Thinking: It’s Just What the Brain Does

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 own.
If you go too long without eating, your stomach will start to do digestive things without any food to digest, and you will feel abdominal discomfort, hear your stomach make embarrassing noises, and so on. It’s trying to fulfill its purpose even when it doesn’t have the necessary ingredients. It’s the same with your brain. If your brain doesn’t have enough problems to solve, it will make some up and try to solve them.
That’s chronic worry—your brain making up problems and trying to solve them, and you taking those thoughts as seriously as you take the tax calculations.
You’ve probably noticed that you experience more worry when you’re not so busy, and that when you’re really busy with activities and problems to solve you don’t seem to worry nearly as much. Maybe you’ve tried to use “keeping busy” as a way to cut back on your worrying. This is why. Worry is a leisure time activity. It expands, or contracts, to fill the time that’s available, because it’s simply not as important as most of our other activities. It takes what’s left over. Your brain is literally acting like a bored puppy, chewing on the carpet because it doesn’t have enough things to do.
We can train that puppy well enough that it will no longer chew on furniture, especially if we offer him other things to chew on. However, we can’t train the brain not to think of problems (because that’s a main purpose of the brain), any more than we could train our stomach not to rumble when we’re hungry.
Instead, we need to change the way we relate to our worry. We do better by learning how to accept and work with, rather than oppose, that fact that we are experiencing worry thoughts. We will also do better when we can recognize the worry thoughts as signs of nervousness and anxiety, the same as an eye twitch or sweaty palms, rather than some important message about the future.

Rules of Life

I regularly teach workshops for professional therapists about the treatment of anxiety disorders, and I usually like to introduce the workshop with an expanded and embellished version of the polygraph metaphor, commonly used in acceptance and commitment therapy.² Before I say hello, or introduce myself, before I say anything at all, I tell them this story.

So a man walks into my office, someone I know as a man of his word, who says what he means and does what he says. This man walks into my office and he has a gun, and he says, “Now Dave, what I’d like for you to do is take all the furniture here in your office, and move it out into the waiting room…or else I’m gonna shoot you!”

“So,” (I ask the audience, and now I’ll ask you, the reader), “as students of human behavior, what is the outcome you predict here?”

And someone in the audience will say, “You’re gonna move the furniture!”

That’s right, I move the furniture—I can do that—I move the furniture and I live.

A week goes by and the man returns—same man, same gun—and he says “Now Dave, the thing I’d like for you to do, is sing the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ The first verse will be sufficient. Sing the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ or else I’m gonna shoot you.”

So, what’s the outcome you predict here?

I sing the song—I can do that—and I live.

Another week goes by, and once again the man appears, and this time he has a colleague with him. The colleague rolls a cart, full of electronic equipment, into my office. The man says, “Now Dave, my associate here, he’s got lie-detecting equipment. The best electronics on the planet for detecting human emotion, virtually infallible. I’m gonna ask my associate to hook you up to the lie-detecting equipment. Then I just want you to relax. Or else I’m gonna shoot you.”

What’s the outcome you predict here?

Nothing good! Nothing good will come out of this one!

That allows me to get to the point of the story, namely, that this is the circumstance of some 40 million Americans with a chronic anxiety disorder. They wake up day after day, worried about feeling anxious, trying so hard not to feel anxious, and getting more anxious as a result of all that effort, digging a deeper hole with all their efforts to resist the anxiety. To help people overcome an anxiety disorder, therapists have to help people discover this aspect of the problem and learn to handle it differently.
And if you struggle with chronic worry, the same applies to your efforts to overcome that problem.
What makes it so apparent that I can move the furniture to save my life, and I can sing a song to save my life, but I can’t relax to save my life?
From the perspective of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), the answer lies with two important rules of thumb that govern our lives.³ ACT is a form of therapy that, more or less, belongs within the school of cognitive behavioral therapy, but has some very different ideas from traditional CBT, particularly with respect to our efforts to control thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations.
First, there’s a rule of thumb which governs our interactions with the external world around us, the physical environment that we live in. In the external world, the rule of thumb is something like this: the harder you try, and the more you struggle, the more likely you are to get what you want. Nothing is guaranteed, but you can improve your odds at getting something you want by making every effort possible. That’s the rule of thumb that governs our interactions with the external world.
But that’s not the only rule we live by. There’s a second rule of thumb, one that pertains to our internal world of thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations. In this world, the rule is quite different. Here the rule is something like this: the more you oppose your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations, the more you will have of them.
The rule that governs your internal world of thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations is the opposite of the rule that governs the external world. God help you if you didn’t get the memo about the second rule, and you try to manage your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations the same way you handle the world around you. It will lead you to use solutions that are bound to fail, and bring you grief and frustration every time.
If you’re someone who struggles with chronic worry, only to find that the peace and calm you seek continues to elude you, then you’re probably someone who will benefit by making more use of the second rule.
Our gut instinct, however, is usually to treat everything the same—oppose what we don’t want, wherever it is. Let’s now consider a workaround for this instinct: the Rule of Opposites.

The Rule of Opposites

This is an important rule of thumb which applies to a lot of anxiety symptoms. When we apply it to chronic worry, it means this:

My gut instinct of how to respond to unwanted, chronic worry is pretty much dead wrong. I am usually better off doing the opposite of my gut instinct.
How can this possibly be? Let’s recall the worry trick from chapter 1: You experience doubt, and treat it like danger.
The worry trick is a powerful influence. It will be very helpful for you to understand what gives it such power.

How Can We Protect Against Danger?

What’s good for danger? Three things: fight, flight, and freeze. If it looks weaker than me, I’ll fight it. If it looks stronger than me, but slower, I’ll run away from it. And if it looks stronger and faster than me, I’ll freeze and hope it doesn’t see so well. That’s all we have for danger.
Fight/flight/freeze methods all involve opposing the worry—struggling to stop worrying; getting mad at yourself because you worry; fighting to distract yourself or to stop thinking of it; repeatedly seeking reassurance, from friends and the Internet, in an effort to stop worrying; thought stopping; reliance on drugs and alcohol; superstitious rituals; and all other manner of “fighting to calm down.”
Doubt, however, isn’t danger. It’s just discomfort. And what’s good for discomfort? A million variations on “chill out and let it pass.” Claire Weekes, an Australian physician whose books about anxiety are still useful and popular fifty years later, recommended that people “float” through their anxiety.⁴ People were often unclear about what she meant by float. I think she meant, literally, the opposite of swim. Make no effort. Simply allow the environment to support you, and go on with your business.
For danger, we fight, or run, or freeze. For discomfort, we chill out and give it time to pass. What’s good for danger is the opposite of what’s good for discomfort. So if you get tricked into treating worry as a danger, this naturally makes it worse.
When you treat worry as a danger that must be stopped or avoided, you’re fighting fire with gasoline. Your gut instinct is actually pretty much the opposite of what would help. This is what gives the worry trick its power.
It’s as if your compass is off by 180 degrees, showing north when it points south. If you have a compass that’s off by 180 degrees, you can still find your way home, as long as you remember that the compass points the wrong way, and you need to go in the opposite direction it suggests.
Your gut instinct of how to handle worry has probably been to take its content seriously, opposing it and seeking to avoid it. That’s what we saw in chapter 3. When you take worry to be a sign of danger, you naturally treat it that way.
We need something very different for the discomfort and doubt of worry. This way would allow us to recognize the doubts and uncertainties that occur to us, and also allow for the way our brains may be over-vigilant in imagining future dangers. It would allow us to distinguish between thoughts that occur in our brains (our internal world) and events that occur (or don’t) in the external world. It would allow us to live more comfortably with the reality that we don’t control our thoughts, and that our thoughts are not always our best guide to what is happening, or will be happening, in our external world.
The Rule of Opposites can be a powerful guide in the search for a more adaptive way to respond to worry. We’ll come back to it again as we look for different methods you can use in responding to worry.

Thinking It Over

In this chapter, we reviewed the nature of worry and found it to be a counterintuitive problem, one best served by a counterintuitive response. This aspect of worry is firmly embedded in the Rule of Opposites, which suggests that a person’s gut instinct of how to handle worry is usually wrong, dead wrong, and that we’re better off doing the opposite of that instinct when it comes to handling worry. This rule will be an important guide as we consider different ways to work with worry.