The Worry Trick Read online

  Who should read this book? People who worry too much, people who worry about their worrying, people who love people who worry, people who treat people who worry. This book is for people who have never before considered reading a self-help book, and for people who have a stack of them on their night tables. It is for people who have never been in therapy, people who are in therapy now, and people who have tried therapy and been disappointed. Even people who have tried cognitive behavioral therapy and medication and found both somewhat helpful will find something new and liberating here.

  In the history of psychotherapy, there have been many approaches to worry, all derived from the psychological theories of the day. For decades, therapy for worriers was a search for insight into “why” people were anxious about whatever they worried about, with the expectation that finding the causes of the worrying would make it melt away. But while many people learned a great deal about themselves, often the worry continued unabated. Another school of therapy suggested that since worry is essentially negative irrational thought, pointing out thinking mistakes and changing these thoughts to more rational or positive thoughts would work to relieve it. However, often people do actually know what the “right” things to think are, but the worries creep back and continue to create misery. Then people worry even more about what is wrong with them, so that they cannot listen to their own best advice during endless internal debates.

  Dr. Carbonell shifts the conversation about worry from efforts to analyze or banish it to changing one’s relationship to it, so that the presence of doubt or worry thoughts causes minimal distress. He puts an end to the internal fight by refusing to fight; if you refuse to dignify the contents of worry with concern and attention, you deprive your worries of what they need to grow and thrive. He illustrates how a shift in attitude can liberate joy and other emotions that have been overtaken. Worry thoughts are treated not as signals or messages or news or calls to urgent action, but as unanswerable questions not worth engaging with. Learning to distinguish between thoughts that lead to helpful action and the “nagging” of an anxious brain is the first task he teaches. From there, he takes the reader on a step-by-step journey to recovery.

  Dr. Carbonell is a wise and nonjudgmental observer of the human mind, and all of us can benefit from his teachings. Having the courage to pick up this book was the first step. Take this journey at your own pace, and you will find yourself offering the book to others even before you have finished reading it.

  —Sally Winston, PsyD

  Introduction

  Joe sits at the table, having dinner with his wife and kids. The children are excited, talking about their first day of school and everything that happened there. If you were at the table, you might notice that Joe is quieter than his wife, but he nods enthusiastically at different points and seems to be involved in the discussion.

  However, if you could eavesdrop on Joe’s thoughts, you’d get a very different picture. Even as he nods his head, and looks from person to person, the conversation inside his head isn’t at all about the first day of school, or even about the family meal. Joe’s not paying much attention to what happens now at the dining table where his family sits, out there in the “external world.” Joe’s mind is focused on his imagination of another place and another time, in his “internal world.”

  The boss comes back tomorrow, Joe’s thinking, and she’s going to want to see my draft report on the marketing plan. What if she doesn’t like it? What if she thinks it should be more polished by now? I’m at the top of my pay grade, what if she thinks they should go with a younger, less expensive guy?

  Joe suddenly becomes aware that his external world has become quiet. His family has stopped talking, and all eyes are on him. He shifts his attention, looking from face to face. “What is it?” he asks.

  “Daddy!” his daughter shouts, laughing. “Aren’t you going to pass the butter? I asked you twice!” Joe hastily passes the butter, makes a joke to cover his inattention, and his kids laugh at how absentminded their dad is. But Joe sees a concerned look cross his wife’s face, and a new worry comes to mind. What if she sees how worried I am about work? I don’t want her to worry… Why can’t I just sit here and have dinner? And then, as the family turns their attention to the playful antics of their dog, Joe experiences another thought in the back of his mind and returns to his internal world: I hope I sleep tonight, I really need the rest before I see the boss—what if I have trouble sleeping?

  Some people only experience this kind of worry infrequently, perhaps in response to a new problem in life, but this isn’t an isolated instance for Joe. He has similar experiences in other situations—staff meetings; conversations with his boss; Sunday nights at home, when he’s talking with his wife while watching TV, and his thoughts turn to the work week ahead; and more.

  Joe worries a lot. It’s not apparent to most people. In fact, he’s often described by people he knows as a really calm guy. “Nothing bothers Joe!” they say. It’s an act. Inside his own mind, in his internal world, Joe is often bothered, often struggling to get his thoughts to behave and stop bothering him. It rarely works.

  Worry is a common and bothersome occurrence for most of humanity. What is worry?

  Worries are simply thoughts and images we experience that suggest something bad about the future. Nobody knows the future, but worries pretend that they do, and that it’s going to be bad, really bad.

  Worries come uninvited, like party crashers. These party crashers are like fanatics on a mission. They have a message they think is important, a warning. They’re going to present that warning, again and again, even though it detracts from the party atmosphere, even though no one wants to hear it, because they think they can save you from trouble this way.

  Nobody enjoys the arrival of the worries. Nor do people feel grateful for the warnings, because they sense that they’re overblown and unlikely, focused on hypothetical problems that probably won’t happen. And yet, they’re often hard to dismiss from your mind. Your attention gets turned away from your own agenda and the world around you. It gets focused on your internal world, full of thoughts about possible bad troubles, the same way that drivers turn their attention from the road to look at an accident on the shoulder.

  Joe is particularly frustrated by his worry. It interferes with his enjoyment of life, invades his leisure time, and, despite the successes he has in life, leaves him feeling like a fraud.

  If, like Joe, you’re frequently bothered by unwanted worrisome thoughts, there’s another aspect of worry to consider, and that is the kind of relationship you have with worry. Since you’re reading this book, you’ve probably already thought about worry a lot, and yet it might not have occurred to you that you have a relationship with it. You do.

  Your relationship with worry includes the importance you place upon your worries; how you interpret your worries; how you feel, emotionally and physically, in response to your worries; what you hope to do with your worries; the ways you try to accomplish those hopes; the ways in which your behavior influences the amount of worry you experience; the ways in which your worries influence your behavior; and the beliefs you hold about worry. In this book, I’ll help you take a good look at your relationship with worry and change it to your advantage.

  Probably the most important aspect of the relationship people have with worry is how worry consistently tricks them. If you frequently experience more worry, and more trouble with worry, than you find reasonable and ordinary, it’s probably because the worry trick has shaped the relationship you have with worry in ways that make your worry more persistent and upsetting. In this book, I will help you identify the worry trick, find evidence of it in your own life, and change your relationship with worry so that its power to disrupt your life shrinks to more ordinary levels.

  You might experience worry as a problem all on its own. Or you might experience worry as part of a broader problem, called an anxiety disorder, such as generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social phob
ia, a specific phobia, or obsessive compulsive disorder. The methods I’ll show you in this book can be used as a self-help method on their own or be part of a process involving the help of a professional therapist, whichever your circumstances may require.

  Joe has tried hard to rid himself of his worry, with little success. It galls him when otherwise well-intentioned friends and family members suggest he simply “stop worrying,” as if this were a simple problem with an obvious solution. He’s tried many things—thought stopping, keeping really busy, prayer, meditation, improving his diet, exercise, nutritional supplements, seeking reassurance from his wife, seeking reassurance on the Internet, and numerous other possible solutions, with little to show for his efforts.

  Still, Joe, and the millions of people like him, can reduce the disruptive effects worry has on their lives. If you find that you have more worry in your life than seems reasonable, and you have been frustrated in your efforts to reduce it, there are better ways to handle worry, and I will help you discover them and put them to work.

  I suggest you use this book by starting on the first page and reading the entire book at a comfortable pace, taking notes and answering my questions along the way. I’ve worked with many clients who struggled with worry, and these are the methods that have been helpful to so many of them. Like them, you may feel pressured to rush through this book to get the fastest results you can. Don’t do that!

  A frozen pizza comes with directions like “Cook at 400 degrees for twenty minutes.” If you’re really hungry, or impatient, it might occur to you to think, I’ll just cook it at 800 degrees for ten minutes! But you’ll still be hungry after the fire department has left your home. Don’t rush! I know you’re hungry, but take your time. This book is printed in indelible ink!

  CHAPTER 1

  The Worry Trick

  This chapter will introduce you to the worry trick, and show you how people literally get tricked by their worries. This will be the first step in a process that helps you shrink the role worry plays in your life. For many people, worry is their constant, carping companion. When you come to really understand how the worry trick works, you’ll get fooled less often and be much better able to reduce the worry in your life. I’m going to help you shrink worry down to an occasional nuisance.

  One universal characteristic of worry is that people would like to have less of it. Nobody has ever come to my office seeking to worry more, or to have a better class of worries.

  Why not? Why don’t people have more appreciation for the tips and warnings that worry brings them? If thieves were stealing my car, I’d appreciate it if my neighbor tipped me off so I could call the police. I’d probably give him a reward! Why don’t we feel the same way about the tips worry gives us?

  Worry: An Uninvited Guest

  People don’t appreciate worry because it rarely, if ever, has new and useful information. Instead, it’s repetition of potential problems that they’re already well aware of, or warnings about possible events that are unlikely and exaggerated. It’s more like nagging than news.

  If worries ever had some important, useful information, you’d probably be more inclined to welcome them, but worry usually has a terrible track record for accuracy. If your worries were useful even a small percent of the time, you probably wouldn’t be reading this book! Worry predictions aren’t based on what’s likely to happen. They’re based on what would be terrible if it did happen. They’re not based on probability—they’re based on fear.

  If worries were your neighbor, you’d move. If worries were your employee, you’d fire him. If worries were a radio station, you’d change the channel, or turn it off entirely. And therein lies the problem.

  There’s no off switch to your brain, and no simple way to stop the worrisome thoughts. This is what makes worry so tricky. Your natural instinct is to stop it. Of course it is! If a mosquito was buzzing near you, you’d swat it. But you don’t have a good way to simply stop the worrying because we aren’t built that way. It’s not just that we don’t have a way to stop the worry. It’s much trickier than that.

  Our efforts at stopping the worry almost always make things worse, rather than better.

  You CAN Change Your Worry Habit

  That doesn’t mean you’re stuck without hope of a solution. Worry is actually a manageable, workable problem. The reason people have so much trouble with worry is that worry literally tricks you. It goads you, tricks you into responding in ways that you hope will help but which actually make your troubles more severe and more persistent.

  If you have struggled with worry for a long time, and find yourself unable to solve the problem, this is why. You don’t have trouble solving this problem because you’re too weak, too nervous, too stupid, or too defective somehow. You have trouble solving this problem because you get tricked into trying to solve it with methods that can only make the problem more severe and more chronic. I’m going to help you uncover this trick, find evidence of it in your own life, and learn how to handle worry in a more effective manner.

  What Is the Worry Trick?

  The trick is this: you experience doubt, and treat it like danger.

  We all live our lives as if we know what’s going to happen. Most days, when I leave for the office, I tell my wife and son what time I’ll be home. I say it like we can count on it, but of course I don’t really know for sure. I might end up booking an extra appointment and staying late; I might be home early because my last appointment cancels; I might return some phone calls that become lengthy conversations; I might have a flat tire, or get stuck in a traffic jam. If it’s a really bad day, I might even die unexpectedly.

  I usually don’t pay much attention to those doubts. I know they’re there, because I can’t know what the future really holds, but they don’t usually bother me too much. I just go on about my business and figure that I’ll respond to events as they arise. That, literally, is life.

  Danger or Discomfort?

  If you or I have a doubt that really bothers us, though, we’re likely to respond very differently. We’re likely to treat that doubt as if it were a sign of danger, rather than the usual discomfort we can feel about uncertainty. When you get tricked into treating the discomfort of doubt as if it were danger, this leads you to struggle against the doubt, trying to remove the unwanted thoughts from your mind.

  How do you struggle against the doubt? You might try hard to prove to yourself that the feared event simply won’t happen. This usually results in arguing with yourself and feeling more anxious as a result. You try to “stop thinking about it,” only to get the same results that come from banning books—it increases your attention to and interest in the unpleasant idea! You might try to do something to protect against the feared event and then find yourself worrying about whether or not that protection will be sufficient. You might bother your friends and family with repeated requests for reassurance. However, when they do tell you that you’ll be okay, then you worry that they’re just humoring you so you’ll stop talking about it.

  And you get dug in, deeper and deeper, with more doubt and fear, and more unsuccessful struggle against it.

  Fear of the Unknown

  People sometimes talk about “fear of the unknown” as if it were a special category of fear. Everything about the future is unknown! It’s not the unknown part that people find scary. It’s when they consider the future and think that they do know what will happen, and that it’s going to be bad. That’s when they get afraid.

  If you were planning on cooking a special meal for your boss and her husband tonight, and experienced the thought What if I get stuck in a traffic jam on the way home?, you might try and remove that doubt by making sure it couldn’t happen. You could set your GPS to give you notices of traffic delays; you could check the Highway Department website for notices, or call their 800 number; you could take local roads, even though that would make for a longer trip. You could call your spouse and ask what she thinks your chances are of getting stuck, trying to get
some reassurance. You could develop a backup plan by identifying a restaurant that could deliver on short notice, and keep their phone number handy. That might remind you that you’re very dependent on your cell phone, and you might start monitoring its battery strength very closely.

  If you had a winter cold that lasted longer than usual, and experienced the thought What if I have cancer or some other terrible illness?, you might try similar methods to clear your mind of the worry. You might consult your physician, which is usually not a bad idea, but if that didn’t clear your mind of this worry you might consult several other doctors as well. You might read up on your symptoms on various Internet sites. You might look at the obituaries, to see if anyone your age had died of cancer recently. You might look at a medical encyclopedia. You might ask the neighbors if they knew of any colds going around.

  In each case, you could expend a lot of time and effort trying to prove to yourself that you have “nothing to worry about,” that there is no chance of getting caught in a long traffic jam or of having cancer.

  Unfortunately, you probably won’t get much relief from these efforts because you can’t really prove that something won’t happen. You can recognize that it’s very unlikely, but there’s no way to prove to yourself that some calamity isn’t going to happen tomorrow, because just about anything, no matter how improbable, is possible if your rules of evidence are loose enough.