The Worry Trick

by David A Carbonell

  If you were told that a neighbor never worries about his kids, would you think that was a good thing or a bad thing?

  Would you like to be known as someone who doesn’t worry about your kids?

  If your significant other said to you, “I don’t think you ever worry about me,” would you take it as a complaint or a compliment?

  Thoughts are always important.

  It’s a very basic human frailty to assume that thoughts are always important, and especially that one’s own thoughts are particularly wise and important. It’s a kind of vanity. Our brain produces thoughts, and if we want to evaluate our thoughts, we have to go back to the organ that produced them in the first place. No wonder we often think they’re more important than they are!

  If you’ve ever had a song stuck in your head, you’ve had the experience of noticing that some thoughts, like song lyrics, get very stuck in your mind, despite their lack of importance.

  When you’re anticipating some kind of potentially difficult encounter with another person—say, you’re going to ask for a raise, or talk to a neighbor about his noisy dog—you might repeatedly find thoughts playing in your head as you imagine how the conversation will go.

  How often do those thoughts turn out to be accurate, and how often does the encounter go the way you anticipated?

  I am responsible for my thoughts.

  If you could pick and choose what thoughts you have, and what thoughts you don’t have, there might be something to this idea. Certainly it would be good to use your powers of mind control wisely, if you had such powers, and if your thoughts affected those you love.

  Do your thoughts affect the people around you?

  Do you control your thoughts?

  Let’s see. Can you now hold in mind a flag without any red, white, or blue colors in it?

  I think you’ll find, when you consider these questions, that your thoughts have no influence on anyone else, unless you choose to share them, and even then the effect of sharing your thoughts with others is unpredictable.

  I think you’ll also find that, while you can apply your thoughts to a problem like a crossword puzzle or a tax calculation, you also have thoughts that occur to you spontaneously, even when you wish they wouldn’t.

  What Beliefs Do You Hold About Your Thoughts?

  Make a list of the worry beliefs you hold. This will give you the opportunity to decide how you want to relate to these beliefs. Do you want to continue to act in accordance with these beliefs? Do you want to play with them? What would the Rule of Opposites suggest about responding to these beliefs?

  Thinking It Over

  Chronic worry can slowly, almost invisibly, infiltrate your beliefs and your life in ways that hijack your hopes and dreams for your life and turn you into an agent of worry rather than a person who lives the life he wants. Identifying these beliefs, and applying the Rule of Opposites, can do for you what killing off the parasites would do for the amber snail.

  CHAPTER 12

  Breaking the Secrecy Trap

  When you have an ongoing struggle with chronic worry, you probably often feel frustrated by the way in which friends and loved ones “just don’t get it” about this problem. All too often, they offer simpleminded solutions like “Don’t worry so much,” or even imply that it’s your fault. They may be genuinely confused about how to be helpful, sometimes saying what they think you want to hear in an effort to help you calm down, other times refusing to discuss the problem at all. This chapter suggests ways you can get the helpful support you may need to change your relationship with worry for the better.

  Are You Keeping Your Worries to Yourself?

  Who knows about the problem you have with chronic worry? What do they know about it?

  If you’re like most people with chronic worry, you probably haven’t told many people, for a variety of reasons. Maybe you’re embarrassed and fear that others will lose respect for you if they know about your trouble with worry. Maybe you don’t want to cause others to worry about you. Maybe you’re afraid that if you talk about it, you’ll make it worse somehow, that just acknowledging it out loud might make it a bigger problem; or that if others know about your worry, they’ll keep asking if you’re worried in ways that continually rekindle your worry.

  We’ll come back to those thoughts later in this chapter. First, I want to direct your attention to what the urge for secrecy reveals about worry. Most people who struggle with worry—or any kind of anxiety, for that matter—tend to keep it secret. What does it tell me about a problem if I’m motivated to keep it a secret? What kinds of problems are we motivated to keep secret?

  Give that a little thought while I tell you about someone who kept his worry a secret. Allan (not his real name) had a persistent worry about contamination by some unhealthy substance. His worry wasn’t that he would become contaminated, or that he would carelessly cause contamination. His worry was that he might be present when some kind of contamination posed a danger to people, and that he would either fail to notice it or, if he did notice, that he wouldn’t take effective action to protect others. Then, he feared, he would carry the guilt of failing to protect those who were subsequently harmed by the contamination.

  It seemed a little far-fetched, even to him, but he could never really “be sure”; at the same time, he felt the possibility of people being harmed required that he be sure whenever possible. One evening he was at a party and noticed what he took to be a contaminated Styrofoam cup adjacent to the punch bowl. He described to me how he worked his way across the room and stood in front of the punch bowl so that no one could see what he was doing. Behind his back, he counted down through the stack of cups to the one he suspected was contaminated, and removed it. He surreptitiously crushed the cup in his hand and placed it in his pocket for safe disposal later.

  When Allan finished telling me this story, I acknowledged his good intentions in seeking to protect people from the contaminated cup. I asked him why he hadn’t simply walked over to the punch bowl, told everyone about the contaminated cup, and removed it while they watched.

  Allan laughed, and said, “That would have been really embarrassing! There probably wasn’t anything wrong with that cup!” That’s what the urge to keep your worry a secret can tell you about the problem. There’s usually something funny about that worry, something that doesn’t stand up in the light of day. That’s why you’re motivated to keep it a secret.

  Keeping Secrets

  Does that match your experience? Do you find you’re motivated to keep your worries a secret because there’s something odd about their content, something that doesn’t entirely make sense? If that fits for you, then feeling the urge to keep your worry a secret can be a reminder that there’s something funny about that worry, that the worry is just another invitation to “pretend…something bad,” as we saw when we diagrammed worry sentences in chapter 6.

  When you find yourself wanting to hide your worry, it can be a valuable reminder that you’re simply nervous. That’s why you’re worrying, you’re nervous, not because you’re up against a real problem in the external world.

  You’d probably prefer not to notice it at all, but it’s actually helpful to notice your nervousness. Noticing that you’re feeling nervous can be a good reminder to do your AHA! steps.

  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).

  Secrecy and Shame

  One of the main reasons people keep their worry a secret is that they feel ashamed of how much worrying they do. They fear others would shame and criticize them if they became aware of the worrying. Protection from this anticipated shame and embarrassment. This is the usual main effect people hope to achieve by keeping their worrying problem a secret, preventing shame and embarrassment.

  Maybe you achieve that main effect, avoiding shame
and embarrassment, although even that usually feels very temporary to most worriers. They’re always worried that they could accidentally reveal their worrisome nature at any time, and so rarely get any long-term comfort from the secrecy. But main effects don’t tell the entire story.

  If you’ve ever watched any medication commercials on television, you probably also know about side effects. Maybe you’ve seen a commercial for some medication that’s supposed to relieve a problem, like acid reflux or erectile dysfunction. At the bottom of the screen, in tiny print, comes a long list of unpleasant side effects. Sometimes they sound pretty nasty, or dangerous, even worse than the problem the medicine is supposed to relieve. As a consumer, it’s up to you to decide if the benefit of the medication exceeds the problem of whatever side effects you might experience.

  There are also side effects to hiding your problem with worry. It would be good to consider these side effects in evaluating whether or not secrecy is a helpful strategy for you. Here are some of the side effects.

  Imagining the worst. Keeping your worries hidden, even from people who are close to you, deprives you of any feedback you might receive if you shared the information. You’re left on your own to guess at what the worry might mean to them, and how other people would view your difficulties. Since worry always exaggerates the negative and makes the unlikely seem quite probable, your guess of how people might respond to your worries is probably exaggerated and overblown in the same way. The chances are excellent that your guess of how people would think about you and your worries is far worse than what they would actually think, and say, if they knew. So you’re left imagining the worst, rather than something more realistic.

  Feeling like a fraud. I’ve worked with many people who were chronic worriers. Many of them were quite successful in different areas of their life, with major accomplishments to their credit. However, they could rarely feel good about their successes. They were preoccupied with this thought: If people knew how much worrying I do, they wouldn’t think very highly of me. They literally thought they were frauds, and this belief was a negative side effect of the secrecy they maintained.

  Increased worry. When you have a secret to keep, it naturally increases your worry, because you’re often concerned with the possibility of accidentally revealing your secret.

  Increased social isolation. Chronic worry naturally interferes with social interaction with others, because it leads people to spend time “in their heads,” arguing with their thoughts, rather than interacting with people. People often cancel social engagements when they feel “too worried” to attend a dinner or a party. When this is accompanied by secrecy, it prevents you from accurately explaining your reasons to the other party, who is left guessing why you canceled the planned luncheon, or why you sometimes seem distant. Because others are likely to think that you’re just not interested in them, this can damage your social network.

  Paradoxical increase in symptoms. Your thoughts don’t shape or cause events outside you, in the external world, but they can shape and cause physical and emotional symptoms of anxiety within you. A person who worries a lot about blushing, or sweating, in a social setting—and keeps those fears a secret—is likely to experience more of those symptoms purely because she is trying so hard to not have them. Similarly, a person who worries about his voice cracking during a presentation probably increases the odds of that symptom.

  The overall effect of these side effects of secrecy is this: While you may believe that you are fooling people by keeping your worries secret, only one person is really getting fooled, and that’s you. The secrecy fools you into believing that you have a terrible, shameful, insoluble problem and that no one would ever like or respect you if they knew about it.

  There might be some good reasons to selectively reveal your struggle with worry, at least to a couple of people who seem to have your best interests at heart. While no one likes the prospect of feeling embarrassed, the feeling of it generally passes pretty quickly. The negative side effects of secrecy, on the other hand, can last a lifetime if you never break the secrecy, so you may find significant benefit in ending it.

  When I first talk to a worried client about self-disclosure, he usually says something like this: “I don’t want to tell anybody about this problem. It’s none of their business!”

  That’s true. Your worries are nobody’s business but your own.

  The only reason to discuss it with someone is if you think that it might help your business, of living, reducing worry, following your aspirations, and so on. It’s about your business, not theirs.

  So it might be worthwhile to do a little cost–benefit analysis of the effects of keeping your worry pattern a secret—the main effect, and the side effects listed above as well—to help you decide if you want to experiment with a little selective self-disclosure.

  If you decide to experiment with self-disclosure, I have some suggestions for you.

  Planning Self-Disclosure

  Start with a significant other, or someone fairly central in your social network. Pick someone who’s clearly in your corner, someone who will be motivated to hear what you’re saying, to understand, and be helpful.

  Schedule an agreeable time. Don’t just work it in at the end of a phone call or other conversation, and don’t leave it to chance. Tell him or her there’s something you want to discuss, and ask to set up a specific time and place. Do this in person if at all possible. You don’t need a lot of time. Probably fifteen to thirty minutes should be plenty, unless you want more. Your friend will be curious what the topic is, but don’t get into it until the time comes. You can reassure him or her that you don’t want to borrow any money!

  Come right to the point. Don’t beat around the bush or spend the first few minutes on small talk, sports, or catching up on general news. Get right into the topic, as suggested in this sample.

  Thanks for setting this time. The thing I want to talk about is an issue I’ve been having and it weighs on my mind. I worry a lot, and I know everybody worries, but I think it’s a bigger deal for me than for most people.

  Here’s a typical description of worrying, but it’ll be better to insert your own description here.

  I find myself thinking and worrying a lot, mostly about stuff that never really happens—or if it does, isn’t nearly as bad as I expect—but it really occupies my mind and distracts me from other stuff I’d rather be thinking about. It’s kind of embarrassing to talk about, but that’s the main reason I wanted to tell you about this, I think it makes it worse if I keep it to myself, keep it in my head. I worry about all kinds of stuff, and have trouble letting it go.

  So, the biggest ways this causes me trouble is [here describe briefly a few ways the worry causes you trouble. This might include getting distracted, having trouble sleeping, and other results of worrying. It should definitely include some of the ways you struggle to control your worry and get rid of it, discussed in chapter 3. If this is a person you ever approach for reassurance, describe that part of worrying].

  You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you this. Mainly, I’m thinking it might help me to get this off my chest, to get over keeping it a secret, because I think keeping it to myself makes it seem like a bigger problem to me.

  But now that I’ve told you about this, there’re a couple of things I’d like for you to do and not do.

  And here is the part where you will probably find it helpful to literally educate others, train them, about what is helpful and not helpful in relating to your worry. People’s concerns about how their loved ones and friends will overreact, or respond in unhelpful ways, are one of the reasons they keep it a secret. You can’t expect that they will automatically know how to be helpful. You’ll have to explain it to them.

  Guidelines to Give Your Support People

  Don’t start asking me “How are you doing—are you worrying?” If I want to talk about this some more, I’ll bring it up. I’d rather you didn’t initiate it.

  Generally, it
’s not a good thing for you to give me reassurance about something I worry about. I’m likely to overthink it and question it, trying so hard to be “sure” that it just causes more trouble, for me and maybe for you as well. I have to get better at handling uncertainty. If you do give me reassurance about something, make it realistic. Don’t tell me something will always be okay, in all ways. Put the usual realistic disclaimers in there, like “As far as I know” or “Anything can happen, but what’s likely to happen is… ,” because I know nothing in the future is sure, and I have to get used to that.

  If I appear to be asking you for reassurance about something, I’d like you to point that out—“It sounds like you’re asking me for reassurance, is that really what you want?”—and give me a chance to change my mind about that.

  Don’t share this information with anyone. If I want someone else to know, I’ll tell them.

  Don’t go out of your way to try to be helpful, or do things you think will make my life easier. If there’s something I want or need you to do, I’ll ask you. Or, if you think you have a really good idea, ask me about it, but don’t do anything without asking me first.

  Give this a try with someone who’s important in your life and motivated by your best interests. See how it goes and evaluate what the effects are. If you find the results are at least neutral, or positive, then perhaps this will encourage you to begin breaking some of the secretive habits you maintain about your worry with others.

  One good way to do this is to notice when you are offering up an excuse or making up a story to cover up the fact that you are worried. For instance, you might find yourself declining an invitation to lunch with a friend at a fancy restaurant because you anticipate feeling really uncomfortable there. You don’t want to feel “trapped” at a table in the center of such a place as you try to “get through” the meal. You picture yourself waiting anxiously for your friend to finish coffee and dessert, then trying to tolerate the delays inherent in getting and paying the bill, when you would much rather rush out of there.