Review Your Typical Worries

Let’s take a closer look at some of your worrisome thoughts. This can help you better understand the worry process and find your way out of a chronic, conflictual relationship with worry.

Is that okay with you—to look at your worrisome thoughts and write some of them down?
You might not want to do this. Maybe you have the thought that if you write them down they will get more permanently fixed in your mind, or even be more likely to come true! Maybe you’d just like to forget them as soon as possible and enjoy the rest of your day. Maybe you think that if you write them down, this will lead you to worry even more than you already do.
Maybe you’re thinking, “Dave, I bought this book to get rid of my thoughts, not to write them down! I just want to be rid of them.”
But maybe this is what you usually do—try to push them away. And yet here you are, reading a book about worry. What you’ve tried in the past probably hasn’t been all that helpful. If it had, you’d probably be doing something more enjoyable than reading (and hopefully, writing) about worry!
If your past efforts to solve this problem haven’t done the job, it’s probably not due to the reason you imagine—that there’s something wrong with you. It’s more likely to be because you got tricked into using methods that weren’t so helpful. You’ll probably do better with a different approach. So, if you’re at all willing, experiment now with writing down a few of your typical worries so you can do a little work with them.

Put Your Worries in a Lineup

This is what you would do if you had been the victim of a crime, like a mugging or a robbery. You’d report it to the police, and they would ask you to sit down with the police artist and describe the mugger so the artist could draw him. This would help the police apprehend the perpetrator. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but it would be worth doing. Sketching out some of your worries to do this review might be your first step toward changing your relationship with worry for the better. Is it worth a try?
What are some worries that bothered you recently? Write down a few of them on your favorite electronic device, or do it the old-fashioned way with pen and paper.
Take a look at the worries you wrote down, and apply this two-part test.

1. Is there a problem that exists now in the external world around you?
2. If there is, can you do something to change it now?

If you answered “yes” and “yes” to these questions, then perhaps you should put this book aside and go do something to change the problem now. If there’s a significant problem now in the physical world you inhabit, and you can do something to change it now, go ahead and do that!
On the other hand, if you answered “no” and “no” (or “yes” to the first question and “no” to the second), then you’re dealing with chronic worry. You’re nervous, and that worrisome thought is just a symptom of being nervous.
Maybe your answer was neither “yes” nor “no” but included thoughts like these:

• It’s not happening right now, but what if it starts soon?
• If I don’t stay on guard and watch out, bad things might happen.
• I hope it doesn’t happen, but how can I be sure?
• It probably won’t happen, but it would be so awful if it did…
• Isn’t it possible that this might happen? I sure hope it doesn’t!
• If I don’t worry about it, then it probably will happen.

Thoughts like these are particularly tricky. You’re likely to have such thoughts when you try to persuade yourself that some dreaded event just isn’t possible, that it won’t and can’t happen. It’s very difficult to “prove a negative,” to prove that something “won’t happen” in the future; trying to is a losing game, a response that brings you more worry rather than less.

Cross-Examine Your Worries

This is like that moment in a courtroom drama, when a witness gives a long-winded answer to a pointed question in an attempt to avoid answering it with “yes” or “no,” and the judge finally orders the witness to just answer the question. You’re not on the witness stand, but it will be helpful to answer these questions with “yes” or “no.”

• Is there a problem that exists now in the external world around you?
• If there is, can you do something to change it now?

Your brain will refer you to various “possibilities.” You’ll have thoughts that tell you something bad could possibly happen sometime in the future. And that’s true. It’s always true, whether you have thoughts about it or not. Anything is possible, bad things sometimes do happen, and nobody knows the future. But this is of little help in taking care of business now. It’s more helpful to notice those thoughts and still restrict yourself to choosing “yes” or “no.” And if the answer isn’t “yes,” then it’s “no.”
Do your answers include these kinds of thoughts?

• I’ll never get on the right track.
• I won’t be able to solve this because I’ll always feel depressed.
• I don’t know what the best solution is, so I’ll never solve this problem.
• I can’t make decisions, let alone good decisions. I’m doomed to suffer.

These thoughts misdirect and mislead you by suggesting a problem in your internal world. The problem they suggest is usually about your being so defective—so depressed, so insecure, so uncertain, so confused, so stupid, so whatever—that you won’t be able to solve your problems and live a good life.
This is a “trickier” kind of thought—a trickier form of bait—and people very often are drawn into thinking and rethinking it, obsessing about it, feeling bad about it, and, in all kinds of ways, “stuck in their heads” about it. So if you struggle with these kinds of thoughts, consider this.
How consistent are these thoughts over time? For instance, if my dog develops a limp, or a warning light comes on in my car and stays on, my thoughts are usually consistent about these problems. I don’t have some days where I think the limp or the light doesn’t matter. I’m aware that both represent a problem I need to solve, and I feel concern. That concern remains with me until the problem gets fixed or goes away.
On the other hand, sometimes I have a discouraging thought that I’ll never be able to finish writing this book, and I feel down and depressed about that. This thought will typically last a little while and then get replaced by something very different. For whatever reason—I get a compliment on something I wrote, or I go see a funny movie, or have a nice chat with a friend—I start thinking and feeling differently about this thought of being a terrible writer. My writing ability is the same as before, and so is my draft. Yet I feel, and think, differently about it. In other words, my thoughts about my writing ability are variable and inconsistent over time.
My thoughts about my dog’s limp, or the warning light in my car, remain consistent over time until I fix the problem.
If you often experience the kind of thoughts above, thoughts that voice a general sense of despair, lack of ability, or hopelessness, ask yourself these questions:
Is this thought consistent over time? Has it been the same the last seven days, and seven weeks? Or does it change—do I sometimes feel more optimistic, sometimes realize that this thought is exaggerated? Does it go up and down like emotions do?

“Just the Facts, Ma’am”

Emotions change, frequently, and often without obvious reason. Facts don’t change in the absence of new evidence. If your thought varies in this way, if it changes with your mood, then it doesn’t really indicate a present problem in the external world. It indicates some unhappiness or upset within yourself, in your internal world, that varies over time—a problem in how you view and relate to your internal experiences of thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations. It might be an issue that follows you periodically, like your shadow when the light is right, but it doesn’t represent a problem “out there” in the external world any more than your shadow represents an assailant. It’s not a problem that you can, or must, solve right now. It’s a problem that plays out in your mind, without any corresponding reality in the external world. And it’s part of the burden of being human.
If you had a problem in the external world you had to solve right now, or suffer bad consequences, you’d know it, and you’d be doing something about it. If your dripping sink were stopped up and about to overflow, you’d be draining, not worrying. If your dog were whining and looking at the door, you’d be walking, not worrying.
Odds are, if you’re experiencing chronic worry right now, you don’t have a real problem in the external world. In fact, if the sink overflowed right now, or the dog started frantically scratching at the door, you’d probably quickly shift gears and take care of the problem. Worrying would be gone, for the moment.

Feelings vs. Thoughts

Sometimes people mistake feelings for thoughts. For instance, you might hear someone say, “I feel like I’ll never get a good job” or “I feel like I’m in danger.” But these aren’t feelings. They’re thoughts. Thoughts are ideas. Feelings are emotions, and they’re quite different from thoughts. Thoughts can be true or false, or somewhere in between. Feelings are emotional responses that don’t involve true or false. So when we look at these two examples, I think they’re more accurately put like this:

• I think I’ll never get a good job, and I feel sad about that.
• I think I’m in danger, and I feel fear about that.

The thoughts—about never getting a good job or about being in danger—may be true or false. The emotions are reactions to the content of the thoughts, regardless of how true or false that content is. We can experience an emotional response to a false thought just as powerfully as we can to a true thought. Our emotions are reactions to the content of our thoughts, regardless of the reality (or lack thereof) behind the thoughts.
This realization, that we can have strong emotional responses to thoughts that are false as well as those that are true, is the basis for doing cognitive restructuring, which aims at making our thoughts more realistic. It can often be helpful. However, it’s common for people who are stuck in chronic worry to find cognitive restructuring, and other efforts to edit their thoughts into more realistic versions, somewhat less helpful than they hoped. We’ll take a look at that problem in the next chapter.

Thinking It Over

Worry is common, a universal part of the human experience, but because it’s not generally visible to others, you’re likely to think that you’re one of a very few, maybe the only chronic worrier in the world. Not so!

What you worry about isn’t nearly as important as how you relate to the worry, how you try to get it under your control. The path out of chronic worry will take you into an examination of how you deal with worry. It’s there that you are likely to find that you’ve been using methods to control worry that are akin to cutting heads off the hydra—it just leads to more heads that bite and breathe fire! Recovery from chronic worry will involve replacing those methods with something more effective and thereby changing your relationship with worry.