It’s generally much more helpful to get involved in the external world. It’s better to engage in activities that are usually important or fun for you, while you’re worried and uncomfortable, than it is to spend much time in your head, trying to get rid of the thoughts. The reason external involvement is a better choice is not because you will feel better right away; you might not. But it will lead to a better outcome and a better pattern for the future.
When I take a group of fearful fliers on a flight, there are often one or two people who have a terribly hard time boarding the plane. They stand in the gate, trying so hard to get more comfortable with the idea of boarding, but they can’t find the comfort they want, and so they feel stuck.
If they make their choice on the basis of wanting to feel better right away, they walk away and go home. They do feel better immediately, but it doesn’t last. By the time they get to the parking lot they start feeling regret, and they have a pretty miserable rest of the day. On the other hand, if they decide on the basis of how they want to feel, not right then but that night, then they get on the plane, feeling afraid in the moment, because they know they’ll feel real good when they return home with that accomplishment behind them.
You face a similar choice with worry. It’s tempting to figure that you should do a little more thinking about the thoughts, to try again to review them or reason with them in an effort to feel better right now, but that’s a shell game. You won’t win that game because it’s rigged against you. It’s for suckers! The Rule of Opposites suggests, well, the opposite. Let’s go do something else while giving the worry time to decline.
This is not the same as trying to make yourself so busy that you stop worrying. That’s just another version of “stop thinking that” and just as unhelpful in the long run.
Take Your Worries for a Walk
If you have dogs, you generally need to take those dogs for a walk, unless you have room to let them run. There will be times when you don’t feel like it—when it’s cold and snowy outside, when you’re too busy writing a book, or when you have a headache, and you just don’t feel like doing it. But if you don’t let those dogs poop and pee outdoors, pretty soon they’ll do it indoors. That won’t do much for your headache or your book! And then when you take those dogs for a walk, they don’t always do what you want. Sometimes they race ahead, trying to pull you along. Sometimes they lag behind, and you have to make them follow. Sometimes they try to eat stuff they shouldn’t, or bark at your neighbors.
Those dogs are a lot like your worrisome thoughts. Sometimes they demand attention when you really don’t feel like giving it, and sometimes they just don’t do things the way you wish they would. But life is better with the walks than without them!
You’ve probably noticed that you tend to worry less when you’re busy and more when you’re idle. Episodes of chronic worry often fade faster when you’re active. So it will be useful to return your attention and energy back to involvement with the external world around you. By this, I don’t mean to simply make yourself busy. That’s too much like trying to get rid of the thoughts. Not that there’s anything terribly wrong with that, getting rid of the thoughts, if it can be done simply and effectively. It’s just that trying directly to get rid of the thoughts usually makes them more persistent and plentiful.
So it is with worries. It might seem like there would be a better time to go to a dinner party, but life is a come-as-you-are party, and if you’re worried the night of the party, then pack up your worries and bring them with you. Would you be happier without the worries? Yes, but that choice isn’t immediately available. Would you be better off lying in bed, alone with your worries? Probably not!
Go on about your business—the worries may leave sooner that way. If they don’t, at least you’re participating in life while you wait for them to pass.
People often object to the idea of getting involved with a project of any kind, on the grounds that they will be able to do a better job when they’re not worried so much. Similarly, they often want to isolate themselves from others, out of a concern that others will notice their distress and be bothered by it.
Both are instances of how our gut instincts of how to handle worry tend to be the opposite of what would actually be helpful. Both suggest that we need, first, to get rid of the worrisome thoughts we’re experiencing, and then, afterwards, to get involved with activities outside our skin.
It’s more often the other way around. Your involvement with your external world will tend to direct your energy and attention there—and leave less of it “in your head.” Moreover, when you interact with the external world, you get more involved with realistic rules of thumb. When you’re in your head, by contrast, you can imagine anything. This is why anticipatory worry is almost always worse than anything that actually happens in real life—there are no rules in your head, anything seems possible! In the external world, the rules of reality apply.
Thinking It Over
In this chapter, we looked at an acronym you can use to guide your responses to chronic worry whenever it crops up. The acronym is AHA!
Acknowledge and accept.
Humor the worrisome thoughts, as you would humor Uncle Argument.
Activity—resume doing things that are important to you in your “external world” (and take the worries with you if necessary).
You’ve noticed the worrisome thoughts, and acknowledged them. You’ve sidestepped the instinct to oppose them and instead cultivated an accepting attitude toward the temporary condition of being worried.
You’ve responded to the thoughts in some playful ways, perhaps using a song or a poem to play with the content, rather than taking it seriously.
You’ve gotten back into the external world, and some activity that’s meaningful to you. And you allowed the worries to accompany you, if that’s what they do.
Treating your worries in this manner—how does it compare to what you usually do?
If it’s the opposite of what you usually do, then good! You’re on track with the Rule of Opposites.
In chapter 10, we’ll consider some regular steps you can build into your daily routine to reduce the amount of chronic worry you experience going forward.
Chapter 10
Your Daily Worry Workout
This chapter introduces three daily maintenance tasks you can use to reduce your daily dose of worry and render the worry less disruptive over time. The first one involves regular exposure to worrisome thoughts. The second is a breathing exercise, and the third is a mindfulness meditation.
Use these as you would use a daily vitamin. They’re not antibiotics, or some other medication you take to relieve a specific ailment or symptom. They’re something you do on a regular basis, not to achieve some immediate, specific goal, but for their overall contribution to your health and wellness.
If you tried the experiment in chapter 8, you probably discovered that when you deliberately turned your attention to chronic worry, without resistance or distraction, your worry lost some of its emotional impact. My clients generally report that they get more relief from deliberate worry than they ever did from thought stopping.
They’re usually surprised by that, because it’s so—you guessed it—counterintuitive. They thought they’d get more relief from efforts to stop worrying than they would from deliberate worry. But it turns out that the opposite is usually true. You’ll probably find yourself encountering this realization time and again, as you work with the pattern of chronic worry. The Rule of Opposites is one of the best guides you have!
Chapter 9 offered a variety of quick ways to respond, on the fly, when you find yourself engaged in unwanted chronic worry. They all incorporated the Rule of Opposites, and some of them might have seemed silly. This isn’t because I’m silly, or because I think you’re silly. It’s because so much of the content of chronic worry is silly, and when you take that content at face value, you get fooled into fighting worry in ways that make it worse rather than better. Th
ose responses are all good ways around this problem. I hope you’ve sampled them, and picked a couple that you can use when the need arises.
Responding to Intermittent Worry
Let’s suppose you’re the manager of a medium-sized department at your workplace. You have your own work to do, and you have to supervise the work of a group of employees as well. You’ve tried several different ways to find the right balance between communicating with your staff and getting your own work done.
You tried leaving your door open all the time, so that staff could drop in to see you whenever they want. This encouraged them to stay in touch with you, and to advise you of situations that needed your attention, but it also encouraged a steady stream of staffers dropping by to chat, complain, and score brownie points with you, preventing you from getting your own work done.
Then you tried keeping your door closed, to discourage all but the most determined of staffers. However, this led staffers to increasingly hang around outside your office, sitting around idly, and making noise, while hoping to have a chance to catch your eye. The bolder ones would even knock on your door, or slip notes underneath it. Everyone’s productivity, yours and theirs, suffered as a result.
In that case, you might try a third method—setting a schedule for when staffers can drop in and see you, and also for when they should leave you alone unless they smell smoke. You might keep your door closed for much of the day, so you could do your work, and have it open at scheduled times each day, so your staff could see you when they need to. That’s the method I want to suggest to you for establishing a better relationship with chronic worry—schedule regular appointments for it.
You’d probably prefer being completely free of worry, but you also probably know by now that avoiding and opposing just gives it more energy. Worry appointments are more likely to help you. They’re designed for those persistent, unwelcome worries which are not of any use to you—chronic “what if” worries, which don’t point out problems you need to solve, but simply nag and bother you. They build on a feature of worry that you probably noticed when you did the experiment in chapter 8—turning yourself over to worrisome thoughts without resistance usually relieves them of their power.
Set Up Appointments for Worrying
This is time you set aside exclusively for worry. This idea may seem strange to you, because it runs counter to our usual instincts. But that’s often how it seems when you “fight fire with fire.”
“Fight fire with fire” isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a technique used to control forest fires. It involves deliberately burning all the flammable material that would otherwise fuel the fire in its spread. When the forest fire arrives at the burned-out part, it falters because it has no fuel left to keep it burning.
Resistance is the fuel by which chronic worry spreads.
During a worry appointment, which will last about ten minutes, you’ll engage in pure worry. Devote your full attention to worrying, and nothing else. Don’t engage in other activities, like driving, showering, eating, cleaning, texting, listening to music, riding on a train, and so on. Spend the full ten minutes worrying about whatever items you usually worry about. Make a list of your worries ahead of time, so you have an agenda, or use the list you developed in chapter 9. And don’t try to solve problems, reassure yourself, minimize problems, relax, clear your mind, reason with yourself, or take any other steps to stop worrying. Simply worry, which means reciting, repeatedly, lots of “what if” questions about unpleasant possibilities.
This will probably seem strange and awkward at first. However, if you’re reading this book, you’ll likely have lots of experience with worrying. Here’s a chance to use that experience for your benefit!
Schedule these times in advance, two a day, and write them into your schedule. Pick times when you have privacy and don’t have to answer the phone or the doorbell, talk to others, look after the dog or the kids, and so on. It’s usually best to avoid the following times: first thing in the morning on waking, last thing at night, or right after meals.
Watching Yourself Worry
One more detail: worry out loud, in front of a mirror.
This is perhaps the most peculiar part, I know, but don’t skip it. It’s important!
The advantage of doing the worrying this way is that it helps you be a better observer of your worry. Most worry is subliminal. It occurs when we’re multitasking. We worry while driving, attending lectures, showering, eating, watching television, or doing some routine work that doesn’t demand much attention. And since we rarely give worry our full attention, it’s easy for it to continue endlessly.
Because worry comes in the form of our own subliminal thoughts, it has more power to influence us. And we all tend to assume that If it’s my thought, there must be something to it. We tend not to notice that we can think all kinds of nonsense, that thoughts are often only anxiety symptoms, nothing more.
When you worry out loud, you don’t just say the worries, you hear them. When you worry in front of a mirror, you see yourself doing the worrying. You’re not just worrying in the back of your mind. You’re hearing, and watching, yourself as you worry. The worry is no longer subliminal, and this will probably help you get a better perspective on it.
Worry appointments are deliberately structured this way to convert worry from a multitasking activity to a unitary one, in which you only do one thing—worry—and you do it with the fullest awareness and attention possible.
Why Would Anyone Do This?
Watching yourself worry sounds, on the surface, like a bizarre, unwelcome exercise. You’d need a pretty good reason to do worry appointments.
And there is one! There’s usually a benefit that comes during the rest of the day, when you’re not engaged in a worry appointment. If you find yourself worrying when you’re off “worry duty,” you can give yourself the following choice: You can either
a)take ten minutes now to worry very deliberately about this issue, or
b)postpone it to your next worry appointment.
The payoff. The immediate benefit is the ability to postpone worry. Many of my clients find that this enables them to sweep large portions of their day relatively clear of worry. However, it only works if you actually do the worry periods as prescribed. If you try to postpone worries, knowing that you probably won’t actually show up for the worry appointments, the postponing probably won’t work for you. So don’t try to fool yourself!
The postponing alone, the reduction in worry during the rest of your day, would probably be sufficient reason by itself to justify doing worry appointments. But there’s more! The regular use of worry appointments will also be a big help in changing your automatic responses to chronic worry, and help you take the content of the worrisome thoughts less seriously.
Taking action about worry is usually much more helpful than thinking about it, reasoning with it, or trying to change the thoughts “in your head.” Worry appointments are a good example of this. How about trying it now? Take ten minutes and do the exercise as I describe it above, and then come back to finish this chapter. Or, if this isn’t a convenient time for a worry appointment, maybe mark this page in the book, do a worry appointment at a convenient time and location later today, and then return to this page. I encourage you to try it. Doing is better than thinking!
Common Reactions to Worry Appointments
I’ve worked with a lot of clients who came to see me for help with chronic worry, and I’ve asked most of them to use worry appointments. I’ve heard a lot of comments and reactions from people who tried them, and it’s usually not the reactions you might expect. When I first started offering this technique, I half expected to get angry feedback that I was an idiot and that they weren’t ever coming back! But that’s not at all what’s happened.
Perhaps the most common reaction clients have is that they tell me, “Boy, it’s really hard to fill the ten minutes!” This confused me at first, because these were people who worried a lot, and their days
were often filled with worry. So how could it be hard to fill ten minutes? I wondered if it was just an excuse to avoid doing the appointments.
However, as I explored this further with clients, here’s what I discovered. They would start the worry appointment and fill a minute or two, and then not have any new worries to add. Normally, when they worried in a subliminal manner, they just kept repeating the worries again and again, and that’s what enabled them to worry for such long periods of time. They kept repeating themselves!
But when they did a worry appointment, they assumed they needed to have ten minutes of fresh material, without repeating themselves. And they couldn’t think of that many worries!
This points to a very important aspect of chronic worry. Although people often have the experience of worrying for long periods of time throughout the day, there are actually very few new worries surfacing during that time. It’s almost all repetition of the same minute or two of worrisome thoughts. That’s what made it seem hard to fill the ten minutes!
So, when you do worry appointments, don’t be concerned with having new, fresh worries each time. During the worry appointments, do what you do when you’re worrying spontaneously—just keep repeating the same old worries. If you have two minutes of worry material, repeat that five times, and there’s your ten minutes!
If you prefer, you can make up some new ones. Or I can lend you some of mine! The content of the worries during your worry appointment isn’t any more important than it is when you’re worrying the old-fashioned way. The important thing is simply to fill the ten minutes with the activity of worrying.
Another reaction I often hear goes like this: “I’m not sure I’m getting the same quality in my worries,” or “It feels like I’m missing something when I worry this way.” When clients tell me this, I usually say something like, “Well, do the best you can!” Of course, I’m kidding when I say that, and we discuss it further. This reaction usually indicates that this person has some beliefs about worry. Without consciously thinking it through, this person has developed some ideas about the “value” of worry, and to worry this way does imply a challenge to those ideas.
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