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Uncle Argument and Your Relationship with Worry

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What’s a Good Relationship with Worry? Let’s suppose you’re going to a family event. Maybe it’s a wedding, a graduation party, a bar mitzvah, or a fiftieth anniversary party. You’re looking forward to it and want to enjoy it. Unfortunately, you misplaced the invitation for a while. You were the last person to send in your RSVP, and so they seated you next to Uncle Argument at the banquet table. Uncle Argument is actually an okay person, but he really, really likes to argue. That’s pretty much his entire conversational style. If you’re a Democrat, he’s a Republican. If you think American football is the greatest sport, he picks soccer. If you think breakfast is the most important meal, he says that it’s dinner, and so on. The man just loves to argue. He’s not really mean, he just loves arguing. And you’ll be seated next to him at dinner. You don’t want to argue. You want to sit and eat, you want to enjoy the meal, you want to have some pleasant conversation if possible, but you a
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Worrying About “What If?” Is Like a Game

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Do you know the game Mad Libs? It’s a party game that became real popular in the 1960s. It was a book full of very short stories that had words missing. You’d get a bunch of your friends together and then you’d ask them to give you the words you needed to complete the story, without letting them see the story. You’d tell them “give me an adverb—a color—a number—a proper noun,” and so on. You’d write these words in where they were needed, and then you’d read the completed story to your friends. Then they’d laugh, especially if you had served plenty of beer beforehand. This is what we did for fun before the Internet. So, this “what if” sentence, this statement of chronic worry, this is the Mad Libs of anxiety. It’s just as arbitrary, as random, as that. You can fill in a catastrophe here, any catastrophe. It doesn’t matter what you pick. You have your usual choices—your “favorite” worries—but they all fit! They all fit because you have “Let’s pretend” in front. The problem is, after
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What Are a Worrier’s Two Most Over-Used Words?

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You nailed it if you answered “What if…?” Now I say this is an advantage, because these two words can point out to you that you’re being lured into worry as surely as the sound of a starter pistol indicates the start of a race, or the siren of an ambulance behind you indicates the need to pull over. Maybe you don’t think that’s an advantage! You might be so accustomed to trying to suppress and ignore your worrisome thoughts that anything that brings attention to them seems unhelpful. It might seem to you that you’ve been barely holding back the tide of unwanted worry, and that you’d be better off keeping it out of your awareness. And yet, we saw in chapter 3 that “anti-worry” techniques usually make the problem of chronic worry more chronic and severe. Such techniques look like helpful solutions, but they’re actually wolves in sheepdog’s clothing. So bear with me! Suspend any disbelief on this point, at least until you’ve digested this chapter. The “what if” words are a useful s
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Thinking: It’s Just What the Brain Does

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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
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Putting Out Fires with Gasoline, and the Rule of Opposites

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“The harder I try, the worse it gets.” If I had a nickel for every time a client said that to me, I’d need so many coin wrappers. Does this thought ever occur to you? Does it describe the history of your efforts to overcome chronic worry? It’s so frustrating! You work so hard to rid yourself of these unwanted, unhelpful worries, and get no lasting benefit from your effort. It often seems to make things worse, rather than better. In fact, if you’ve been using methods like the ones described in chapter 3, you have been using methods which make things worse. You don’t continue to have chronic worry despite your best efforts. You continue to have chronic worry because of your best efforts. It’s the ultimate irony! Your efforts to stop worrying are the main reason you continue to worry. Is It You, or Your Methods? This might lead you to think there’s something wrong with you, and to blame yourself for all the worrying. You might think that you’ll always be burdened with this pro
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There’s More to the Brain Than You Think

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People often get very frustrated at their inability to talk themselves out of worrisome thoughts. “I know better than this,” they’ll say, “but it doesn’t help!” They think the reason it doesn’t help is that there’s something wrong with them. However, the real reason is that a different part of the brain gets involved when you’re afraid. Most people, when they think about their brain, think about the part that’s called the cerebral cortex . This is where conscious thought takes place, and it’s where we use language and logic. There’s a lot more to the brain, different parts that function differently. One of the other parts is called the amygdala . The amygdala has numerous functions, but one of its primary jobs is regulating the fear responses of fight and flight. Meet Your Amygdala I want to tell you a few things about the amygdala that will help you understand why you’ve been having so much trouble with chronic worry. The amygdala handles fight and flight responses because it’
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Feeling Afraid in the Absence of Danger: How Odd Is That?

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You’re probably reading this book because you’re bothered by a lot of worry that you recognize is unrealistic and exaggerated. It sounds odd to say, but that’s the good news. You don’t really have all the problems that your worries suggest. The bad news is that these worries function like a red flag to a bull. The red flag isn’t a threat to the bull, but its appearance leads the bull to charge and make himself vulnerable to the swords and spears of the matador. Your worries aren’t a threat to you, but their appearance invites you to struggle to get rid of them, and that’s what makes you vulnerable to more worrying. When you resist your thoughts, you hope to be the matador, but you’re actually the bull. This chapter will help you see how this kind of worry is not evidence of a weak or troubled mind but a natural consequence of how our brains are organized. This is really important, because if you keep getting “suckered” by the idea that your worries mean there’s something wrong with
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