There, you’ve meditated!
What’s that you say? You don’t feel any calmer? That’s okay. If you had just done your first set of abdominal crunches, your stomach wouldn’t be any harder now either. However, with time and repetition, you will probably notice some gradual changes.
You’re annoyed at how the thoughts interrupted your effort to feel calm? That’s okay. Remember, meditation is about passively observing the thoughts as they rise up to interrupt the quiet. As you experience reactions of annoyance, or an urge to resist, you can notice those thoughts as well.
You don’t feel like you did anything? That’s okay. This is a brief introduction to experiencing the absence of effort, and the simple observation of thoughts as thoughts, rather than important messages or warnings. It’s likely to feel like “doing nothing” if you’re in the habit of responding strongly to your automatic thoughts.
You fell asleep? Well, that’s a problem. You can’t meditate while you’re sleeping. Maybe you need to experiment with a different chair, one that’s less conducive to sleep, or perhaps you can sit on the floor, with your back against the wall.
Get in the Habit
How about getting some regular experience with this process? Once a day, set aside five to ten minutes for meditation. Just take that time to go through the steps. You might find yourself having thoughts about how well, or poorly, you did the exercise, and you can notice those thoughts as you go, just like all the others. Just show up, go through the steps, and give the habit a chance to develop. After you become more accustomed to the practice, increase your daily time to ten to twenty minutes.
Our days are often filled with activities that we have to make happen, and it’s easy to forget that there are also activities that we just allow to happen. People who experience chronic worry are likely to think that they need to control the thoughts they experience, and make themselves experience the thoughts they want to have, rather than the ones that occur spontaneously. It usually doesn’t work so well.
The chief benefit of adding this technique to your daily activities is that it will help you become a better, and more dispassionate, observer of your own thoughts. Over time you will enhance your own ability to observe thoughts without becoming embroiled in the content of the thoughts.
People who struggle with chronic worry are sometimes hesitant to sample meditation because they have thoughts that suggest that maybe they’ll just encounter more unpleasant thoughts, and more struggle with those thoughts, when they meditate. My experience is that people generally find the opposite to be true. Experience with meditation usually leads people to be more tolerant and accepting of whatever thoughts they happen to encounter.
It’s the Rule of Opposites!
Thinking It Over
This chapter prescribes three activities for daily use that can help to moderate the amount of worry you experience on a daily basis. These can be the basis for a good maintenance program for keeping your relationship with chronic worry more evenhanded.
Chapter 11
The Worry Parasite
Chronic worry functions like a parasite, increasingly getting the host—that’s you!—to spend time and energy on producing and maintaining worry, rather than pursuing the hopes and dreams you have for your own life. This chapter will look at how it does this, and suggest a way out.
But first, I want to tell you the story of a parasitic flatworm, the formal name for which is Leucochloridium paradoxum.
Yes, I know, my family wasn’t much interested in this story either. But I think once you’ve read it, you’ll have a better appreciation of what’s at stake here, and how the worry game is played.
How a Parasite Takes Over a Snail
This parasitic flatworm is a microscopic creature and is often found living inside amber snails. It spends a large portion of its life cycle inside snails, but when it comes time to reproduce and make baby parasites, it can only do this inside the belly of a bird, which is its preferred environment. There it can live off the bird’s food and have a secure home in which to lay eggs, which will give rise to new generations of parasites. The eggs it lays return to the ground in bird droppings.
The parasite spends much of its life cycle inside a snail, which crawls around on the ground, under rocks and leaves. So how, you might wonder, does it get inside the belly of a bird?
The amber snail likes to eat bird droppings. When these droppings contain parasitic eggs, baby flatworms hatch inside the snail and begin a nefarious plot of mind control.
The first thing these flatworms do is locate the brain of the snail—and if you’ve ever had trouble finding a small lost item at home, imagine what a job this is, finding the brain of a snail! But they find the brain, and bring to it a substance, a hormone or a neurotransmitter.
The chemical that the flatworm brings to the snail’s brain leads the snail to act differently than before. The snail no longer moves “at a snail’s pace” but moves about much more rapidly. All activities which serve the purposes of the parasite are maximized, and all activities that only serve the purpose of the snail are eliminated or greatly reduced. The snail no longer seeks out other snails with which to mate. If focuses exclusively on moving around rapidly and getting food.
But that’s not all! Now, under the influence of the flatworms, the snail has a whole new view of life.
The snail has the ability to change its outer color. Normally, the snail favors dull, bland colors, a thousand shades of brown, which blend into its environment and hide it from predators. But now the snail “thinks” to itself, I’ve always wanted colored eyestalks! Its eyestalks blossom into bright colors. And the flatworms find their way to the snail’s eyestalks. Normally the snail can retract its eyestalks at will, but the flatworms engorge and fatten the eyestalks to the point where they can’t retract. The flatworms hop around in the brilliantly colored eyestalks, making them pulsate and appear to move, looking for all the world like a caterpillar on the move. (Search Leucochloridium paradoxum on the Internet if you want to see videos!)
And, under the continuing influence of the flatworms, the snail now thinks, I’ve always wanted to sunbathe! So the snail, which heretofore has always preferred to stay in dark, shady places, now climbs to the top of a tree and basks in the sun, displaying its brilliantly colored, caterpillar-resembling eyestalks.
And the next thing you know, the parasites are inside the belly of a bird! Birds generally don’t eat snails, but they’re so attracted by the eyestalks that look like caterpillars that they pluck them off for a tasty meal, leaving the snail to grow a new pair. This goes on for the rest of the snail’s life. It’s become a zombie snail, functioning as a host for more parasites.
The parasite has literally hijacked the self-care agenda of the snail. The snail now acts in ways that further the purposes and interests of the parasitic flatworms, rather than the purposes and interests of the snail.
That’s what chronic worry does. Chronic worry literally hijacks your own self-care agenda and makes it serve the maintenance of chronic worry, rather than your plans, dreams, hopes, and aspirations. That’s how insidious this is. Your life becomes more about worry and less about your work, your relationships, your fun, your intellect—everything that makes life worthwhile.
How Worry Takes Over Your Life
How does this happen? And how can you roll this process back and regain control of how you spend your time and energy in life?
You probably get a sense of how your life agenda has been hijacked when you recall how much time and energy you spend not just worrying, but also engaging in the anti-worry techniques we looked at in chapter 3. What did you used to do with all the time and energy that now gets tied up in worry and anti-worry? You probably actually did more things, things that were important to you in your role as parent, spouse, friend, neighbor, employee, and so on. You had interests, passions, and ambitions that you wanted to follow. And you probably followed them and did things with a lot less mental struggle than you
experience now.
It’s not that you didn’t worry at all. You certainly did, because everybody worries to some extent. But you were probably more likely to go ahead and engage in activities that were important to you. You gave the speech to the PTA or some other public meeting, even though you were nervous about public speaking; you went on vacation to an unfamiliar place, even though you had worries about getting lost or feeling out of place; you sold your home and moved elsewhere, even though you had doubts if it was the right thing to do; you had an annual physical, even though you were a little nervous it would find something bad; you applied for a new job, even though you were nervous about interviewing and weren’t sure if it was the right time for a job change, and so on.
The Parasitic Effects of Worrying
When you get caught up in chronic worry, it doesn’t just disturb your peace of mind. Chronic worry leads to systematic changes in the way you think and behave, just as the parasitic flatworm changes the behavior of the snail. And these changes don’t further your own values and aspirations; they further the maintenance of the worry, just as the changes in snail behavior favor the parasite’s interests, rather than the snail’s.
Chronic worry redirects much of your time, attention, and energy to worry rather than life. It leads you to spend more and more time “in your head,” in your internal world, trying to get your thoughts arranged the way you think they should be, always struggling and fussing with worry rather than getting out into your external world and living, doing whatever it takes to be the good parent, good friend, good employee, good neighbor, or good whoever you always wanted to be. It leads you to invest your time and energy in worry, and struggles with worry, rather than in being the person you wanted to be and living the life you hoped for.
This Invasion Began with Certain Beliefs
How does chronic worry hijack your agenda? The hijacking of the snail starts when it ingests the parasitic eggs. Your hijacking started when you adopted and developed certain types of beliefs about worry. Over time, maybe all the way back in early childhood, you developed some beliefs about worry. These are typically beliefs that you rarely notice or reflect upon, beliefs which have a strong influence on how you think and how you act. Much of their power comes from the fact that you rarely notice or reflect upon the thoughts, and so they exert a powerful subliminal influence, much like propaganda.
These beliefs all have an ironic aspect, because they all consider worry to have value. It probably sounds silly to say that, because doesn’t everyone recognize that worry is a useless activity? Isn’t that why people who struggle with chronic worry want to overcome it, because they realize it’s a useless diversion of their time and energy? But it’s not as simple as that. If you consider closely how you react to worry, I think you will find evidence that whatever you may say or think about worry being nonsensical and pointless, you actually do behave, some of the time, as if worry has some important value and power all by itself.
People don’t often talk about these beliefs with others, and often don’t directly think about the beliefs. Most people don’t recommend worry to others, and you probably don’t either. At first glance, when you look at these beliefs below, you might be likely to dismiss them as having nothing to do with you. But give each one a little consideration.
It helps if I expect the worst.
I’ve talked with so many people who subscribe to this idea. It seems to them that, if they expect the worst, they won’t ever be surprised or experience an overwhelming feeling about some sudden bad event. For them, worry is a kind of dress rehearsal for bad events that might happen in the future. They rehearse and study their lines, the scene, and their likely reactions, and feel dread now, somehow thinking this will protect them from feeling really bad someday, as though worry were a vaccine against feeling overwhelmed in the future.
People who are influenced by this belief don’t like to feel optimistic. They’re suspicious of optimism because they think the universe, or God, will “even things out” by giving them something bad because they’re feeling optimistic. This has a superstitious aspect to it, as when people “knock on wood” because they just said something optimistic, and they hope to prevent that statement from backfiring on them.
They may also think that God, or the universe, is likely to give them something good when they feel pessimistic. They often think of “expecting the worst” as a kind of preparation for bad events, a form of “paying your dues.”
Questions to Consider
Have you ever felt a little nervous because you voiced an optimistic prediction, or had an optimistic thought?
Have you ever felt like you should do something to “undo” that thought, some version of “knock on wood”?
Have you ever experienced difficult events without emotional upset, like the death of a parent or the loss of a job, because you did enough worrying about it ahead of time?
Have you experienced difficult events you did not anticipate? Were you able to manage the emotional upset despite your lack of worry preparation?
Have you worried significantly about events that never occurred? (Did you just think Not yet, they haven’t?) What percentage of the things you worry about have actually happened?
Want to Do an Experiment?
Try holding some optimistic thoughts to see if the simple act of holding positive thoughts makes you a little nervous.
My kids will be happy and healthy every day this week, without any problems.
I know I’m in excellent health and won’t contract any diseases.
All my friends and relatives will be safe from harm this week.
Hold these thoughts in mind for a couple of minutes, and see how you feel about them. If holding these thoughts makes you a little uncomfortable, it’s probably because you do tend to believe, at some level, that It helps if I expect the worst.
My worry can influence future events.
When you’re under the influence of this belief, you tend to act as if the simple act of worrying can change the future, that it might prevent bad events from happening that would have otherwise happened. I’m not referring here to situations in which your thoughts lead you to take action, and those actions influence the future. Here I mean that people treat worry itself as something that can affect the future.
This belief can make worry seem like a double-edged sword. On the one hand, if you worry about the “right” things, maybe the worry will prevent bad things from happening. On the other, if you fail to worry about them, maybe this will cause bad things to happen. How can you ever be sure which are the right things to worry about? This idea sure makes worry seem important!
Now, if this idea were really true, we wouldn’t need to spend trillions on the military—we could just organize our civilians into worrying about war. We’d draft worriers, rather than warriors! But then we’d have to worry about whether we were preventing war or causing it.
Unlikely as it seems, many people subscribe to this idea, sometimes in a superstitious way. They may actually feel nervous when they notice that they’ve been worrying less, as if somehow they stopped paying their dues, and they need to get that payment in the mail right away.
Questions to Consider
Have you ever noticed that you hadn’t been worrying about a topic that you had been worrying about a great deal?
Did it make you feel a little nervous?
Did you feel a little irresponsible, like you hadn’t been doing your job?
Did you think you should resume worrying about it? Did you resume worrying about it?
If something bad happens and I hadn’t worried about it, I’ll feel guilty.
This belief leads you to treat worry as a duty, or maybe even a beneficial activity. If you shirk your duty, bad things will happen and they’ll be your fault.
It’s certainly true that if there’s something you’re supposed to do (say, water your plants) and you fail to do it (and they die), then that’s your fault. But there’s a big differ
ence between worrying and doing.
Questions to Consider
Has this idea ever led you to worry?
Have you ever felt guilty for not worrying about something that actually happened?
Did you apologize to anyone who was harmed or bothered by the event? Did you make amends?
Were you able to forgive yourself?
Worry shows I care.
This is a surprisingly widespread belief. It shows how we often fail to recognize the important distinction between thoughts and action.
If you have children, you probably want to be a caring parent, and also to be seen as a caring parent by your family and friends. The best way, probably the only way, to judge how much parents care for their children is to look at their actions. Do they attempt to fill the child’s needs, physical and emotional? Do they make an effort to balance assisting the child and fostering independence? Do they work at the very difficult task of communicating with the child through the various developmental stages of childhood?
Caring is demonstrated by doing. Yet in our culture, we do tend to attribute some positive characteristics to worry. It’s so common for people to reflexively, automatically, think that caring is somehow demonstrated by worrying.
Questions to Consider
The Worry Trick Page 17