Putting Out Fires with Gasoline, and the Rule of Opposites

“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 problem and feel different from all the “normal” people in your life who appear not to have any worries.

There’s a valuable truth hidden behind the blame and shame. If you’re trying to achieve something, and find that the harder you try the worse it gets, you should take a very close look at the methods you’re trying. There’s probably something about those methods that gives you the unwanted results. It’s more likely the method that’s defective, rather than you. You’ve gotten tricked into using methods that not only can’t bring you the outcome you seek, but push it further away!
Chronic worry is one of those problems for which the metaphor “putting out fires with gasoline” was created. This metaphor describes a person who, on discovering a neighbor’s house on fire, frantically grabs the nearest liquid he can find. Unfortunately, this turns out to be one of hundreds of buckets of gasoline in the yard. Even worse, in his haste he assumes the buckets contain water. He throws some gasoline on the fire, which burns even higher and hotter as a result. Seeing that the problem is growing, the man frantically throws even more gasoline, and the fire grows more, and so on. The harder he tries, the bigger the fire gets.
There are some problems with this metaphor—who doesn’t recognize the smell of gasoline, and who keeps it in buckets around their home? But if we overlook these minor flaws, the story helps us evaluate the problem of chronic worry.
Suppose now that the neighbor, the one who collects gasoline for a hobby, returns home, and shouts, “Hey! This won’t work! You’re putting out fires with gasoline!”
What do you do? If you suddenly discover that you’ve been putting out fires with gasoline, you probably don’t have any idea what to do next. You’re upset with yourself for making this mistake, worried about how it will look to your neighbor whose house is burning, wishing that you had never gotten involved, and so on. On one hand, you don’t know what to do. But on the other, the first step is really obvious.
Put down the buckets! Stop throwing that gasoline on the fire!
Almost anything will be better than throwing more gasoline on the fire. Standing there and doing nothing will be better! Don’t try throwing the gasoline faster, or farther, or a little more to the left. Put down the gasoline!
What does this tell us about handling chronic worry? It suggests that, when we get caught up in chronic worry, our natural instinct of how to solve the problem turns out to be doing things that make the problem worse, rather than better. You probably have responses to worry—identified in the inventory you created in chapter 3—that you’ll be better off without. Those are your buckets of gasoline.

Counterintuitive Problems

How could this happen? How can we go so far wrong as to make our situation worse by trying to make it better?

It’s not hard, really, nor is it uncommon. Worry is a special kind of counterintuitive problem, one in which your gut instincts of how to help yourself are likely to make it worse rather than better. When you try to solve a counterintuitive problem with intuitive solutions, things usually get worse.
When my son, at two years old, would say “no” to everything, that was a counterintuitive problem for me. I would sometimes forget that he was learning to be independent, learning to use a powerful word, and that this was exciting and fun for him. Sometimes I would approach him as if I just needed to share my adult knowledge with him and help him see the error of his ways. So we would argue! The more we argued, the more he delighted in saying “no.” His favorite phrase was “because not.” (Now he’s twenty, and we still do this occasionally, for old times’ sake!)
If I try to solve a counterintuitive problem with an intuitive solution, I’m probably going to fail. If I want to solve a counterintuitive problem, I need a solution that is counterintuitive. I need to fight fire with fire.
This isn’t as bizarre as it might sound. There are many everyday examples of this. I learned as a young child, when my puppy got off her leash, that if I chased her she would run away. She had four legs to my two, so the results were always poor. But if I ran away from her, she would chase me, and then I could grab her collar when she caught me. Counterintuitive.
When you’re wading into the ocean, and a large wave comes toward you? If you turn and run for shore, the wave will probably break on your shoulders and knock you down. You’ll swallow saltwater and sand. But if you dive into the base of the wave, it will pass right over you as if it were nothing. Counterintuitive.
Driving on an icy road, and starting to skid toward a phone pole? If you try to steer away from that pole, you’ll probably be talking to your insurance agent soon. However, if you steer into the skid and aim for the pole (who was the brave guy that first figured this out?), you’ll straighten out and be okay. Counterintuitive.
There are lots of counterintuitive problems. When the military trains soldiers to respond to an ambush, they train them to run toward the enemy, not away. Why? Well, the other side is expecting you to run away, and that’s where they plan to shoot next (I hope they’re not reading this!). If you’re stuck in quicksand? Okay, you get the idea. Counterintuitive.
The difficulty with solving counterintuitive problems is that when you’re trying so hard to solve a problem, and see that you’re failing, your natural instinct is to “try harder,” and that makes things worse. It can almost feel like an insult when the world doesn’t respond to your solution. This often leads people to get frustrated and upset with themselves while they continue to make things worse.

Attitudes about Thoughts

The previous examples all involve counterintuitive problems in the world around us. It’s even trickier when we have counterintuitive challenges in our internal world, in our own minds. We have some unexamined assumptions about our thoughts that influence our reactions in unhelpful ways.

Our brains are not like computers that simply generate output. A computer generates an answer to a problem—maybe it calculates something for you, or maybe it formats material you’ve written into a letter format—and it has no opinion about what it produced. You “ask” a computer a question, and that’s all you get, the answer.
Not so with our brains. We have thoughts, including worries. We also have attitudes, beliefs, and thoughts about our thoughts. One belief about thoughts that we briefly examined in chapter 3 is the belief that thoughts can be dangerous. Let’s take another look at that.

Are Thoughts Dangerous? Want to try an experiment? Take a minute now to think about this book catching fire in your hands. Think about it in great detail. Picture the flames curling the pages, the white pages turning to gray ash, the smell of burnt paper, the smoke spiraling toward the ceiling. Any minute the smoke alarm should start screeching a warning. And yet here you are, still holding the unburned book in your hands, reading these words.

It seems clear that thoughts aren’t dangerous. Only actions can be dangerous.

Why Can’t You Just Control Your Thoughts?

One important attitude that many people hold about their thoughts is that they “ought” to be in control of them. They think they should be able to have the thoughts they want and not have the thoughts they don’t want. Do you think about it this way?
People who hold this belief are often offended and irritated by the way their thoughts seem to defy them. Again and again, they review the evidence about the content of their worries and see that the feared events are not at all likely to occur. They tell themselves that there’s “nothing to worry about.” Then they go on about their business. Sooner or later, they find themselves having the same worrisome thoughts. Maybe they’ve even been watching for them! Then they get mad at themselves all over again, wondering “why” they keep having the same dumb thoughts, reprimanding themselves the same way you might reprimand a teenager who has once again left dirty dishes on the table instead of clearing them away.
The truth is, we don’t have pinpoint control of our thoughts. And there’s always something to worry about, because we can worry about any possibility we can imagine. We don’t need realistic danger to worry.

Try This Experiment. Think of an elephant for about twenty seconds, and then stop thinking of it. No more elephant. Take one minute and keep it out of mind. No long trunk, no loud trumpeting sound, no tusks, no eating peanuts, no running away from mice.

How did you do? Odds are you just spent some time with thoughts of elephants. For most people, the results will be as obvious as an elephant stomping through the jungle. And if it seems to you as though you had no thoughts of elephants during that minute, then ask yourself this question: how do you know? The only way you can try to avoid all thoughts of elephants is to think of what it is to think about elephants, and watch to see if you do that while trying not to do it! You get elephants on the brain from every direction!
Anytime you deliberately try to stop thinking of something, you’re likely to think more about it. Psychological research on the subject of thought suppression¹ clearly shows that the main effect of thought suppression is a resurgence of the thoughts you’re trying to forget.
It’s the same with our emotions. We don’t control our thoughts or our emotions—or our physical sensations, for that matter. The more we try, the more we get thoughts and feelings we don’t want.
Your lack of direct control over thoughts and emotions may come to your attention quite clearly when some well-meaning friend tries to help you by saying “Don’t think about it” or “Calm down!” It’s probably painfully obvious to you what’s wrong with that suggestion. It might even make you angry that this person “doesn’t get it.” And yet, you may be continually trying to use this strategy without noticing that you’re using the same unhelpful method that doesn’t work, and then getting disappointed and frustrated when it fails again. If it doesn’t work when a friend urges you to “calm down,” it’s probably not going to work when you urge it upon yourself!

What Do We Really Control?

People often assume that control is measured by what they think and feel. They think that if they’re having odd or illogical thoughts, or strongly unpleasant and exaggerated emotions, that this means they’re “out of control.” They don’t like that idea, so they struggle to control their thoughts and feelings, and this is like trying to grab a greased pig on ice. The more you try to control thoughts and feelings, the more out of control they seem.

Control is about what we do, not what we think and feel. That’s why our laws describe behavior that’s expected and restricted. Society expects people to control what they do—how they drive, how they treat others, how they wait their turn in line, and so on. Our laws and social norms aren’t based on what people think and feel because nobody really controls those things. Control is about what you do.
And yet, it’s part of the human condition to assume that we can, or should be able to, control our thoughts and emotions. Certainly there are times when we want to. Our intuitive instinct with respect to worry is to “stop thinking that.” And it backfires, because worry is a counterintuitive problem. You’ll be better off with a counterintuitive solution for this counterintuitive problem.