That leads to another part of the problem. If you’re like most people, you probably tend to think you should be in control of your thoughts. You may have the idea that you should only have the thoughts you find desirable and useful and not have the thoughts that you don’t want. And yet…your mind has a mind of its own. It’s perfectly commonplace to have thoughts that defy your sense of control, unwanted thoughts that resist your efforts to evict them. If you’ve ever had a song “stuck in your head,” you know what I mean.
If you’re not so sure that this applies to you, take a minute now and don’t think about the first pet you ever had. Put the book down, sit back, and try this for a minute.
How did you do? If you’re like most people, you’re probably having more recollections of that pet than you have for years.
Review Your Typical Worries
Let’s take a closer look at some of your worrisome thoughts. This can help you better understand the worry process and find your way out of a chronic, conflictual relationship with worry.
Is that okay with you—to look at your worrisome thoughts and write some of them down?
You might not want to do this. Maybe you have the thought that if you write them down they will get more permanently fixed in your mind, or even be more likely to come true! Maybe you’d just like to forget them as soon as possible and enjoy the rest of your day. Maybe you think that if you write them down, this will lead you to worry even more than you already do.
Maybe you’re thinking, “Dave, I bought this book to get rid of my thoughts, not to write them down! I just want to be rid of them.”
But maybe this is what you usually do—try to push them away. And yet here you are, reading a book about worry. What you’ve tried in the past probably hasn’t been all that helpful. If it had, you’d probably be doing something more enjoyable than reading (and hopefully, writing) about worry!
If your past efforts to solve this problem haven’t done the job, it’s probably not due to the reason you imagine—that there’s something wrong with you. It’s more likely to be because you got tricked into using methods that weren’t so helpful. You’ll probably do better with a different approach. So, if you’re at all willing, experiment now with writing down a few of your typical worries so you can do a little work with them.
Put Your Worries in a Lineup
This is what you would do if you had been the victim of a crime, like a mugging or a robbery. You’d report it to the police, and they would ask you to sit down with the police artist and describe the mugger so the artist could draw him. This would help the police apprehend the perpetrator. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but it would be worth doing. Sketching out some of your worries to do this review might be your first step toward changing your relationship with worry for the better. Is it worth a try?
What are some worries that bothered you recently? Write down a few of them on your favorite electronic device, or do it the old-fashioned way with pen and paper.
Take a look at the worries you wrote down, and apply this two-part test.
Is there a problem that exists now in the external world around you?
If there is, can you do something to change it now?
If you answered “yes” and “yes” to these questions, then perhaps you should put this book aside and go do something to change the problem now. If there’s a significant problem now in the physical world you inhabit, and you can do something to change it now, go ahead and do that!
On the other hand, if you answered “no” and “no” (or “yes” to the first question and “no” to the second), then you’re dealing with chronic worry. You’re nervous, and that worrisome thought is just a symptom of being nervous.
Maybe your answer was neither “yes” nor “no” but included thoughts like these:
It’s not happening right now, but what if it starts soon?
If I don’t stay on guard and watch out, bad things might happen.
I hope it doesn’t happen, but how can I be sure?
It probably won’t happen, but it would be so awful if it did…
Isn’t it possible that this might happen? I sure hope it doesn’t!
If I don’t worry about it, then it probably will happen.
Thoughts like these are particularly tricky. You’re likely to have such thoughts when you try to persuade yourself that some dreaded event just isn’t possible, that it won’t and can’t happen. It’s very difficult to “prove a negative,” to prove that something “won’t happen” in the future; trying to is a losing game, a response that brings you more worry rather than less.
Cross-Examine Your Worries
This is like that moment in a courtroom drama, when a witness gives a long-winded answer to a pointed question in an attempt to avoid answering it with “yes” or “no,” and the judge finally orders the witness to just answer the question. You’re not on the witness stand, but it will be helpful to answer these questions with “yes” or “no.”
Is there a problem that exists now in the external world around you?
If there is, can you do something to change it now?
Your brain will refer you to various “possibilities.” You’ll have thoughts that tell you something bad could possibly happen sometime in the future. And that’s true. It’s always true, whether you have thoughts about it or not. Anything is possible, bad things sometimes do happen, and nobody knows the future. But this is of little help in taking care of business now. It’s more helpful to notice those thoughts and still restrict yourself to choosing “yes” or “no.” And if the answer isn’t “yes,” then it’s “no.”
Do your answers include these kinds of thoughts?
I’ll never get on the right track.
I won’t be able to solve this because I’ll always feel depressed.
I don’t know what the best solution is, so I’ll never solve this problem.
I can’t make decisions, let alone good decisions. I’m doomed to suffer.
These thoughts misdirect and mislead you by suggesting a problem in your internal world. The problem they suggest is usually about your being so defective—so depressed, so insecure, so uncertain, so confused, so stupid, so whatever—that you won’t be able to solve your problems and live a good life.
This is a “trickier” kind of thought—a trickier form of bait—and people very often are drawn into thinking and rethinking it, obsessing about it, feeling bad about it, and, in all kinds of ways, “stuck in their heads” about it. So if you struggle with these kinds of thoughts, consider this.
How consistent are these thoughts over time? For instance, if my dog develops a limp, or a warning light comes on in my car and stays on, my thoughts are usually consistent about these problems. I don’t have some days where I think the limp or the light doesn’t matter. I’m aware that both represent a problem I need to solve, and I feel concern. That concern remains with me until the problem gets fixed or goes away.
On the other hand, sometimes I have a discouraging thought that I’ll never be able to finish writing this book, and I feel down and depressed about that. This thought will typically last a little while and then get replaced by something very different. For whatever reason—I get a compliment on something I wrote, or I go see a funny movie, or have a nice chat with a friend—I start thinking and feeling differently about this thought of being a terrible writer. My writing ability is the same as before, and so is my draft. Yet I feel, and think, differently about it. In other words, my thoughts about my writing ability are variable and inconsistent over time.
My thoughts about my dog’s limp, or the warning light in my car, remain consistent over time until I fix the problem.
If you often experience the kind of thoughts above, thoughts that voice a general sense of despair, lack of ability, or hopelessness, ask yourself these questions:
Is this thought consistent over time? Has it been the same the last seven days, and seven weeks? Or does it change—do I sometimes feel more optimistic,
sometimes realize that this thought is exaggerated? Does it go up and down like emotions do?
“Just the Facts, Ma’am”
Emotions change, frequently, and often without obvious reason. Facts don’t change in the absence of new evidence. If your thought varies in this way, if it changes with your mood, then it doesn’t really indicate a present problem in the external world. It indicates some unhappiness or upset within yourself, in your internal world, that varies over time—a problem in how you view and relate to your internal experiences of thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations. It might be an issue that follows you periodically, like your shadow when the light is right, but it doesn’t represent a problem “out there” in the external world any more than your shadow represents an assailant. It’s not a problem that you can, or must, solve right now. It’s a problem that plays out in your mind, without any corresponding reality in the external world. And it’s part of the burden of being human.
If you had a problem in the external world you had to solve right now, or suffer bad consequences, you’d know it, and you’d be doing something about it. If your dripping sink were stopped up and about to overflow, you’d be draining, not worrying. If your dog were whining and looking at the door, you’d be walking, not worrying.
Odds are, if you’re experiencing chronic worry right now, you don’t have a real problem in the external world. In fact, if the sink overflowed right now, or the dog started frantically scratching at the door, you’d probably quickly shift gears and take care of the problem. Worrying would be gone, for the moment.
Feelings vs. Thoughts
Sometimes people mistake feelings for thoughts. For instance, you might hear someone say, “I feel like I’ll never get a good job” or “I feel like I’m in danger.” But these aren’t feelings. They’re thoughts. Thoughts are ideas. Feelings are emotions, and they’re quite different from thoughts. Thoughts can be true or false, or somewhere in between. Feelings are emotional responses that don’t involve true or false. So when we look at these two examples, I think they’re more accurately put like this:
I think I’ll never get a good job, and I feel sad about that.
I think I’m in danger, and I feel fear about that.
The thoughts—about never getting a good job or about being in danger—may be true or false. The emotions are reactions to the content of the thoughts, regardless of how true or false that content is. We can experience an emotional response to a false thought just as powerfully as we can to a true thought. Our emotions are reactions to the content of our thoughts, regardless of the reality (or lack thereof) behind the thoughts.
This realization, that we can have strong emotional responses to thoughts that are false as well as those that are true, is the basis for doing cognitive restructuring, which aims at making our thoughts more realistic. It can often be helpful. However, it’s common for people who are stuck in chronic worry to find cognitive restructuring, and other efforts to edit their thoughts into more realistic versions, somewhat less helpful than they hoped. We’ll take a look at that problem in the next chapter.
Thinking It Over
Worry is common, a universal part of the human experience, but because it’s not generally visible to others, you’re likely to think that you’re one of a very few, maybe the only chronic worrier in the world. Not so!
What you worry about isn’t nearly as important as how you relate to the worry, how you try to get it under your control. The path out of chronic worry will take you into an examination of how you deal with worry. It’s there that you are likely to find that you’ve been using methods to control worry that are akin to cutting heads off the hydra—it just leads to more heads that bite and breathe fire! Recovery from chronic worry will involve replacing those methods with something more effective and thereby changing your relationship with worry.
We’ll take a more detailed look at your responses to worry in the next chapter.
CHAPTER 3
Your Dual Relationship with Worry
When I was training to become a psychologist, I had my first experience working with a client who struggled with worry. This man worried a lot about losing his job. He obsessed over every tiny error or shortcoming he displayed at work and overlooked all his good accomplishments on the job. My supervisor wanted me to learn to use cognitive restructuring with this client, which, you may recall, is a method by which people can find and correct the “errors” in their thinking that cause distress.
The supervisor expected me to become good with these techniques, so I worked hard at it. I helped my client become aware of how he was “maximizing” all the negatives in his mind and “minimizing” all the positives so that his job seemed less secure than it probably was. And one day, we had a session in which the man seemed to show some good progress. “I see what you mean,” he told me. “I’ve been overlooking all the good things I do at work, and overemphasizing the things that can use some improvement. My boss seems okay with the idea that I need more experience and training, and he seems happy with most of the results I get even though I’m new. So I guess I’ve really been exaggerating the risk of getting fired.”
I smiled, happy for his progress, and looking forward to describing it to my supervisor. Then he continued, once again getting upset, “So you see, that’s what really worries me. Look at all the unnecessary worry I’ve been doing! That can’t be good for my health! What if it gives me a stroke, all this worrying about nothing?”
My heart sank as I realized we hadn’t made as much progress as I thought! But I should really thank this man, if he happens to be reading this book, for giving me such a clear example of the two stances of the worry relationship. On the one hand, he took the thought about losing his job very seriously and worried intensely about it. On the other, when he realized that this worry was unrealistic, he worried about how much worrying he was doing! And, when I saw him the following week, he had thought of some more reasons to believe that he might get fired and was back to worrying about that. He was treating these thoughts the way you might respond to a piece of cactus stuck in your hand—too painful to leave alone and too painful to remove!
This man—and most people who struggle with chronic worry—didn’t have a problem that he worried about. He had the problem of worrying.
The Two-Sided Relationship with Worry
If you struggle with chronic worry, odds are that you associate the worries with danger, in two ways.
Sometimes, you take the content of the worry thought as an important prediction of danger. It might seem to you that thoughts such as What if I lose my job? or What if I have cancer? are valid warnings about trouble with your employment or your health, a sign of trouble in your external world. In response, you either try to protect against that hypothetical danger or you try to prove that there isn’t any danger, so that you can feel better and stop worrying.
Both of those responses tend to fail.
Other times, you recognize that these thoughts are “irrational” or unlikely, and you don’t take the content of the worry so seriously. Instead, you wonder why you keep having such grim and unlikely thoughts. You might take the presence of the thought as a sign that something is going terribly wrong in your mind, in your internal world. You may think that you shouldn’t have such thoughts at all, that the thoughts themselves are a sign of you losing control of yourself. You might fear that such thoughts might even make you ill. In response, you try in various ways to suppress or rid yourself of the thought.
This response also tends to fail.
Your relationship with worry may take two different forms. Let’s take a closer look at how each one works.
Stance 1: Treat the Worry as an Important Warning
This is the first stance. You take the content of your worry seriously, and:
Look for ways to disprove the threats, and reassure yourself that the feared catastrophes won’t come to pass; and/or you
Think of ways you could protect against the feared e
vents, and either use them or “keep them in mind” as a future defense.
People will frequently take both steps above, even though, if you could prove an event wasn’t going to happen, you wouldn’t need to defend against it. So a person having thoughts of getting sick and missing work might try to soothe himself this way: “I won’t get sick, I had a flu shot, and anyway I have lots of sick time left over.”
Let’s look at some of the common ways people use this stance.
Arguing with the Worry
You might get into a debate with your own thoughts, the same way you might if you were arguing with another person. It’s a game of “point-counterpoint” and often sounds like this.
Me:What if I lose my job and we all end up on the street?
Also Me:That’s not going to happen—they need me at the firm!
Me:What if it does?
No matter what evidence or ideas you bring to the argument to reassure yourself, the other side of the debate always has a strategy for topping your argument, as we see here.
Also Me:It’s really unlikely I’m going to lose my job, but if I do, I’ll just find another one. We’d get by.
Me:But what if you don’t?
This “what if” argument is a central part of chronic worry, and we’ll take a good look at how it works, and what to do about it, in chapter 6.
These debates you have with yourself are really circular. When you’re debating these worries, do you bring in any new evidence since you last had the debate?
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