. It includes fatigue—feeling tired without apparent explanation. It includes upset stomach. It often includes trouble with sleep—either difficulty falling asleep or waking up earlier than you want.
Chronic worry doesn’t alert you to problems that need solving. It interferes with problem solving. If you experience chronic worry, your attention is focused on unlikely hypothetical future disasters, rather than current situations that require a solution. Chronic worries don’t get solved because there really isn’t anything to solve. The worry just gets repeated until it’s replaced by something else.
Chronic worry can become the focus of your life and crowd out activities that you might otherwise enjoy. Physically, you’re in the present, in your usual environment. But mentally, your focus is on a dismal future of grim possibilities.
Finally, if you struggle with chronic worry, you try to stop worrying. These efforts to stop usually make things worse rather than better. It’s like stories from Greek mythology in which a hero confronts a hydra, a serpent or dragon with many heads. When the hero cuts off a few heads from the hydra, several more heads grow in the place of each one.
I hate it when that happens, don’t you?
Your Relationship with Worry
People who struggle with worry have several kinds of reactions. These reactions are a central part of the problem with chronic worry, and form your “relationship with worry.” The path to having less trouble with worry involves changing your relationship with worry rather than trying to change the worries themselves.
You might be wondering how you got into a relationship with worry in the first place. Let’s consider how that happens.
How Do You Get to This Point?
First, you dislike the content of the thoughts. And that’s natural; the content of worry is always negative, always about bad things that might happen in the future. Nobody has ever experienced this worry: “What if I win $50 million in Super Powerball and live a dream life on Tahiti?” Nobody worries about good stuff! So you become a person who’s bothered by repetitive thoughts of bad possibilities.
Second, you probably recognize—at least most of the time, when you’re not so caught up in the worry—that the thoughts are unrealistic. But this doesn’t help you lose the thoughts! You continue to have nagging, unwanted thoughts even though you recognize that they’re unrealistic.
This can be really frustrating for most worriers. I’ve had many conversations with clients in which we discuss the fact that the content of their worries are kind of unrealistic. There’s a technique that’s part of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) called cognitive restructuring, in which clients are helped to review their thoughts and find “the errors of thinking” so they can change their thoughts to something more realistic. It’s helpful with lots of problems but often fails to solve the problem of chronic worry. Here’s a common response to the cognitive restructuring: “I know!” Not “Whew—what a relief!” but “I know!” They might be a little annoyed too, on doing that work only to discover what they already knew.
They know. They don’t need me to help them discover that their worries are exaggerated and unlikely. That’s why they came to see me in the first place—they were bothered by repetitive thoughts of unlikely catastrophes! So just like them, you become a person who’s bothered by repetitive, unrealistic thoughts of bad possibilities and wants them to stop, and is increasingly frustrated by the fact that they don’t.
Third, it may seem to you that if you keep having negative, unrealistic thoughts you don’t want to have, this must mean there is something wrong with you. You have the thought that people who can’t control their thoughts are “out of control” and find this a scary comment about yourself. So you become a person who’s bothered by repetitive, unrealistic thoughts of bad possibilities who wants them to stop, is increasingly frustrated by the fact that they don’t, and fearful that this means you’re losing control of yourself.
Finally, you try hard not to have the thoughts. Maybe you do this because you hate and fear the content of the thoughts. Maybe you realize that the thoughts are unrealistic but think it’s a sign of mental
problems to have thoughts you can’t control. In either case, you try a variety of anti-worry techniques: distraction, avoidance, thought stopping, cognitive restructuring, arguing with your thoughts, reassurance seeking, drugs and alcohol, and more. And the result, all too often, is more worry. When you struggle against your worries, you generally get more worry rather than less.
And even though you dislike the worries, you might also have some unconscious beliefs about worry, beliefs which suggest that worry helps you somehow. These beliefs can also lead you to respond in ways which keep the worries alive. We’ll take a look at this in chapter 11.
So it’s through a process like this that you become a person who’s bothered by repetitive, unrealistic thoughts of bad possibilities and wants them to stop; who is increasingly frustrated by the fact that they don’t, fearing that this means you’re losing control of yourself; and who wants so desperately to get rid of the thoughts that you get caught up in a struggle to rid yourself of the thoughts—only to have more, rather than less, worry as a result.
If you’ve become involved with chronic worry, this is what the relationship is like, and this is the problem you need to address.
Relating to Thoughts
Worry is a way of thinking, and that’s a big part of the problem. Modern Western culture emphasizes the role of thought in life, seeing it as the end point of billions of years of evolution. If you’re like most people, you probably have lots of respect for thoughts. Especially your own thoughts! You probably give the content of your thoughts a lot of attention and credibility, even when you’re having thoughts that seem exaggerated and untrue.
The Worry Trick Page 4