The Worry Trick: How Your Brain Tricks You Into Expecting the Worst and What You Can Do About It

We will also do better when we can recognize the worry thoughts as signs of nervousness and anxiety, the same as an eye twitch or sweaty palms, rather than some important message about the future

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 you find yourself arguing with yourself, there's one thing you can count on – you're not going to win this argument.

I helped my client become aware of how he was "maximizing" all the negatives in his mind and "minimizing" all the positive.

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

Questions to Consider If you were told that a neighbor never worries about his kids, would you think that was a good thing or a bad thing? Would you like to be known as someone who doesn’t worry about your kids? If your significant other said to you, “I don’t think you ever worry about me,” would you take it as a complaint or a compliment?

When you’re under the influence of this belief, you tend to act as if the simple act of worrying can change the future, that it might prevent bad events from happening that would have otherwise happened. I’m not referring here to situations in which your thoughts lead you to take action, and those actions influence the future. Here I mean that people treat worry itself as something that can affect the future.

Moreover, when you interact with the external world, you get more involved with realistic rules of thumb. When you’re in your head, by contrast, you can imagine anything. This is why anticipatory worry is almost always worse than anything that actually happens in real life—there are no rules in your head, anything seems possible! In the external world, the rules of reality apply.

Thoughts, however upsetting, foul, disgusting, annoying, and so on, are just never dangerous. It’s discomfort, not danger.

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.

Your recognition that your worries are exaggerated or unrealistic doesn't help you if you continue to avoid what you fear anyway. If you avoid the object of your worries, you will become more afraid of them. What you do counts for much more than what you think.

This is a real problem when you yourself recognize that your worry is based on an "irrational" fear. "I know it doesn't make any sense," people say. "That's what really bothers me about these thoughts.

Thoughts are ideas. Feelings are emotions, and they're quite different from thoughts. Thoughts can be true or false, or somewhere in between. Feelings are emotional responses that don't involve true or false.

You'll have thoughts that tell you something bad could possibly happen sometime in the future. And that's true. Its always true, whether you have thoughts about it or not. Anything is possible, bad things sometimes do happen, and nobody knows the future.

When you struggle against your worries, you generally get more worry rather than less.

Chronic worries don't get solved because there really isn't anything to solve. The worry just gets repeated until it's replaced by something else.

This most often takes the form of an argumentative, fighting kind of relationship in which you persistently struggle to control and change your worrisome thoughts, only to find that the more you resist and oppose them, the more persistent they become.

If you feel that you have too much worry in your life and want to have less, you can probably learn to shrink the role of worry plays in your life.

It may surprise you to hear that what you worry about, the specific content of your worrisome thoughts, isn't usually all that important. What's most important is how you relate to your worrisome thoughts, whatever their content may be.

You get more worried as a result of your effort to stop worrying. That's the heart of the trick.

you might also have some unconscious beliefs about worry, beliefs which suggest that worry helps you somehow.

If you avoid the object of your worries, you will become more afraid of them. What you do counts for much more than what you think.

Resistance is the fuel by which chronic worry spreads.

Acknowledge and accept. Humor the worrisome thoughts, as you would humor Uncle Argument. Activity—resume doing things that are important to you in your “external world” (and take the worries with you if necessary).

What you have is the emotion of feeling nervous. It’s okay to feel nervous. You probably really, really dislike the emotion, but it’s like the experience of sitting in an uncomfortably warm room, not like camping in a forest fire. It’s discomfort, not danger. You might be sitting in an uncomfortably warm room and reading about a forest fire, or watching a movie about a forest fire, but it’s still just discomfort, no matter how realistic the film is or how vivid the description.

The path to having less trouble with worry involves changing your relationship with worry rather than trying to change the worries themselves.

That’s why you’re worrying, you’re nervous, not because you’re up against a real problem in the external world.

The amygdala doesn’t use language. It learns by association, and that’s how it remembers

something bad happens and I hadn’t worried about it, I’ll feel guilty. This belief leads you to treat worry as a duty, or maybe even a beneficial activity. If you shirk your duty, bad things will happen and they’ll be your fault.