Worrying About “What If?” Is Like a Game

Do you know the game Mad Libs? It’s a party game that became real popular in the 1960s. It was a book full of very short stories that had words missing. You’d get a bunch of your friends together and then you’d ask them to give you the words you needed to complete the story, without letting them see the story. You’d tell them “give me an adverb—a color—a number—a proper noun,” and so on. You’d write these words in where they were needed, and then you’d read the completed story to your friends. Then they’d laugh, especially if you had served plenty of beer beforehand. This is what we did for fun before the Internet.

So, this “what if” sentence, this statement of chronic worry, this is the Mad Libs of anxiety. It’s just as arbitrary, as random, as that. You can fill in a catastrophe here, any catastrophe. It doesn’t matter what you pick. You have your usual choices—your “favorite” worries—but they all fit! They all fit because you have “Let’s pretend” in front.
The problem is, after a while you forget that you’re pretending.
If you’re like most people with chronic worry, over time you get so used to these thoughts that you stop noticing the pretend part. You probably don’t even notice the “what if” clause after a while. The only part of the thought you consciously notice is the inflammatory and exaggerated catastrophe clause.
When you don’t notice the “what if” clause, you get this steady drumbeat of ideas in your mind that suggest disaster. You don’t notice the part that tells you it’s pretend! No wonder people can get so anxious and depressed in response to worry. It’s like a cable TV channel devoted exclusively to bad news, beamed directly into your mind.
When you don’t notice the “what if” clause, this drumbeat of ideas sounds like this:

• What if…I GET CANCER?
• What if…MY SPOUSE LEAVES ME?
• What if… I FREAK OUT DURING MY PRESENTATION?
• What if…I GET SO NERVOUS, THEY THINK I’M A TERRORIST?
• What if…I LOSE MY MIND AT THE RESTAURANT OVER LUNCH?

The effect of the worry is strengthened even more by the fact that it often occurs while you’re multitasking. Even if you noticed the “what if” part, you don’t have the opportunity to give it your full attention and resolve it. You’re too busy checking your text messages while eating your lunch and scanning your schedule. This thought has a lot of subliminal power. We don’t stop to notice that we’re experiencing this particular thought and respond to the thought as just that, a thought. Instead, we skip right past the “what if” part, focus in on the catastrophe clause, and absorb its message as if it were true.
This is one of the obstacles you face in dealing with the problem of worry. As a society, we value thought, and usually think of thought as one of our characteristics that sets us apart from animals, one of the highlights of billions of years of evolution. We value human thought. And most of us are vain enough to put a particularly high value on our own thought. Thought is good, powerful, and important, we believe, and my thoughts are especially good, powerful, and important. We certainly act this way in responding to worry. If we didn’t take these thoughts to be important, they wouldn’t cause us so much grief!
Our brains are wonderful problem-solving tools. More than any other factor (except perhaps opposable thumbs), it’s our brains that have enabled us to become the top predator of the planet. Our brains have produced the wheel, speech and writing, and the calculations necessary to land a ship on a comet.
But the brain is still a problem-solving organ, looking for problems to solve. And, especially when there’s no urgent problem (like an attacking dog) to solve, the brain will make up some problems, just to have something to do. So it doesn’t matter how smart you are. A certain amount of your thoughts will just be noisy nonsense.

How Worry Baits You

This “what if” clause is like that red flag to a bull that I mentioned in chapter 4. Imagine if you could have a heart-to-heart conversation with a bull, just before a bullfight. I think it would go something like this.

Listen, bull, I know how you feel when you see that red flag. Your blood boils, right? You want to paw the ground, snort real loud, then race over and flatten that flag, and the guy holding it, too. But remember what happened to your cousin, Toro? He ran over to that flag, and while he was attacking it, some guys stuck short knives in his side. Then another guy waved it again, and when Toro ran at him, the guy stabbed him in the neck with a sword. It was a trick! They bait you with that red flag, man! So the best thing for you to do, when they start waving that thing at you, is remember it’s a trick! Lie down and eat some daisies! Don’t take the bait! Don’t get suckered!

It would be real hard to train a bull to do that. But you can train yourself to take a pass on the “what if” bait, to notice the “what if” and respond differently. You can train yourself to remember that it is, in fact, a bunch of bull.
The first step is to get better at consciously noticing the “what if” clause. This is the part that says “Let’s pretend (something bad),” and when you don’t notice this clause, it’s easy to lose sight of the pretending. Generally, the catastrophe clause that follows seems so upsetting and ominous that it’s easy to forget about the “what if” part, especially when you barely noticed it to begin with.
So here’s a way to become more aware of the “what if” clause.

Count Your Worries

Get yourself some bottles of Tic Tacs, or any kind of mint that comes in fixed quantities. Tic Tacs, for instance, come in bottles of sixty and one hundred (except in Australia, where they come in bottles of fifty—go figure!), but any kind of mint or candy that comes in a fixed number per bottle will do. Keep it with you at all times, in your pocket, purse, or briefcase.
Get into this habit. Whenever you notice a “what if” thought (or you hear yourself saying it out loud), take out your bottle of Tic Tacs. Take one out. You can eat it, or you can flick it onto the street, or toss it in the garbage. Whatever you do with it is fine, just remove one from the bottle and close the bottle.
You can use this as a way to track, and count, the number of times you experience a What if…? thought during the week. If you prefer, you could use some other method, like a clicker. I like the Tic Tacs, though, because they are more likely to interrupt you in your mental “business as usual.” And, if you feel self-conscious about doing this kind of self-monitoring, no one will notice a thing—just a person eating a mint!
Practice makes permanent. Do this for a couple of weeks, and you will make a pretty permanent change in your ability to notice the “what if” thoughts. They will no longer be subliminal, slipping into your mind unnoticed the way a pickpocket gets your wallet without drawing your attention. Now you will become more and more aware of the habit. And it will start to lose some of its power to fool you.
Most people quickly come to recognize how central these “what if” words are. Occasionally I meet someone who discovers they use a variation on this phrase, such as “Suppose,” “Isn’t it possible,” or other words that contain the same invitation to imagine bad stuff happening in the future. If you discover that your worry bait comes in a slightly different wording, you can use Tic Tacs to observe that wording as well.
One more thing before you start. As you start using the Tic Tacs, you might be displeased when you notice how many times you catch yourself in the act of “what if”-ing. You might feel overwhelmed when you realize how often this thought occurs to you. You might feel, initially, that you would have much preferred that I hadn’t ever brought it to your attention.
Don’t be fooled. This is the good news, when you notice all those “what if”s, even though you may initially feel dismayed and discouraged. It’s the good news because you’ve been having all those thoughts for some time, long before you started this book. All that’s different now is that you’re noticing them. That’s the good news, because noticing them is a new skill that will help you.
Keep track of your counts for a couple of weeks to help you really get into this habit of passively observing “what if.”
How does this strategy of becoming more consciously aware of these “what if” thoughts compare to what you usually do?
I’m thinking that it’s probably the opposite of what you usually do. That might seem odd and uncomfortable to you. However, it’s actually a good sign that your efforts to change your relationship with chronic worry are on the right track.
Remember the Rule of Opposites: “My gut instinct of how to respond to chronic worry is typically dead wrong, and I am better off doing the opposite of my gut instinct.” (If you don’t remember that, you can review it in chapter 5.)
If you keep responding in the same way, you can expect the same results. We’re looking for different results here, and this will take different, even opposite, actions.
We can see the Rule of Opposites in action when we consider that many people try very hard to distract themselves from their worrisome thoughts. If that really worked, you wouldn’t be reading this book. You would have already dismissed and banished your unwanted worries.
It just doesn’t work that way. It works the opposite. The more you try to eject thoughts from your mind, the more they keep coming back in, like unwanted drunks at a party.
That doesn’t mean the effort to distract yourself is worthless, however. It can point to some useful information. Consider this question: When you are motivated to distract yourself from a problem, what does it tell you about that problem?
Think about that for a minute. What kind of problems do we usually want to distract ourselves from?
Imagine that you were standing in line at a bank when a robbery broke out, and you heard gunshots. How likely would you be to take out your checkbook and balance it, in order to distract yourself from the unpleasant gunplay?
Probably not very likely! You’d be too busy diving to the floor, or looking for some cover or an exit. You’d be trying to protect yourself, not distract yourself.
When are we motivated to distract ourselves from unpleasant and worrisome thoughts? When we’re not facing a clear and present danger. When the chips are not down. When the babbling of our cerebral cortex, rather than the self-defense of our amygdala, is center stage.
So when you notice that you feel the urge to distract yourself, this can be a powerful reminder of what the game is. The chips are not down, you are not in danger, and that’s why you are motivated to distract. If you actually were under the gun, you wouldn’t even think of distraction!

The “Why?” Question

The “what if?” question is the pickpocket that steals your peace of mind, and it does it so sneakily that you don’t notice what’s actually happening.

Most pickpockets have an accomplice, someone who draws the attention of potential victims away from the pickpocket by clumsily bumping into people, or even shouting out “Watch out for pickpockets!” on a crowded train. When people get bumped, or hear a warning about pickpockets, they tend to check their wallets, which tells the pickpocket where they are. Pickpockets understand the Rule of Opposites.
The “why?” question is the pickpocket’s accomplice.
When you’re having the thought that you should be controlling your brain and find that once again, your brain is producing all kinds of unreasonable and unwanted worrisome thoughts, you’re likely to respond with “why” questions, such as “Why do I keep worrying so much?”
People usually experience the “why” question as a kind of rhetorical question. They don’t really expect an answer. It’s more of a protest, a finger-pointing question, an angry demand that some higher authority correct this injustice. It’s not a question so much as a complaint. Unfortunately, it’s a complaint expressed in the absence of a complaint department. This question leads people to feel weaker and more pessimistic about their future, because it suggests that the solution to the problem requires someone else, maybe even God, to do something. Meanwhile, they have to wait and worry.
When you’re caught up in worry, getting into the “why” question amounts to taking the bait. The “why” question is usually some form of resistance to the worry, rather than an actual inquiry. And resistance to worry inevitably fans the flames of worry, rather than extinguishing them. This resistance is the equivalent of slamming on the brakes when my car starts skidding on an icy road. That’s the last thing I need! Resistance is intuitive. It’s also counterproductive. What we really need is a response that’s counterintuitive and productive.
People often think that the “why” question is the key issue. Why do I have these thoughts? Why me? Why here? Why now?

Better Questions

The truth is, “why?” is the least useful question there is about worry. This question is just another way of being anxious. While you probably can’t simply dismiss it and make it go away, you don’t have to get involved in taking it seriously. It will be more helpful to steer away from this “why” question, to catch yourself in the act of asking it, to notice it and move on to the more useful questions of “what and how.”
What am I experiencing now? Well, I’m experiencing worrisome thoughts.
How can I respond to it? I’ll cover this with the steps in chapter 9.

Thinking It Over

This chapter directed your attention to two types of worrisome thoughts—What if…? and Why?—that consistently mislead and misdirect you into a life of chronic worry, and suggested ways of disarming them. Becoming more aware of these thoughts as they occur to you is a big step in learning how to disregard the “bait” that so often lures people into making their worry more persistent.