A Thinking Man

What’s your worst nightmare? I daren’t tell you mine. It’s too embarrassing and too scary!

Sometimes we do spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about what might happen, and while some of that is understandable and natural, for some of us there comes a point where it tips over the edge and becomes obsessive.

Given that we are programmed to feel emotion, that our bodies have evolved strong instincts to protect us from danger (fight) or to remove ourselves from it (flight), and that we have immense computing power in our brains to anticipate and calculate risk, it would be unnatural if we didn’t worry sometimes. Some worry is natural - even productive. In fact, if we were faced with threat or danger and didn’t worry, we would probably be either dead or psychotic. So, a degree of anxiety can be healthy.

But obsessive worry can be counter-productive and can stop us functioning normally. We become tired and stressed. A lot of our energy goes into the worry so that the analysis leads to the brakes going on and eventually to a degree of dysfunctional ‘paralysis’ - not literal ‘paralysis’, but just that sense that we cannot really concentrate on anything else or get things done.

Albert Ellis, a cognitive therapist who founded Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), came up with many suggestions for handling worry. I was re-reading some of them the other day and was again struck by their helpfulness, and I thought I would try to rehearse some of the key suggestions here.

Strategy One: Be Realistic

Sometimes we invent worlds that are totally unrealistic, and this is especially true in relation to worry. We actually make our worry worse by exaggerating the probability that what we fear most will happen in a worst case scenario. Although life doesn’t come with guarantees, it is loaded with different probabilities of differing values.

Like most parents, after my children had passed their driving tests and went solo, I used to worry a lot, not just about the potential damage to the vehicles they were driving in, but about the safety of their lives. I consciously had to remind myself that although there were risks involved, they had been taught well, had passed the test, and that the threat of an accident, though real, was actually less than my imagination was telling me. I worked to consciously counter the internal tape that wanted to increase my anxiety by making a particular outcome seem almost inevitable when really it wasn’t.

We could, of course, get killed by crossing the road. I don’t worry about that and am realistic about it because: 1) I know the risk to be very small; 2) I know that I will use my skill as a careful pedestrian to minimize that small risk and make it even smaller; 3) I have long experience of successful road crossing.

Strategy Two: Accept That Life Has No Guarantees

In a perfect world there would be certainty and no risk whatsoever. Unfortunately, none of us live in a perfect world. To want a perfect world is to spend time longing for something that is never going to happen. To have such desires is unrealistic and mentally unhealthy.

We can never have certainty in relation to health - the person who we worry about may get better and the fit person we didn’t worry about may suddenly drop dead. Similarly we can never make the perfect decision about jobs or relationships. We may make a good decision at the time, only for it to turn out badly because of circumstances beyond our control. Equally, our choices may turn out for the good. The point is that there is always risk and no certainty.

Many people worry because they want to make the risk-free, perfect decision. They are chasing clouds. There is no such thing as the risk-free, perfect decision. I need to accept that there are no guarantees of a good outcome, but work sensibly to do my best to ensure that I make a good decision. I gather information. I weigh up the arguments. I make a decision on the balance of probability. It may work out. If it doesn’t, that doesn’t necessarily mean I made a bad decision - it just means that things didn’t work out. And if it doesn’t work out, I try to do whatever I can to learn from experience and move on.

Knowing that there are no guarantees and that the perfect decision doesn’t exist can take away a lot of the pressure of having to worry about getting it perfect.

Strategy Three: Stop Awfulizing

Do you have awfulitis? There’s a lot of it about, and it’s absolutely awful!

This is about getting a different perspective - a bit like being realistic about the risks. We worry because we exaggerate the consequences of what we fear most. If so and so happened, then it would be absolutely awful. But in reality, it may be unpleasant, however, in most situations we could imagine something far worse.

A colleague of mine recently worried obsessively about his seventeen year old son getting a job. The son hadn’t done brilliantly in academic terms, and had started to get into a bit of trouble from mixing with some of the ‘wrong’ crowd. The colleague told himself that if his son didn’t get a job it would be absolutely awful.

In the father’s imagination, the son would stay at home all day, lose his self-esteem, start taking drugs and start stealing to feed his habit. He would get into endless rows with his father and start bringing his friends round during the day, putting house and property at risk. Eventually there would be one big row and the son would leave home never to return.

In reality, what happened was that his son spent six months consistently trying for a job and eventually got two in quick succession. There was the occasional difficulty at home, but nothing like the scenario the father had anticipated. At times it was bad, but it wasn’t as awful as he had imagined it. And even if it had been as bad as the father imagined, even that wouldn’t have been as awful as it could have been.

Strategy Four: Don’t Minimize Your Ability To Cope

Of course, you never know if you would be a good parachutist until you get thrown out of an aeroplane with a big handkerchief on your back. Beforehand, you could be unrealistic about the risks (the parachute would never open, I know it wouldn’t), you could fret about the lack of absolute certainty, you could awfulize the situation and say that the experience would be absolutely too terrifying for you - and yet if it happened, you would almost certainly cope and land safely, or with minimal injury.

When the BSE crisis hit the UK farming industry several years ago, the money to pay for it was taken partly from the education budget. It would have been too politically sensitive to take it from schools, so a lot of it was taken from the Further Education sector. All over the country, as FE budgets were reduced, colleges re-structured and shed staff (largely middle management posts as departments were merged to save salaries). I was working as a manager in an FE college at the time, and I and several close colleagues were worried about our jobs. We were convinced that if we lost our good income we would never find work again and would face financial ruin.

I, and several others lost our jobs. Many years on, a group of us still meet regularly for social gatherings. Most of us are so glad that we ‘got out’ when we did. Some have learned to survive on little money and are enjoying retirement. Others have obtained more lucrative jobs. Others have re-trained and learned skills that they would have thought impossible before being ‘thrown out’. The ‘ejection’ provided the creative impetus that we needed to discover that we had far more resources than we knew we had.

Behind all these strategies is the key notion in cognitive therapy that one of the things all people can do, is talk to themselves and challenge any thinking that is not helpful. Unhelpful thinking is usually untrue, and usually leads to a degree of dysfunction. If we can recognise what internal ‘tapes’ we are playing to ourselves, and recognise what is wrong with them, then we can stop being victims and start to take control of how we respond to life.

Tags: accidents, Albert Ellis, anxiety, awfulizing, CBT, cognitive, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, cognitive therapy, fear, obsession, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, REBT, worry