The Worry Trick

by David A Carbonell

  How could this happen? How can we go so far wrong as to make our situation worse by trying to make it better?

  It’s not hard, really, nor is it uncommon. Worry is a special kind of counterintuitive problem, one in which your gut instincts of how to help yourself are likely to make it worse rather than better. When you try to solve a counterintuitive problem with intuitive solutions, things usually get worse.

  When my son, at two years old, would say “no” to everything, that was a counterintuitive problem for me. I would sometimes forget that he was learning to be independent, learning to use a powerful word, and that this was exciting and fun for him. Sometimes I would approach him as if I just needed to share my adult knowledge with him and help him see the error of his ways. So we would argue! The more we argued, the more he delighted in saying “no.” His favorite phrase was “because not.” (Now he’s twenty, and we still do this occasionally, for old times’ sake!)

  If I try to solve a counterintuitive problem with an intuitive solution, I’m probably going to fail. If I want to solve a counterintuitive problem, I need a solution that is counterintuitive. I need to fight fire with fire.

  This isn’t as bizarre as it might sound. There are many everyday examples of this. I learned as a young child, when my puppy got off her leash, that if I chased her she would run away. She had four legs to my two, so the results were always poor. But if I ran away from her, she would chase me, and then I could grab her collar when she caught me. Counterintuitive.

  When you’re wading into the ocean, and a large wave comes toward you? If you turn and run for shore, the wave will probably break on your shoulders and knock you down. You’ll swallow saltwater and sand. But if you dive into the base of the wave, it will pass right over you as if it were nothing. Counterintuitive.

  Driving on an icy road, and starting to skid toward a phone pole? If you try to steer away from that pole, you’ll probably be talking to your insurance agent soon. However, if you steer into the skid and aim for the pole (who was the brave guy that first figured this out?), you’ll straighten out and be okay. Counterintuitive.

  There are lots of counterintuitive problems. When the military trains soldiers to respond to an ambush, they train them to run toward the enemy, not away. Why? Well, the other side is expecting you to run away, and that’s where they plan to shoot next (I hope they’re not reading this!). If you’re stuck in quicksand? Okay, you get the idea. Counterintuitive.

  The difficulty with solving counterintuitive problems is that when you’re trying so hard to solve a problem, and see that you’re failing, your natural instinct is to “try harder,” and that makes things worse. It can almost feel like an insult when the world doesn’t respond to your solution. This often leads people to get frustrated and upset with themselves while they continue to make things worse.

  Attitudes about Thoughts

  The previous examples all involve counterintuitive problems in the world around us. It’s even trickier when we have counterintuitive challenges in our internal world, in our own minds. We have some unexamined assumptions about our thoughts that influence our reactions in unhelpful ways.

  Our brains are not like computers that simply generate output. A computer generates an answer to a problem—maybe it calculates something for you, or maybe it formats material you’ve written into a letter format—and it has no opinion about what it produced. You “ask” a computer a question, and that’s all you get, the answer.

  Not so with our brains. We have thoughts, including worries. We also have attitudes, beliefs, and thoughts about our thoughts. One belief about thoughts that we briefly examined in chapter 3 is the belief that thoughts can be dangerous. Let’s take another look at that.

  Are Thoughts Dangerous? Want to try an experiment? Take a minute now to think about this book catching fire in your hands. Think about it in great detail. Picture the flames curling the pages, the white pages turning to gray ash, the smell of burnt paper, the smoke spiraling toward the ceiling. Any minute the smoke alarm should start screeching a warning. And yet here you are, still holding the unburned book in your hands, reading these words.

  It seems clear that thoughts aren’t dangerous. Only actions can be dangerous.

  Why Can’t You Just Control Your Thoughts?

  One important attitude that many people hold about their thoughts is that they “ought” to be in control of them. They think they should be able to have the thoughts they want and not have the thoughts they don’t want. Do you think about it this way?

  People who hold this belief are often offended and irritated by the way their thoughts seem to defy them. Again and again, they review the evidence about the content of their worries and see that the feared events are not at all likely to occur. They tell themselves that there’s “nothing to worry about.” Then they go on about their business. Sooner or later, they find themselves having the same worrisome thoughts. Maybe they’ve even been watching for them! Then they get mad at themselves all over again, wondering “why” they keep having the same dumb thoughts, reprimanding themselves the same way you might reprimand a teenager who has once again left dirty dishes on the table instead of clearing them away.

  The truth is, we don’t have pinpoint control of our thoughts. And there’s always something to worry about, because we can worry about any possibility we can imagine. We don’t need realistic danger to worry.

  Try This Experiment. Think of an elephant for about twenty seconds, and then stop thinking of it. No more elephant. Take one minute and keep it out of mind. No long trunk, no loud trumpeting sound, no tusks, no eating peanuts, no running away from mice.

  How did you do? Odds are you just spent some time with thoughts of elephants. For most people, the results will be as obvious as an elephant stomping through the jungle. And if it seems to you as though you had no thoughts of elephants during that minute, then ask yourself this question: how do you know? The only way you can try to avoid all thoughts of elephants is to think of what it is to think about elephants, and watch to see if you do that while trying not to do it! You get elephants on the brain from every direction!

  Anytime you deliberately try to stop thinking of something, you’re likely to think more about it. Psychological research on the subject of thought suppression1 clearly shows that the main effect of thought suppression is a resurgence of the thoughts you’re trying to forget.

  It’s the same with our emotions. We don’t control our thoughts or our emotions—or our physical sensations, for that matter. The more we try, the more we get thoughts and feelings we don’t want.

  Your lack of direct control over thoughts and emotions may come to your attention quite clearly when some well-meaning friend tries to help you by saying “Don’t think about it” or “Calm down!” It’s probably painfully obvious to you what’s wrong with that suggestion. It might even make you angry that this person “doesn’t get it.” And yet, you may be continually trying to use this strategy without noticing that you’re using the same unhelpful method that doesn’t work, and then getting disappointed and frustrated when it fails again. If it doesn’t work when a friend urges you to “calm down,” it’s probably not going to work when you urge it upon yourself!

  What Do We Really Control?

  People often assume that control is measured by what they think and feel. They think that if they’re having odd or illogical thoughts, or strongly unpleasant and exaggerated emotions, that this means they’re “out of control.” They don’t like that idea, so they struggle to control their thoughts and feelings, and this is like trying to grab a greased pig on ice. The more you try to control thoughts and feelings, the more out of control they seem.

  Control is about what we do, not what we think and feel. That’s why our laws describe behavior that’s expected and restricted. Society expects people to control what they do—how they drive, how they treat others, how they wait their turn in line, and so on. Our laws and social norms aren’t based on what people think and f
eel because nobody really controls those things. Control is about what you do.

  And yet, it’s part of the human condition to assume that we can, or should be able to, control our thoughts and emotions. Certainly there are times when we want to. Our intuitive instinct with respect to worry is to “stop thinking that.” And it backfires, because worry is a counterintuitive problem. You’ll be better off with a counterintuitive solution for this counterintuitive problem.

  Thinking: It’s Just What the Brain Does

  Your brain is an organ and, like other organs—stomach, kidneys, liver—it has tasks to accomplish. Your stomach digests food. Your kidneys remove waste products from the bloodstream and produce urine. And your brain, among other things, identifies problems and generates solutions. Actually, most of the work our brains do (maintaining balance, monitoring the work of other organs and glands, watching for emergencies, and so on) takes place without our awareness. The brain activity that gets our attention—the thinking, calculating, verbal work—is actually a very small portion of the brain’s activity, taking place in the cerebral cortex.

  An ancient proverb tells us, “The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master.” The brain is a useful tool. We can direct our attention and thoughts to topics in order to design bridges, land a rocket on an asteroid, and calculate our taxes. Left without enough to do, however, the brain is likely to cause mischief as it generates thoughts on its own.

  If you go too long without eating, your stomach will start to do digestive things without any food to digest, and you will feel abdominal discomfort, hear your stomach make embarrassing noises, and so on. It’s trying to fulfill its purpose even when it doesn’t have the necessary ingredients. It’s the same with your brain. If your brain doesn’t have enough problems to solve, it will make some up and try to solve them.

  That’s chronic worry—your brain making up problems and trying to solve them, and you taking those thoughts as seriously as you take the tax calculations.

  You’ve probably noticed that you experience more worry when you’re not so busy, and that when you’re really busy with activities and problems to solve you don’t seem to worry nearly as much. Maybe you’ve tried to use “keeping busy” as a way to cut back on your worrying. This is why. Worry is a leisure time activity. It expands, or contracts, to fill the time that’s available, because it’s simply not as important as most of our other activities. It takes what’s left over. Your brain is literally acting like a bored puppy, chewing on the carpet because it doesn’t have enough things to do.

  We can train that puppy well enough that it will no longer chew on furniture, especially if we offer him other things to chew on. However, we can’t train the brain not to think of problems (because that’s a main purpose of the brain), any more than we could train our stomach not to rumble when we’re hungry.

  Instead, we need to change the way we relate to our worry. We do better by learning how to accept and work with, rather than oppose, that fact that we are experiencing worry thoughts. We will also do better when we can recognize the worry thoughts as signs of nervousness and anxiety, the same as an eye twitch or sweaty palms, rather than some important message about the future.

  Rules of Life

  I regularly teach workshops for professional therapists about the treatment of anxiety disorders, and I usually like to introduce the workshop with an expanded and embellished version of the polygraph metaphor, commonly used in acceptance and commitment therapy.2 Before I say hello, or introduce myself, before I say anything at all, I tell them this story.

  So a man walks into my office, someone I know as a man of his word, who says what he means and does what he says. This man walks into my office and he has a gun, and he says, “Now Dave, what I’d like for you to do is take all the furniture here in your office, and move it out into the waiting room…or else I’m gonna shoot you!”

  “So,” (I ask the audience, and now I’ll ask you, the reader), “as students of human behavior, what is the outcome you predict here?”

  And someone in the audience will say, “You’re gonna move the furniture!”

  That’s right, I move the furniture—I can do that—I move the furniture and I live.

  A week goes by and the man returns—same man, same gun—and he says “Now Dave, the thing I’d like for you to do, is sing the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ The first verse will be sufficient. Sing the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ or else I’m gonna shoot you.”

  So, what’s the outcome you predict here?

  I sing the song—I can do that—and I live.

  Another week goes by, and once again the man appears, and this time he has a colleague with him. The colleague rolls a cart, full of electronic equipment, into my office. The man says, “Now Dave, my associate here, he’s got lie-detecting equipment. The best electronics on the planet for detecting human emotion, virtually infallible. I’m gonna ask my associate to hook you up to the lie-detecting equipment. Then I just want you to relax. Or else I’m gonna shoot you.”

  What’s the outcome you predict here?

  Nothing good! Nothing good will come out of this one!

  That allows me to get to the point of the story, namely, that this is the circumstance of some 40 million Americans with a chronic anxiety disorder. They wake up day after day, worried about feeling anxious, trying so hard not to feel anxious, and getting more anxious as a result of all that effort, digging a deeper hole with all their efforts to resist the anxiety. To help people overcome an anxiety disorder, therapists have to help people discover this aspect of the problem and learn to handle it differently.

  And if you struggle with chronic worry, the same applies to your efforts to overcome that problem.

  What makes it so apparent that I can move the furniture to save my life, and I can sing a song to save my life, but I can’t relax to save my life?

  From the perspective of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), the answer lies with two important rules of thumb that govern our lives.3 ACT is a form of therapy that, more or less, belongs within the school of cognitive behavioral therapy, but has some very different ideas from traditional CBT, particularly with respect to our efforts to control thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations.

  First, there’s a rule of thumb which governs our interactions with the external world around us, the physical environment that we live in. In the external world, the rule of thumb is something like this: the harder you try, and the more you struggle, the more likely you are to get what you want. Nothing is guaranteed, but you can improve your odds at getting something you want by making every effort possible. That’s the rule of thumb that governs our interactions with the external world.

  But that’s not the only rule we live by. There’s a second rule of thumb, one that pertains to our internal world of thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations. In this world, the rule is quite different. Here the rule is something like this: the more you oppose your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations, the more you will have of them.

  The rule that governs your internal world of thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations is the opposite of the rule that governs the external world. God help you if you didn’t get the memo about the second rule, and you try to manage your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations the same way you handle the world around you. It will lead you to use solutions that are bound to fail, and bring you grief and frustration every time.

  If you’re someone who struggles with chronic worry, only to find that the peace and calm you seek continues to elude you, then you’re probably someone who will benefit by making more use of the second rule.

  Our gut instinct, however, is usually to treat everything the same—oppose what we don’t want, wherever it is. Let’s now consider a workaround for this instinct: the Rule of Opposites.

  The Rule of Opposites

  This is an important rule of thumb which applies to a lot of anxiety symptoms. When we apply it to chronic worry, it means this:


  My gut instinct of how to respond to unwanted, chronic worry is pretty much dead wrong. I am usually better off doing the opposite of my gut instinct.

  How can this possibly be? Let’s recall the worry trick from chapter 1: You experience doubt, and treat it like danger.

  The worry trick is a powerful influence. It will be very helpful for you to understand what gives it such power.

  How Can We Protect Against Danger?

  What’s good for danger? Three things: fight, flight, and freeze. If it looks weaker than me, I’ll fight it. If it looks stronger than me, but slower, I’ll run away from it. And if it looks stronger and faster than me, I’ll freeze and hope it doesn’t see so well. That’s all we have for danger.

  Fight/flight/freeze methods all involve opposing the worry—struggling to stop worrying; getting mad at yourself because you worry; fighting to distract yourself or to stop thinking of it; repeatedly seeking reassurance, from friends and the Internet, in an effort to stop worrying; thought stopping; reliance on drugs and alcohol; superstitious rituals; and all other manner of “fighting to calm down.”

  Doubt, however, isn’t danger. It’s just discomfort. And what’s good for discomfort? A million variations on “chill out and let it pass.” Claire Weekes, an Australian physician whose books about anxiety are still useful and popular fifty years later, recommended that people “float” through their anxiety.4 People were often unclear about what she meant by float. I think she meant, literally, the opposite of swim. Make no effort. Simply allow the environment to support you, and go on with your business.

  For danger, we fight, or run, or freeze. For discomfort, we chill out and give it time to pass. What’s good for danger is the opposite of what’s good for discomfort. So if you get tricked into treating worry as a danger, this naturally makes it worse.