The Worry Trick

by David A Carbonell

  Keep track of your counts for a couple of weeks to help you really get into this habit of passively observing “what if.”

  How does this strategy of becoming more consciously aware of these “what if” thoughts compare to what you usually do?

  I’m thinking that it’s probably the opposite of what you usually do. That might seem odd and uncomfortable to you. However, it’s actually a good sign that your efforts to change your relationship with chronic worry are on the right track.

  Remember the Rule of Opposites: “My gut instinct of how to respond to chronic worry is typically dead wrong, and I am better off doing the opposite of my gut instinct.” (If you don’t remember that, you can review it in chapter 5.)

  If you keep responding in the same way, you can expect the same results. We’re looking for different results here, and this will take different, even opposite, actions.

  We can see the Rule of Opposites in action when we consider that many people try very hard to distract themselves from their worrisome thoughts. If that really worked, you wouldn’t be reading this book. You would have already dismissed and banished your unwanted worries.

  It just doesn’t work that way. It works the opposite. The more you try to eject thoughts from your mind, the more they keep coming back in, like unwanted drunks at a party.

  That doesn’t mean the effort to distract yourself is worthless, however. It can point to some useful information. Consider this question: When you are motivated to distract yourself from a problem, what does it tell you about that problem?

  Think about that for a minute. What kind of problems do we usually want to distract ourselves from?

  Imagine that you were standing in line at a bank when a robbery broke out, and you heard gunshots. How likely would you be to take out your checkbook and balance it, in order to distract yourself from the unpleasant gunplay?

  Probably not very likely! You’d be too busy diving to the floor, or looking for some cover or an exit. You’d be trying to protect yourself, not distract yourself.

  When are we motivated to distract ourselves from unpleasant and worrisome thoughts? When we’re not facing a clear and present danger. When the chips are not down. When the babbling of our cerebral cortex, rather than the self-defense of our amygdala, is center stage.

  So when you notice that you feel the urge to distract yourself, this can be a powerful reminder of what the game is. The chips are not down, you are not in danger, and that’s why you are motivated to distract. If you actually were under the gun, you wouldn’t even think of distraction!

  The “Why?” Question

  The “what if?” question is the pickpocket that steals your peace of mind, and it does it so sneakily that you don’t notice what’s actually happening.

  Most pickpockets have an accomplice, someone who draws the attention of potential victims away from the pickpocket by clumsily bumping into people, or even shouting out “Watch out for pickpockets!” on a crowded train. When people get bumped, or hear a warning about pickpockets, they tend to check their wallets, which tells the pickpocket where they are. Pickpockets understand the Rule of Opposites.

  The “why?” question is the pickpocket’s accomplice.

  When you’re having the thought that you should be controlling your brain and find that once again, your brain is producing all kinds of unreasonable and unwanted worrisome thoughts, you’re likely to respond with “why” questions, such as “Why do I keep worrying so much?”

  People usually experience the “why” question as a kind of rhetorical question. They don’t really expect an answer. It’s more of a protest, a finger-pointing question, an angry demand that some higher authority correct this injustice. It’s not a question so much as a complaint. Unfortunately, it’s a complaint expressed in the absence of a complaint department. This question leads people to feel weaker and more pessimistic about their future, because it suggests that the solution to the problem requires someone else, maybe even God, to do something. Meanwhile, they have to wait and worry.

  When you’re caught up in worry, getting into the “why” question amounts to taking the bait. The “why” question is usually some form of resistance to the worry, rather than an actual inquiry. And resistance to worry inevitably fans the flames of worry, rather than extinguishing them. This resistance is the equivalent of slamming on the brakes when my car starts skidding on an icy road. That’s the last thing I need! Resistance is intuitive. It’s also counterproductive. What we really need is a response that’s counterintuitive and productive.

  People often think that the “why” question is the key issue. Why do I have these thoughts? Why me? Why here? Why now?

  Better Questions

  The truth is, “why?” is the least useful question there is about worry. This question is just another way of being anxious. While you probably can’t simply dismiss it and make it go away, you don’t have to get involved in taking it seriously. It will be more helpful to steer away from this “why” question, to catch yourself in the act of asking it, to notice it and move on to the more useful questions of “what and how.”

  What am I experiencing now? Well, I’m experiencing worrisome thoughts.

  How can I respond to it? I’ll cover this with the steps in chapter 9.

  Thinking It Over

  This chapter directed your attention to two types of worrisome thoughts—What if…? and Why?—that consistently mislead and misdirect you into a life of chronic worry, and suggested ways of disarming them. Becoming more aware of these thoughts as they occur to you is a big step in learning how to disregard the “bait” that so often lures people into making their worry more persistent.

  Chapter 7

  Thinking About Thoughts

  It’s a tricky thing to think about worry, because worry is thought. Things get complicated when we think about our thoughts, let alone try to change those thoughts. This chapter will take a look at the difficulties that can arise when people set out to change their thoughts, and ways around some of these difficulties.

  Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Anxiety

  The introduction of cognitive behavioral therapy in the mid-1980s was a major breakthrough for people who suffered with chronic anxiety. Prior to this, there were very few good options for people who suffered with chronic anxiety. Now, for the first time, a method was introduced that offered practical, concrete ways to reduce chronic anxiety.

  CBT was a radical departure from previous schools of therapy, and combined a cognitive (thinking) approach with a behavioral approach. On the cognitive side, it said that mistaken and exaggerated thoughts were heavily involved in producing and maintaining anxiety, and it offered a way to help clients identify and change those thoughts. The primary tool it offered was cognitive restructuring, which involved the identification of various “errors of thinking” and the subsequent review and correction of these thoughts.

  Identifying Worrisome Thoughts

  So, for instance, a person who struggled with lots of worry about money and job security would be directed to identify his key worrisome thoughts on the subject. These thoughts might include statements like the following:

  I’m likely to get fired.

  If I lose this job, I’m ruined.

  I’m too old to get another job.

  I’ll never be able to support myself and my family again.

  My wife will leave me, and I’ll have to live in my car.

  Since emotions are believed to be shaped by our thoughts and beliefs about the topic, his emotions would be shaped by these thoughts regardless of how true or false they were. If this man’s thoughts about finances and employment were exaggerated or unrealistic in some way, he would have an emotional response in his internal world which was out of proportion to his actual circumstances in the external world.

  A CBT therapist would ask him to evaluate his thoughts on the topic he worried about to see how realistic or unrealistic they were, and to look for some characteristic errors in his
thoughts, as described in chapter 3. If this man found errors in his typical thinking about employment and finances, he would work to correct his thoughts, replacing the unrealistic thoughts with more realistic versions. If these new, and more accurate, thoughts about his situation were less negative and foreboding than his previous thoughts, this would change his emotional response for the better.

  Changing Behavior

  On the behavioral side, CBT would suggest changes in one’s behavior that would ultimately reduce anxiety. This would include practicing with the objects, locations, and activities that people fear. So snake phobics would make progress by spending time with a snake, rather than avoiding it, and the same would apply to people who feared heights, shopping malls, driving, flying, and so on. Relaxation and meditative methods might also be used to lower overall anxiety levels, but exposure to what one fears is considered to be the most effective behavioral method by far.

  Traditional CBT methods have been of enormous help to millions who had been suffering from chronic anxiety and worry. However, there are a few difficulties when we attempt to apply these methods to chronic worry.

  For one, typical worry thoughts usually express uncertainty about a possibility, and most often begin with “what if” as in What if I lose my job? This type of worry isn’t a prediction that can be evaluated and shown to be true or false. It’s an invitation, as I point out in chapter 6, to “pretend” that something bad will happen and to worry about it. Since most hypothetical events, however likely or unlikely, are possible rather than impossible, this makes it more difficult to apply the usual tools of cognitive restructuring.

  No matter how much evidence you may muster to show that you’re unlikely to lose your job, chronic worry can always trump that argument by responding, “But what if you do?” This usually leads people to try to become “sure” that the feared event won’t happen. When they can’t do that, it serves to prolong and maintain the worry.

  Secondly, the invitation to use cognitive restructuring to correct “errors of thinking” can mislead people into believing or hoping that we can tame, maybe even perfect our thoughts. This contains the implicit suggestion that we can do such a good job of correcting our thoughts as to eliminate dysfunctional worry.

  This is a bridge too far, in my view, a hope that is more misleading than helpful. In my professional work as a psychologist, I have seen far too many people who struggled to correct their thoughts, who tried so hard to stop having unrealistic worries and thoughts which daily filled them with discomfort and upset, only to feel like failures because they failed to control their thoughts.

  Your Brain Is Not a Computer

  People often mistakenly think of their brain as a computer. Let’s suppose you’re running a program which doesn’t work exactly the way you want. Maybe it has a line of code which converts all your measurements into the metric system, displaying your output in kilograms and meters when you want it to use pounds and yards. You could remove that line of code so that the program only gives output in yards and pounds, and the revised program would run as if it had always been written that way. It won’t “remember” that it used to calculate kilograms and meters, and experience any doubt about which system to use. The computer has no awareness or consciousness, and so it can’t have any thoughts about how the program is running, nor about how it used to run before the correction. It just runs the program as currently written.

  Not so with your brain! Your brain records thoughts as memories. While you can literally erase the computer code about the metric system and replace it with American measurements, your brain doesn’t lose memories unless there has been actual physical damage to the brain. It creates new memories, and these memories can become the dominant memory on a subject, but you never lose the old memories. They may occur to you less often, even fall into disuse, but they can always become active again under the right circumstances.

  Additionally, you have conscious awareness of thoughts as they occur in your cerebral cortex. This allows you to have thoughts about thoughts. Computers, at least to date (I hope my word processor doesn’t have opinions about my writing), don’t have this conscious awareness—they simply execute instructions without thinking about them.

  Having thoughts about thoughts is what opens the door to worrying and arguing with yourself. Having thoughts about thoughts is what makes it so difficult to remove an “error of thinking” from your thoughts. Your effort to remove a thought will inevitably remind you of the thought you don’t want to have. This is often typified in the classic, paradoxical instruction: “Don’t think of a white bear.”1

  Paradoxical Therapy for Anxiety and Worry

  A different school of psychotherapy which appeared about the same time as CBT was paradoxical therapy. This method didn’t attain the same mainstream prominence that CBT has achieved but, in my opinion, can be a more powerful and direct way of working with chronic anxiety and worry. Paradoxical therapy takes a different approach to the problem of correcting your thoughts. It leaves thought alone and requests action instead. And it requests action in a paradoxical way, a request that is difficult to fully accept or reject.

  A paradox is a seemingly logical request or instruction that leads to a self-contradictory result. A typical paradoxical request might be: “Be spontaneous now!” or “Listen carefully to what I say and don’t do what I tell you.” These kinds of instructions create confusion within the listener and make it difficult for her to keep doing the same old thing that she was doing before. “Act natural” is another example.

  The principal tool of paradoxical therapy is called “prescribing the symptom.” This has an astonishing amount of power in helping people overcome chronic anxiety. Here’s an example of prescribing the symptom. When I work with a client who is struggling to overcome chronic worry, I might ask this person to deliberately keep her worries in mind as we have our conversation.

  When I first do this, people have two principal reactions. First, they think I’m crazy, but I’ll clear that up with them later. Second, they find it hard to keep that worry thought in mind and may find that they keep forgetting about their worry, even though I’ve asked them to pay more attention to it.

  How does this work? My odd request for them to focus more on their worrisome thoughts interrupts and disrupts their internal effort to “stop worrying.” And, it turns out, this effort to “stop worrying” is a major factor in maintaining chronic worry! When I disrupt it with my unexpected request, the worry actually becomes less persistent.

  Paradoxical methods are powerful in working with chronic anxiety and worry because chronic anxiety is itself such a paradoxical experience. By that, I mean these two things:

  Your efforts to directly increase anxiety will decrease it.

  Your efforts to directly reduce anxiety will increase it.

  In a larger sense, all the therapies mentioned above, including CBT, have a paradoxical aspect to them, because they all encourage the client to experience the anxiety in some way, to practice with it, in order to reduce it over time. This is why we invite the snake phobic to sit with a snake, the flying phobic to go for an airplane ride, the agoraphobic to go to the shopping mall, and so on. In my view, the elements of these therapies that encourage a person to work with the anxiety, rather than against, are the most powerful elements of those therapies. It’s this paradoxical element of anxiety and worry that explains the observation “The harder I try, the worse it gets.” It’s the paradoxical element of anxiety that gives the Rule of Opposites its power.

  CBT has been the treatment of choice for anxiety for the past thirty years. As its strengths and weaknesses have become more apparent, new ideas and models of how to work with anxious thoughts have appeared, including acceptance and commitment therapy, metacognitive therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, and narrative therapy, among others.

  These models embody a different attitude toward thoughts than does traditional CBT. All these methods see thoughts as central in the produ
ction of emotions, but these newer methods take a much more skeptical attitude toward thoughts, and particularly toward our ability to control thoughts.

  From this perspective, the brain produces thoughts in the same manner the kidneys produce urine and the liver produces bile. It’s just what the organ does. And because you can only evaluate your thoughts with the same organ that produced those thoughts in the first place—your brain—you don’t have a way to form an independent evaluation of your thoughts. None of us do. This is the reason people so often act as if their thoughts are a good, accurate model for the external world even when they’re not.

  This is also why we’re so often attached to our thoughts, take pride in them as we would an important creation, and tend to find more value in our own thoughts than in anyone else’s. So we have this problem, as expressed by Chicago comedian Emo Phillips: “I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”2

  And we have the second problem that it isn’t always so easy to directly change a thought. All too often the efforts people make to change their thoughts begin to work like thought stopping and, as I’ve previously noted, thought stopping is almost always unhelpful. The main result of “thought stopping” is “thought resumption.”

  If you use cognitive restructuring and find it helpful in modifying your worries without getting involved in a lot of arguing with yourself, without a lot of back talk from the worries, that’s good. Keep doing that! However, if you find that you get bogged down in arguing with your thoughts when you seek to “correct” the errors, and that the worrisome thoughts continue to recur to you, then cognitive restructuring might be starting to work just like thought stopping for you. If that’s the case, you may be better off using some of the acceptance-based techniques I present in chapters 8 to 10 rather than trying harder to make the cognitive restructuring work.