Uncle Argument and Your Relationship with Worry

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 absolutely don’t want to argue. Arguing gives you a stomachache. What can you do?

It’s Hard to Avoid Arguing

You can’t move to another table, because there aren’t any empty seats. You can’t change seats with anybody, because nobody wants to sit next to Uncle Argument. So you have to sit next to him unless you skip the meal. You don’t want to do that because that’s usually the part you enjoy the most, and going without food gives you a stomachache as well. How can you sit next to Uncle Argument for the entire meal without arguing? What would your options be?
You might try ignoring him, but that just makes him louder and more persistent. He loves it when people try to ignore him, because he takes that to mean he’s winning the argument. So that won’t help.
You might tell him you don’t want to argue, but that also makes him more persistent, and he’ll start nagging you about being afraid to voice your opinion. You could yell at him, tell him to shut up, but that’s angry arguing, which delights and encourages him. You could listen carefully for him to say something that’s clearly wrong, and then point that out to him, but that’s also arguing, and he never admits to being wrong anyway. You could try to get other people at the table to help you out, but they don’t want to mess with Uncle Argument, so they’ll look the other way. You’re on your own!
You could hit him, but you probably won’t get invited to the next family event if you start a fistfight at this one. And you don’t want to bring the police to the party. So what can you do?

The Opposite of Arguing

How about this—you can humor him. You can agree with everything he says, true or untrue, brilliant or ridiculous, whatever. “Yes, Uncle Argument, how very true. So wise. From your mouth to God’s ears.”
Do you have any doubt that if you agree with everything he says, this man who loves arguing more than anything else will find someone else to argue with? Do you give anything up by humoring him? Would this be a reasonable way of responding to the persistent invitation to argue?
You can have an arguing, confrontational relationship with him, or you can have a humoring relationship with him. The man is so persistent that he leaves you no other choice. You wish you had other choices, but you also want to enjoy the banquet, and these are the choices you have.
Dealing with your worry is like dealing with Uncle Argument. If you take the bait and reply to the specific content of the arguments, you end up getting embroiled when you just wanted to eat. You end up exactly where you didn’t want to be—arguing, and finding that your comfort level is decreasing.
On the other hand, if you create the habit of humoring your worrisome thoughts, you can increasingly pass over the invitation to argue without becoming embroiled or upset. You can play with the thoughts, rather than work against them.
Does this sound counterintuitive? That’s good, because the problem is counterintuitive. If it’s true that the harder you try to suppress these thoughts, the worse they get, then you will probably benefit from trying something very different. Humoring the thoughts will be just what the Rule of Opposites would suggest.

Is That Okay with You?

Do you have any objections to this? Sometimes people express some reservations in the form of “should” statements, as in, “He”—Uncle Argument—“should be more respectful of my feelings” and “I shouldn’t have to deal with all these stupid thoughts!” But if that were going to get you somewhere, you’d be sitting at a lovely café without a care in the world, while a beautiful stranger reads poetry to you, instead of reading this book. Better to work with “what is” than to get stressed about those thoughts of what “should be.”

A New Way to Look at Worry

This “Uncle Argument” metaphor might be very different from the ways you’ve thought about chronic worry in the past. How have you thought about your chronic worry in the past? What kind of metaphors come to mind?
Most people who struggle with chronic worry tend to use metaphors that involve struggle, resistance, and fighting. They may think about the anxiety demon and how they can slay it. It’s natural enough to think about chronic worry in terms of demonizing it and opposing it. That’s a very intuitive response.
But this is a counterintuitive problem…and so when we rely on our natural intuitive responses, we often end up feeling frustrated in our attempts to solve a problem. When I’m skidding on an icy road, the harder I try to steer away from that phone pole, the more likely I am to hit it. I need to steer into the skid.
So it is with our metaphors for chronic worry. Worry is not a disease or a soul-sucking alien that’s invaded my mind. It’s just the natural consequence of my brain looking out for me, probably more than necessary. A counterintuitive response is much more likely to get me where I want to be. That will take a little getting used to.

Worry Is Like a Heckler

Chronic worry is like a heckler in the audience at a performance. Dealing with a heckler requires a particular kind of response. As a performer, it won’t help to go down into the audience and have a fistfight with the heckler, because that prevents you from delivering the performance you came for. Neither will it help to defend yourself against the heckler’s comments, because then you’re arguing with the heckler rather than doing your show. And it won’t do to try and ignore the heckling either, because it will be noticeable no matter how hard you try not to notice, and struggling not to notice will distract you from the task at hand. You could perhaps ask the heckler to stop, but generally speaking, hecklers don’t respond to simple requests to be reasonable. Your request will probably fall on deaf ears and the heckling will continue, and meanwhile you’ve again been distracted from your task.

What’s a good way to respond to a heckler? It’s probably best to work the heckler into your routine. This way, you don’t have to choose between going on with your show (or daily business) and listening to the heckler. And, as you work with the heckling in this way, treating it like you would any other sounds in the room, the heckling will probably die down. What keeps heckling going is the sense that the heckling is getting attention and being disruptive. As it starts to blend in with the show, it will probably diminish.

Are You Being Heckled By Your Own Thoughts?

What does it mean when you find yourself getting heckled by your own thoughts? As we saw in chapter 4, it means you’re nervous. That’s probably all it means—not endangered, just nervous. You could run a quick check with the two-part test from chapter 2 if you want.
Suppose you get an e-mail from a Nigerian prince, in which he offers to share a fortune in gold with you. He just needs you to give him access to your bank account so he can transfer it to you.
If you take the content of this e-mail at face value—if you take it to mean that you’ll soon be rich—you’re going to get suckered. However, if you read the content of the e-mail and make an interpretation of what it means—that someone is trying to scam you—you’ll probably come out of it all right.
These worrisome thoughts (the heckling) need to be interpreted in a similar way. The repetitive “what if” thoughts don’t really, accurately predict illness, job loss, boiler failure, kids flunking out of school, and so on. What they do mean is “I’m nervous.”
And that’s what you have to respond to—nervousness, not disaster.

Humoring the Worry

So how about doing some humoring? There are a lot of ways to do this. Here’s one method.
Simply take the thought, accept it, and exaggerate it. There’s a training exercise in improvisational theater called “Yes, and…” In this exercise, you accept whatever the other person in the scene has just told you, and build on it by adding something else. You don’t disagree, or contradict, or deny what the other player just said. You accept it and add to it. This is probably the most fundamental rule of improvisational comedy—no denial! Instead, accept whatever the other performers offer you and build on it.
This rule works on stage and will also work in your own mind, in your internal world. The reason it works so well on stage is different from the reason it works so well with worry, but this rule definitely helps with worry. It helps because it’s an expression of the Rule of Opposites.
How can you use it? Here are some examples of humoring the thoughts in this way.
What if I freak out on the airplane and they have to restrain me?
Yes, and when the plane lands they’ll probably parade me through town before taking me to the asylum, and I’ll be on the nightly news for everyone to see.
What if I get so nervous at the banquet that my hands shake so everyone can see?
Yes, and I’ll probably spill hot soup all over the bridal party and cause second degree burns, so the honeymoon will be ruined.
What if I get a fatal illness?
Yes, and I better call the hospital to make a reservation now, and probably the funeral home, too.
The point of this response is not to get rid of the worry. My clients are often so used to trying to rid themselves of their chronic worry that they’ll sometimes try the humoring response for a while, then come back to me and say “It didn’t work. I still worry.” That’s not the aim of humoring.
Worry is counterintuitive. When you try to remove it, by whatever means, it becomes more persistent. The point of a humoring response is to become more accepting of the worry so that it matters less to you. It’s to get better at hearing and accepting the thought for what it is—simply a thought, a twitch in your internal world. It’s okay to have thoughts—smart ones, dumb ones, pleasant ones, angry ones, scary ones, and so on. We don’t have that much choice in the matter. We all have lots of thoughts. And a lot of them are misleading and exaggerated. That’s okay. We don’t have to be guided by them, or argue with them, or disprove them, or silence them. We just have to be willing to hear them as we go on about our business.
I notice that my clients with chronic worry go through a cycle. When they have a time of extra worry, they label it “a bad time” and struggle to bring it to an end. When they have a time of reduced worry, they label it “a good time” and try to keep the worry at bay. They’re always trying to adjust their menu of thoughts—and it usually brings a very different result than they intended.
What’s a person to do? When you try to get rid of the “bad times,” it often prolongs and strengthens them. When you try to hold on to the “good times,” they get ripped from your hands.
Frustrating, right? Let’s recall that important observation: The harder I try, the worse it gets. How can you apply that here?
You might identify your worry thought and “keep that thought in mind.” What does that mean, to keep that thought in mind? It means the opposite of what you do when you try to “keep that thought out of mind!” You deliberately keep the thought at hand, playing with it, repeating it, trying not to forget about it, maybe checking in with yourself every three minutes or so to make sure you remember to repeat the thought to yourself periodically.
Why would anyone do that? Well, if it’s true that “the harder I try, the worse it gets,” you’ll probably get better results doing the opposite of what you usually do!

Become Less Attached to Your Thoughts

Another good way, a more general one, and perhaps the most important of all, is to get less attached to your thoughts, regardless of whether the content of those thoughts seems good or bad. Your automatic thoughts are like an unending soundtrack that accompanies you your entire life. Sometimes the thoughts are relevant, sometimes not; sometimes pleasant, sometimes not; sometimes accurate, sometimes not. There’s no off switch, no volume control. We live in our thoughts the same way a goldfish lives in water.
Neither you nor I get to pick our thoughts. We can, however, often pick how we respond to them, and we can certainly pick what we do with our time on this planet. We don’t need to get our thoughts arranged the way we might like in order to do things we want to do.
This work that people do of trying to hold onto the “good” thoughts and get rid of the “bad” thoughts—where do they do it? In their heads! As the activity of life goes on around them, they’re missing out, because they’re inside, trying once again to rearrange the furniture rather than coming out here into the sunlight where life actually occurs. Let your thoughts come and go in your head while you tend to the activities that are important to you out in the external world, the environment of people and objects that you live in.
Want to try an experiment? It won’t take long, maybe five minutes. It’s got three steps.

The Worry Experiment

Step One. Create a sentence, maximum of twenty-five words, that expresses the strongest version you can create of one of your typical worries, something that’s been bothering you recently. The first two words, of course, will be “what if,” so you really only have twenty-three words to play with. Try to create a thought that not only includes the terrible event you fear but also incorporates the long-term consequences of this problem, the angst you’ll feel in your old age as you remember this bad event, and so on. This will be the longest of the three steps. Spend some time on it to get a good worry expression and to get the most unpleasant ideas in it that you can.

Here are a couple of examples. As you might expect, simply reading these examples of worry will induce discomfort in many readers, the same way a scary book or movie will fill a person with fear. That’s okay, it will pass. However, if you don’t feel up to that experience right now, bookmark this section and come back some other time when you’re more willing to feel that discomfort.

Examples:

For someone who worries about losing his/her sanity:

• WEAK: What if I go crazy?
• BETTER: What if I go crazy and end up in an institution?
• GOOD: What if I go crazy, end up in an institution, and live a long, miserable, pointless life—forgotten, toothless, with bad hair, abandoned and alone?

For someone who worries about looking foolish at a party:

• WEAK: What if I get really nervous at the party?
• BETTER: What if I get really nervous at the party, and then start sweating and trembling?
• GOOD: What if I get really nervous at the party, start sweating and trembling, pee in my pants, and people avoid me the rest of my life?

Go ahead and draft your worry. Use a topic that you usually find quite upsetting, in order to make this experiment meaningful. State the “what if” worry and add two or three “and then” statements of the terrible consequences it will produce. Don’t just stop with your first draft. Take a little time to edit it and get the maximum strength—all the fear and loathing you can muster—into your wording.

Step Two. Write the numbers one to twenty-five on a slip of paper.

Step Three. Sit, or stand, in front of a mirror so you can see yourself. Say the worry sentence out loud, slowly, twenty-five times. After each repetition, cross off the next number on your slip of paper, so you can keep count.

If you prefer, you can group twenty-five small items—toothpicks, coins, jellybeans (or Tic Tacs!)—on a table, moving them one at a time with each repetition. Don’t count in your head, because that takes too much concentration. I want you to concentrate on the twenty-five repetitions of the worrisome thought.
Go ahead and try this. Pick a time and place that allows you privacy, so you can focus your attention on what you’re saying without a lot of concern for being overheard. You may feel foolish anyway, but please do give it a fair try. Don’t skip past this!
This exercise may not be a pleasant experience, but I think it will be worth the temporary pain. Experiments like this one will be very helpful in developing a better understanding of how your worry works and in cultivating a different way of responding to it. Come back when you’re done.
It seems odd and counterintuitive, this idea, but remember what kind of results you’ve obtained from logical and intuitive efforts in the past. Just check it out—it’s an experiment!
All done? So now, if you were doing this experiment in my office, the question I would ask is this: How did the emotional impact of the last repetition compare to the emotional impact of the first repetition? Which one bothered you more?

Repeating the Worry Usually Reduces Its Power!

If you’re like most people with chronic worry, you probably found that the worrisome thought lost power with repetition, so that the last repetition felt much less disturbing than the first one. And if you did, this offers a powerful insight into the nature of your chronic worry. (If you didn’t get this result, review the worry you used to make sure it’s representative of your chronic worries, and replace it if it’s not. If it is a representative statement, you might be dealing with a different kind of problem—depressive memories of a past event, rather than worrisome thoughts of a possible future event, for instance; or a strong obsessive compulsive tendency. If this is the case, perhaps you should review your work with the earlier chapters, or review your situation with a professional therapist skilled in this type of work.)
Think of all the efforts you’ve made to rid yourself of the worry, and how little you have to show for them. Think of the results you’ve obtained from the anti-worry techniques you listed in chapter 3. Yet here, with just a few moments of repeating your worry out loud, you probably reduced its ability to disturb you—not permanently, of course, but the repetition produced a temporary change in your emotional response to the worry.
“What if” this is more like the way to respond to chronic worry? “What if” this approach—humoring and making plenty of room for the worry—has more to offer you than all the thought stopping methods you’ve heard so much about?
This would mean a major revision of your relationship with chronic worry. It would suggest a counterintuitive response to a counterintuitive problem. Consistent with the Rule of Opposites, you would respond to chronic worry by accepting and playing with the thoughts, rather than trying to rid yourself of them. You would defuse the worry thoughts by accepting them as sources of doubt, rather than danger. You would humor the worries, rather than get drawn into unwanted argument. You would treat them like a tic, rather than a tumor.
In short, you can replace the counterproductive thought stopping with the very productive thought exposure. A snake phobic who wants to overcome that phobia will need to spend some time with snakes in order to overcome the fear. If you have an ongoing issue with chronic worry, the worrisome thoughts are your snakes.
I’ve worked with clients who feared snakes and wanted to overcome that fear, and I’ve done that by having one or more extended exposure sessions with a client and a snake. While the problem initially seems insurmountable to the client, it’s not really a hard job to help them overcome it. I just have to take the time to help them accept the symptoms of fear and get involved with the snake. The desensitization to the snake then occurs quite naturally.
The only thing I have to remember is to get a nonpoisonous snake. And with chronic worry, all the snakes are nonpoisonous. Thoughts, however upsetting, foul, disgusting, annoying, and so on, are just never dangerous. It’s discomfort, not danger.
For some people, it will be enough to take the humoring response as I’ve described it here. If you can do that, and return your energy and attention back to the activities that are important to you, that might be all that you need to do.
Other people may find the habit of chronic worry more persistent and entrenched in their lives and will benefit from using more specific and tailored techniques. You’ll find those in the next chapter.

Thinking It Over

In this chapter, we’ve looked at a basic tool you can use to shift your relationship with chronic worry in a helpful direction. You tried an experiment of repeating worrisome thoughts to evaluate what happens if you make room for the thoughts, rather than resist them. And we looked at ways you can humor these thoughts, the same way you might humor Uncle Argument. In chapter 9, we’ll look at more active ways you can respond to particularly persistent and unpleasant thoughts.