The Worry Trick

by David A Carbonell

  Probably not! Instead, you find yourself repeating the same tired old points, having pretty much the same debate each time. The same thoughts keep getting repeated, again and again, without any progress, new ideas, or problem solving. No wonder it gets so annoying! If it were a television program, you’d turn it off or change the channel—but this TV set doesn’t have any controls!

  If you find yourself arguing with yourself, there’s one thing you can count on—you’re not going to win this argument.

  How does the debate end? There’s no real conclusion. It ends when your attention is drawn to something else. Given how tedious this ongoing repetition of worries can become, it’s no wonder you lose interest!

  But it’ll probably be back, same as before, the next time your mind is idle.

  Ritualistic Responses

  You might take this a step further and engage in private, subtle behaviors you hope will end the debate. So a person who worries about choking and gagging may continually drink small amounts of water, either hoping to keep his throat “open” this way or trying to prove that there isn’t any problem. A person who worries about leaving the stove or coffee pot on might linger in the kitchen before going to work, playing with the on-off switch, or even unplug it. A person who fears dying in a plane crash may touch the skin of the airplane while boarding, “just for luck.”

  These responses are a lot like superstitions.

  Here are some common ones.

  Singing or humming a song to yourself

  Praying with the expectation of a clear, reassuring answer from God (preferably in writing!)

  Thinking about other people’s problems and telling yourself to be grateful

  Snapping your fingers

  Putting your worries in a “worry jar” or something similar

  Relying on luck—your lucky shirt, lucky breakfast, and so on

  Counting something—the number of letters in a word; the number of words in a sentence; the number of people in line; the total of the numbers in a license plate

  People generally recognize that such responses won’t really alter anything in the external world, but they continue to use them, perhaps with the thought, It can’t hurt! If you use them occasionally, with a sense of humor and without ascribing any real power to them, they probably won’t hurt your cause. However, if you find yourself in a pattern wherein you feel more nervous if you refrain from your ritual, and feel as though you “must” follow this habit, then it probably does hurt.

  Internet Research (Googling)

  The Internet has opened up new frontiers for people who struggle with worry. Before there was an Internet, you had to visit a library or a bookstore to research your worries. Now, with the click of a mouse, anyone with fingers can enter a couple of search terms and see what comes back.

  The irony is that people do this hoping to find out that they have nothing to worry about. So if you’re a person who worries that your cough might be a sign of cancer, or that your garage door opener might be set off by someone’s microwave, you might go to the web hoping to find a page that says it’s not so. This might work—there’s a chance that you’ll find some web pages with useful information for you.

  However, if you want to eliminate all doubt, if you’re hoping to find conclusive evidence that proves you don’t have cancer or your garage door can’t ever open by accident, you’re likely to be disappointed. As much as you might like to get absolute proof that this problem isn’t occurring now, and can’t ever occur in the future, that evidence is not available, because we can’t prove that something will never happen. When you struggle mightily to feel sure, it’s like you’re hoping to find a web page with your photo and name on it, and a message saying that you’re guaranteed to be okay. That page is not available! Even if it were, that wouldn’t be the end of it. If you ever did find such a page, you’d probably find yourself wondering, “How can they be so sure?”

  Consult Experts

  This comes up most frequently about health concerns, but people with other types of worries—about finances, real estate, taxes, child rearing, career planning, and so on—also get caught up in this.

  If you consult an expert about a worry—maybe a cardiologist about your heart, or an accountant about your taxes—a consultation with one expert should generally be enough. In some cases, with really complex issues, maybe a second opinion will seem necessary. But if you find that you get caught in a pattern of seeing a variety of professionals about your concern, and remain too doubtful to actually use any of the recommendations—if you come away from the consultations with more questions or hypothetical reasons to distrust the answers you received—then you’re probably caught up in a cycle of seeking more and more professional reassurance, and feeling less and less sure as a result.

  Consult “Non-Experts”—Friends, Family, Coworkers, and Neighbors

  In addition to, or often in place of, consulting experts, worriers frequently ask loved ones, relatives, friends, and coworkers for reassurance. They don’t ask these people for reassurance because they have some special expertise or knowledge of the topic. They ask these people because it’s convenient and free!

  Because of this, they put even less confidence in the reassurance they receive from these “civilians” than they do in the expert opinions they received. The discussions they have with family or friends often devolve into something like the argument they have in their heads, with the worrier trying to find flaws in the reassurance being offered. They wonder if the other person is just saying what they want to hear, or humoring them to get them to change the topic. If you engage in this pattern, you probably don’t ask just once. You might ask repeatedly, asking the question in different ways to see if you get the same answer. Reassurance has a very short shelf life and lasts only a little while before you start seeking a fresh supply.

  This kind of reassurance seeking can be a burden on a marriage, friendship, or other relationship. The party being asked for reassurance often becomes increasingly concerned that he or she doesn’t really know what’s helpful to do—to continue to answer the questions or “call the question” and encourage the asker to find his own answers.

  Avoidance

  Another way that people take their worries seriously is with the use of avoidance. It’s very common for people to avoid what they fear, even when they recognize that their fears are exaggerated or unrealistic, and even when the avoidance comes with a significant disadvantage.

  You might avoid conversations with your boss, even though such contacts might help your career and facilitate your work. You might avoid group activities where you fear being observed and judged, like open house at your children’s school or a neighborhood block party, even though this limits your social life; you might avoid answering the phone, or making calls; you might avoid going for your annual physical; you might avoid a task because you feel compelled to do it perfectly and worry you’ll have trouble finishing it. You might avoid certain locations or activities for fear of having a panic attack there.

  If you fear public speaking, you’re likely to avoid requests to address a group, be it at work, your child’s school, or a civic organization. If you fear plane crashes, even if you are familiar with the safety statistics showing that flying is the safest form of travel, you’re likely to avoid flying or endure it with great discomfort and the use of alcohol or tranquilizers. Highway driving, dogs, elevators, being alone, sitting in the middle of a pew—if you worry about it, there’s a good chance you avoid it.

  This is a real problem when you yourself recognize that your worry is based on an “irrational” fear. “I know it doesn’t make any sense,” people say. “That’s what really bothers me about these thoughts!”

  Your recognition that your worries are exaggerated or unrealistic doesn’t help you if you continue to avoid what you fear anyway. If you avoid the object of your worries, you will become more afraid of them. What you do counts for much more than what you think.

  Cogniti
ve Restructuring Taken Too Far

  If you’ve ever worked with a cognitive behavioral therapist, or read any self-help books based on cognitive behavioral therapy, you’ve probably tried cognitive restructuring. When you do cognitive restructuring, you identify the mistaken thoughts that fuel your upset and replace them with thoughts that are more realistic. Then, hopefully, you are less bothered by these new thoughts.

  Proponents of cognitive restructuring have identified a number of these “errors of thinking” in order to help people identify and change them. These include such errors as:

  Overgeneralizing—believing that one bad moment means the whole day is going to be terrible

  Mind reading—thinking you can tell what others are thinking, especially about you

  Maximizing bad probabilities and Minimizing your ability to adapt to difficulties

  Fortune telling—thinking you know what the future holds

  Black and white thinking—thinking of extremes without recognizing the middle ground

  Cognitive restructuring can be very helpful with a variety of problems. For instance, a speaker who gets nervous on seeing people in the audience who yawn or look at their watches probably has some thoughts to the effect that they do this because he’s boring, and that’s why he feels nervous. However, if the speaker can review these thoughts and recognize that there are many reasons why audience members might do such things—they didn’t sleep well, they have to leave early for another meeting, and so on—then he might become more accepting of their yawns and watch checking without necessarily taking such behaviors as negative comments on the quality of his presentation.

  However, it’s likely to cause you more trouble if you use it in an effort to abolish your bad thoughts, and become “sure” that your worries will not come true. This is where you might find yourself crossing over into the second stance. A successful public speaker might still experience the same thoughts as a nervous one when she observes yawns during her presentation and just not pay them any mind, treating them like background noise while she goes on with her talk. However, if a speaker tries to eliminate these thoughts from her mind, on the grounds that the thoughts are mistaken and should not present themselves, then she’s likely to end up talking more to her worries than to her audience. In this case, cognitive restructuring may work just like arguing with your worry and bring you back to the original problem.

  If you want to use cognitive restructuring, be guided by the results you get. If you find that these methods help you recognize that your worries are exaggerated and unrealistic, and you become less bothered by them, then you’re getting good results and can expect to continue to benefit from using them. However, if you find that your efforts to identify and remove the “errors” in your thinking lead you to argue more with your thoughts in an effort to remove all uncertainty, then you’re probably trying too hard to purify your thoughts. It might help to do the cognitive restructuring with a lighter, more permissive touch. (It might also help to use some of the acceptance-based methods I’ll introduce in chapters 8 to 10 in place of cognitive restructuring.)

  Now let’s look at the other stance in this dual relationship with worry.

  Stance 2: Stop Thinking That!

  People take this stance when they become worried about how much worrying they’re doing. In Stance 1, they were very concerned about the potential problems they were thinking of, but now it seems clear to them that the thoughts are just a bunch of worthless worry, of noisy nonsense. Unfortunately, this doesn’t lead them to feel any better. Instead, they worry about doing so much worrying! They start having thoughts like, These thoughts don’t make any sense, why can’t I stop them? What if I get a heart attack or stroke from all this worry? or What if these thoughts prevent me from doing my job and I get fired? or Why do I worry so much? I must be going crazy!

  When you experience these kinds of thoughts, you’re on the other side of the worry street. You’re not trying to disprove the thoughts. In fact, you might be quite clear that the thoughts are “irrational” and not to be believed. That’s good. Unfortunately, though, you’re now in a different kind of struggle—the struggle to “stop worrying.”

  With Stance 1, you were afraid that the worries were accurate predictions of trouble, and you spent a lot of time thinking about them, researching the problem, discussing it with loved ones, trying to persuade yourself that you were safe. Now, you’re much less concerned with the apparent content of the thoughts. Now you’re bothered by how much worrying you do, and afraid of how the worry itself might affect you. You have thoughts that worry might prevent you from ever enjoying your life, from being a good parent or spouse, that it might make you less productive at work, that it might become obvious to others and damage your reputation, even that it might literally kill you. So now you try to get the worry out of your head. You try distraction, thought stopping, avoiding the subject, anything to “stop thinking about it.”

  While there is some overlap, most of the ways that people try to control Stance 2 worry are different from the methods they tried with Stance 1. Here are some of the key ways people try to “stop worrying.”

  Distracting Yourself

  A very common response is to try to distract yourself, so you don’t think about the topics that worry you. Distraction sometimes works to take your mind off a problem, especially when the distraction is an outside event like an unexpected phone call, a household emergency, or your dog barking. However, you can’t count on this kind of distraction—it’s unpredictable and unreliable. So many people try to deliberately distract themselves from their unpleasant thoughts and worries. They might hum a favorite tune, look over some text messages they’ve already read, or phone a friend just to chat. This quickly becomes a source of trouble, for two reasons.

  The first is that when you try to deliberately distract yourself, you’re aware of what you don’t want to think of. You tell yourself to “think about this, not that.” Once you’ve done this, it’s too late—you’re already thinking of what you hoped to avoid!

  The second reason is that the use of distraction strengthens the belief that thoughts can be dangerous. On those occasions when it works, you are literally training your mind to expect relief when the thought leaves—and therefore to feel upset when the thought remains, or returns. The more effort you make to get those thoughts out of your head, the more your mind will justify the effort by viewing the thoughts as dangerous. The truth is, thoughts simply aren’t dangerous. Actions can be dangerous; thoughts can only be unpleasant. If thoughts were dangerous, the obituary pages would be banned. There’s no such thing as a “killer joke.” The more you use distraction, the more you strengthen this impression that thoughts can be hazardous.

  A variation on distraction is when people try really hard to “think positive.” It’s probably a good thing to enjoy positive thoughts. But when you struggle to make your thoughts positive, all too often you’re going to end up with the opposite result.

  Thought Stopping

  When people find their ability to distract themselves erodes over time, they often escalate their effort to thought stopping. Here, by sheer power of will, people sternly instruct themselves to “Stop thinking about that.” They may even snap a rubber band on their wrist and say “Stop!” I’m sorry to say that this technique has actually made its way into the self-help literature, and even today you may find books advocating this technique. It ranks high among the worst advice I have ever seen in print!

  Thought stopping works like banning books—it just promotes interest in the forbidden topic! It leads, inevitably, to the return of the thoughts you were trying to stop. All you’ll have to show for it will be some red welts on your wrist.

  Should you use thought stopping? Don’t even think about thought stopping!

  Use of Substances

  It’s quite common for people to try to control their worry with the use of substances that they ingest. Here the aim is not to dispute or contradict the content of
the worries. It’s simply to stop the worry thoughts from arising.

  Drugs and Alcohol

  People will frequently turn to the use of street drugs and alcohol in an effort to relax and quiet their mind. It works, until it doesn’t, and then you have a much bigger problem than you had before.

  On a daily basis, you might find that while your drug of choice helped you relax the night before, it leaves you feeling less comfortable and more anxious the next day, a hangover effect. This is part of a terrible chain of dependency in which you can become more and more reliant on the drug or on alcohol and develop the additional problem of substance abuse as a result. There isn’t any problem that can’t be made worse by the use of drugs and alcohol as a solution.

  Tobacco use follows the same pattern.

  Prescription Medications

  I’m usually skeptical about the use of prescription medications for reducing worry. I think it often causes more trouble than good. It strengthens the idea that you need protection from your thoughts, and often produces unwelcome side effects.

  However, I have seen the occasional client who benefited from medication when nothing else helped much. If you are going to try these medications to tame really persistent worries, be guided by the results you get. If, on balance, your life seems to work better with the medication than without, that sounds like a reasonably good use of medication.

  Comfort Foods

  If only the comfort lasted without adding weight, and strengthening the urge to eat! Of course it doesn’t, and in this regard the reliance on emotional eating resembles the reliance on drugs and alcohol.