Chronic Worry: A Dysfunctional Relationship

Some people get more than their share of trouble with worry. Worry becomes your constant companion rather than an occasional nuisance and can seriously degrade the quality of your life.
If you experience chronic worry, you experience an excessive amount of worry over time. Who decides how much worry is excessive? The person doing the worrying! If you feel that you have too much worry in your life and want to have less, you can probably learn to shrink the role worry plays in your life.
The most important aspect of this chronic relationship with worry, however, is not the amount of worry but the way you respond to it. This most often takes the form of an argumentative, fighting kind of relationship in which you persistently struggle to control and change your worrisome thoughts, only to find that the more you resist and oppose them, the more persistent they become. The chronic relationship with worry is one in which you really care, all too much, about the worries, and try again and again to reform them.

What Does Chronic Worry Do to You?

Chronic worry involves spending time with thoughts of possible disappointments and catastrophes, even though you don’t want to. It involves a chaining of thoughts, the creation of an increasingly unlikely sequence of causes and effects which suggest that you will eventually suffer terrible catastrophes and lose your mind or your ability to function.
It’s frustrating. You’d like to relax and watch that TV show, or read a book in the park. Maybe you’re hoping to enjoy dinner with the family or lunch with a friend. But here come those worries again.
They seem uncontrollable! Just when you don’t want them, there they are.
  • What if I get laid off?
  • What if my daughter flunks out?
  • What if I get sick and can’t work?
  • What if a loved one dies?
  • What if the furnace conks out this winter?
  • What if I start screaming on the airplane?
  • What if I start shooting people like that crazy guy did?
  • What if the garage door opens by itself while I’m asleep?
  • What if I get cancer?
  • What if Joe can tell how nervous I feel?
  • What if I look nervous and the clerk thinks I’m a thief?
  • What if I pee in my pants during my presentation?
Chronic worry is likely to:
  • Be a major focus in your life for significant periods of time
  • Direct your focus toward unlikely catastrophes
  • Distract you from worthwhile tasks and responsibilities
  • Interfere with your relationships with loved ones and other key people
  • Generate obsessive thinking without leading to useful decisions
  • Continue until something else replaces it
  • Continue despite your recognition that you’re wasting your time with worry
  • Interfere with your participation in the present world
  • Leave you feeling helpless, hopeless, and out of control
People with chronic worry repeatedly think and rethink about the possibilities that concern them without coming up with new solutions or taking any effective action. There’s no natural end point with chronic worry. It just drones on, continuing as if it has a life of its own.

The Struggle Is Not Just in Your Head

Chronic worry is often accompanied by physical symptoms and behaviors. This includes feeling restless, where you may find it difficult to relax and enjoy a quiet moment or a movie. You might jiggle your leg, shift frequently in your chair, crack your knuckles, sigh repeatedly, check your phone, and so on. It includes irritability, in which otherwise unimportant sounds and interruptions fill you with a startled or angry reaction. It includes muscular tension—backaches, neck aches, headaches, and more. It includes fatigue—feeling tired without apparent explanation. It includes upset stomach. It often includes trouble with sleep—either difficulty falling asleep or waking up earlier than you want.
Chronic worry doesn’t alert you to problems that need solving. It interferes with problem solving. If you experience chronic worry, your attention is focused on unlikely hypothetical future disasters, rather than current situations that require a solution. Chronic worries don’t get solved because there really isn’t anything to solve. The worry just gets repeated until it’s replaced by something else.
Chronic worry can become the focus of your life and crowd out activities that you might otherwise enjoy. Physically, you’re in the present, in your usual environment. But mentally, your focus is on a dismal future of grim possibilities.
Finally, if you struggle with chronic worry, you try to stop worrying. These efforts to stop usually make things worse rather than better. It’s like stories from Greek mythology in which a hero confronts a hydra, a serpent or dragon with many heads. When the hero cuts off a few heads from the hydra, several more heads grow in the place of each one.
I hate it when that happens, don’t you?

Your Relationship with Worry

People who struggle with worry have several kinds of reactions. These reactions are a central part of the problem with chronic worry, and form your “relationship with worry.” The path to having less trouble with worry involves changing your relationship with worry rather than trying to change the worries themselves.
You might be wondering how you got into a relationship with worry in the first place. Let’s consider how that happens.

How Do You Get to This Point?

First, you dislike the content of the thoughts. And that’s natural; the content of worry is always negative, always about bad things that might happen in the future. Nobody has ever experienced this worry: “What if I win $50 million in Super Powerball and live a dream life on Tahiti?” Nobody worries about good stuff! So you become a person who’s bothered by repetitive thoughts of bad possibilities.
Second, you probably recognize—at least most of the time, when you’re not so caught up in the worry—that the thoughts are unrealistic. But this doesn’t help you lose the thoughts! You continue to have nagging, unwanted thoughts even though you recognize that they’re unrealistic.
This can be really frustrating for most worriers. I’ve had many conversations with clients in which we discuss the fact that the content of their worries are kind of unrealistic. There’s a technique that’s part of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) called cognitive restructuring, in which clients are helped to review their thoughts and find “the errors of thinking” so they can change their thoughts to something more realistic. It’s helpful with lots of problems but often fails to solve the problem of chronic worry. Here’s a common response to the cognitive restructuring: “I know!” Not “Whew—what a relief!” but “I know!” They might be a little annoyed too, on doing that work only to discover what they already knew.
They know. They don’t need me to help them discover that their worries are exaggerated and unlikely. That’s why they came to see me in the first place—they were bothered by repetitive thoughts of unlikely catastrophes! So just like them, you become a person who’s bothered by repetitive, unrealistic thoughts of bad possibilities and wants them to stop, and is increasingly frustrated by the fact that they don’t.
Third, it may seem to you that if you keep having negative, unrealistic thoughts you don’t want to have, this must mean there is something wrong with you. You have the thought that people who can’t control their thoughts are “out of control” and find this a scary comment about yourself. So you become a person who’s bothered by repetitive, unrealistic thoughts of bad possibilities who wants them to stop, is increasingly frustrated by the fact that they don’t, and fearful that this means you’re losing control of yourself.
Finally, you try hard not to have the thoughts. Maybe you do this because you hate and fear the content of the thoughts. Maybe you realize that the thoughts are unrealistic but think it’s a sign of mental problems to have thoughts you can’t control. In either case, you try a variety of anti-worry techniques: distraction, avoidance, thought stopping, cognitive restructuring, arguing with your thoughts, reassurance seeking, drugs and alcohol, and more. And the result, all too often, is more worry. When you struggle against your worries, you generally get more worry rather than less.
And even though you dislike the worries, you might also have some unconscious beliefs about worry, beliefs which suggest that worry helps you somehow. These beliefs can also lead you to respond in ways which keep the worries alive. We’ll take a look at this in chapter 11.
So it’s through a process like this that you become a person who’s bothered by repetitive, unrealistic thoughts of bad possibilities and wants them to stop; who is increasingly frustrated by the fact that they don’t, fearing that this means you’re losing control of yourself; and who wants so desperately to get rid of the thoughts that you get caught up in a struggle to rid yourself of the thoughts—only to have more, rather than less, worry as a result.
If you’ve become involved with chronic worry, this is what the relationship is like, and this is the problem you need to address.

Relating to Thoughts

Worry is a way of thinking, and that’s a big part of the problem. Modern Western culture emphasizes the role of thought in life, seeing it as the end point of billions of years of evolution. If you’re like most people, you probably have lots of respect for thoughts. Especially your own thoughts! You probably give the content of your thoughts a lot of attention and credibility, even when you’re having thoughts that seem exaggerated and untrue.
That leads to another part of the problem. If you’re like most people, you probably tend to think you should be in control of your thoughts. You may have the idea that you should only have the thoughts you find desirable and useful and not have the thoughts that you don’t want. And yet…your mind has a mind of its own. It’s perfectly commonplace to have thoughts that defy your sense of control, unwanted thoughts that resist your efforts to evict them. If you’ve ever had a song “stuck in your head,” you know what I mean.
If you’re not so sure that this applies to you, take a minute now and don’t think about the first pet you ever had. Put the book down, sit back, and try this for a minute.
How did you do? If you’re like most people, you’re probably having more recollections of that pet than you have for years.

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