The Worst Ways to Handle Worry

Excerpted from
The Worry Cure: Seven Steps to Stop Worry from Stopping You
By Robert L. Leahy, Ph.D.

Most worriers have heard this advice from well-meaning friends or even well-meaning therapists. You might-if you are really lucky-feel better for about ten minutes.

Trying to be more positive is a good idea at times, but as a worrier, you are actually afraid of being more positive. Telling you to "think positively" is like telling someone who has a fear of heights, "trust me, you won't fall. You can climb that mountain." The chance that this advice would work is zero.

What about saying to you, "You need to believe in yourself? It sounds nice, but if you are a worrier, how do you make that happen? Imagine that someone says, "Gee. I see you have all these doubts about yourself and your relationship. I want you to just start believing in yourself right now-this very minute." How likely is that to be helpful for you?

Again, zero.

The fact that your friend believes in you is wonderful, but how does it help you believe in yourself if you are a worrier? In fact, riot only does your friend's confidence in you seem to have absolutely no relevance to your confidence in yourself, but you might conclude, "She doesn't know the real me." If you are a worrier, you probably harbor a "private self' that is the core of your self-doubt, the "neurotic me" that no one knows. So when your friend says she believes in you, it may simply demonstrate that she doesn't really know you as well as you know yourself.

Sound familiar?

Or what if your friend says, "Try to get your mind off it" and urges you to distract yourself with something else, like taking a walk? As you are walking you will probably think, "I wonder if Pete is trying to call me and can't get through." And when the walk is over, you return home and go right back to your worry. And then YOU ask Yourself, "What does she think I should do, spend my entire life taking a nice long walk?" Since you don't view yourself as the Forrest Gump marathon walker, you believe that this well-meaning advice-to get your mind oil" it-is not going to do the trick.

Perhaps your therapist says to you, This thought that Pete will break up with you sounds like an obsession." Since the therapist is an "expert," you believe that what will come out of his mouth next will be incredibly valuable words of wisdom. He is about to provide you with an insight that will make everything crystal clear and will free you forever of these terrible worries. As you lean forward in your chair, your heart beating rapidly, ears straining to catch every important syllable he is about to utter, he says, "Just stop worrying."

Your eyes blink in disbelief. Surely you have missed something. "But how do I just stop worrying?" you ask.

He smiles, looking down confidently at your perplexed face, and says, "Whenever you worry, just yell 'Stop!' at yourself."

This simple solution had escaped you over the past ten years of your reoccurring worry. You could have solved it all by simply telling yourself to stop. How simple it is. You can use this thought-stopping technique.

Then the therapist reaches into his desk drawer and pulls out a rubber band.

"Here. Put this on your wrist. Whenever you worry, just snap the rubber band and say to yourself, 'Stop!'"

Even more perplexed, but with a faint feeling of hope, you go home and start snapping. You snap all week. You keep telling yourself to slop those thoughts. A few times, when no one is looking, you yell out loud, "Stop!" That distracts you for a hit-but then your worries come right back.

You return the next week to your therapist, now worried that your last chance to cure your worry hasn't worked, and tell him, "Doctor, it worked the first few times. I was distracted by the pain. But I'm still worrying just as much as before."

The doctor looks at you, thinking you might be a long-term case, and says, "You are just going to have to tell yourself to stop worrying."

"I don't know if that's enough." you respond.

"Well, you're going to have to believe in yourself."

If you are like the millions of people who worry, then you have probably heard some, if not all. of this bad advice. If anything, it makes you feel even more depressed. You don't feel understood, and you even think that your situation must be really hopeless because all these well-meaning people and highly trained experts can't seem to help you. The truth is. they can't help you because they are trying to get rid of your worries.

You are probably saying, "Isn't this what this book is about?"

It is. But your worries persist because of the ways that you try to get rid of I hem. You use techniques that make things worse. It's like an alcoholic trying to get rid of his alcoholism by having another drink. It'll take his mind oil the problem for an hour, but the problem is still there, and worse than before.

The reason you persist in doing many of these self-defeating things to help with your worry is that they all work in the short run. Each of these strategies you use will make you less anxious for a few minutes or a few hours. You might ask, "Well, isn't that an advantage for me? After all, if I can feel better for a few minutes or even a few hours, then what is wrong with a little bit of relief from my worries?" These techniques are self-defeating because they maintain your belief that you need to worry in order to reduce threat, they convince you that you cannot live with uncertainty and they keep you from facing and conquering your worst fears. In this chapter we will review twelve common failing strategies that not only will fail to reduce your worries over the long term but will actually make things worse for you. By highlighting these strategies, you can begin to understand why you need to relinquish the "solutions" that you have been trying. In fact, unless you abandon your failing solutions and strategies, you will continue to worry.

Let's take a closer look at the "dirty dozen."

The "Dirty Dozen": Twelve Strategies That Don't Work

1. You Seek Reassurance

You are worried that you don't look as good as you wish you did (who does?), so you turn to your partner and say, "Do you think I look OK?" Or you think that a small discoloration is a sign of cancer, so you go to doctors over and over to find out if you'll live. Or you are worried about the guy you met at a party who yawned while you were talking with him. and you ask your friends, "Is he bored with me?"

But, of course, you don't seek reassurance just once. You keep going back, again and again. In fact, you may have read other books about worry that actually encourage you to get reassurance from people that you are OK, or to keep telling yourself that things will work out.

Seeking reassurance does not work because you can always doubt the reassurance later. Maybe your friend is trying to bolster your ego by telling you that you look fine, but she really believes that you are looking worse than ever. Or maybe the doctor cannot really tell if it is cancer without doing extensive tests. As we will see throughout this book, the main problem with seeking reassurance is that it tries to eliminate uncertainty. Relying on reassurance will keep you from learning to live with uncertainty-an essential element in reducing your worry. Consequently, seeking reassurance is a strategy that will fail. What is worse, it will make you go back over and over to try to get more reassurance, since it will reduce your anxiety (and uncertainty) for a few minutes. Seeking reassurance is like a compulsion to check if you locked the door. If you check the door forty times, then chances are that the next time you leave the house you'll check it forty-one times. The real trick is to be able to walk through the door.

2. You Try to Stop Your Thoughts

Perhaps you look a course in psychology once and heard about "thought stopping," a therapy that involves getting rid of negative or unwanted thoughts by suppressing them. Thus, whenever you have the worry that you will lose all your money in the stock market, you are encouraged to force yourself to stop having these thoughts by snapping a rubber band on your wrist (to distract you) or just yelling to yourself. "Stop!" This is supposed to reduce your worries. Unfortunately, not only does thought stopping not work, but it actually leads to "thought rebounding" and makes things worse in the long term.

Let's try thought stopping. Close your eyes and relax. I'd like you to get a very clear image in your head of a white bear-a cute furry white bear. Now that you have this thought of a white bear clearly in your mind. I want you to stop thinking of white bears for the next ten minutes. Whatever you do, don't think of any white bears. Psychologist David Wegner found that attempts to suppress thoughts of white bears actually led to an increase in these thoughts after the suppression.' Thus if you suppress for ten minutes, you will have a substantial increase after the ten minutes is over.