Growing up, on the evening of every first day of school you could find me sitting on my bed surrounded by my various classes’ syllabi. I now had in my possession a road map of the next several months of my life, spelled out in Times New Roman and neatly stapled. Knowing what was coming – and more importantly, what was required of me – filled me with both adrenaline and reassurance.
The problem was that once I knew what was going to be due, I couldn’t seem to help but to start working on assignments. Now having the deadlines neatly printed in front of me created an anxious energy, and at the time, the only thing I knew to with anxious energy was to get to work.
I couldn’t always work ahead, though – often limited by not having learned the relevant material or not yet having been given more detailed instructions. And so the second best strategy for managing all of that anxious energy, all of that anticipation of what was going to be required of me, was to worry.
I’d love to say that this is where my own worry habit started, but in truth it had already become well-honed by that point. I’d figured out – not through conscious control, but rather simply by experience – that worrying about things seemed to give my mind something to do with all of the anxious energy that rattled inside me.
It’s worth breaking this down, because while I trust you are following me here, thinking about worrying in this way is a bit of a deviation from how we tend to talk about it. First, to define worry, I’m talking about a few different mental manifestations. Worry can look like:
- Imagining how a situation will go
- Rehearsing our reactions or responses
- Going over a sequence of events repeatedly
- Trying to think of ways to solve or prevent an issue
Underneath these different cognitive tasks, there’s usually an underlying emotional state of anxious anticipation or fear. But the worry itself isn’t a feeling, you’ll notice. It’s a mental behavior that sits atop the feeling.
I point this out because we often talk about worry as a feeling itself; “I feel worried.” But while it’s fueled by an emotional state, we can think of it as a way our minds have learned to respond to fear. Or how we have learned to respond to other related experiences, like uncertainty, anticipation, overwhelm, or just a body-based feeling of agitation.
In fact, worry can start to become our mind’s response to almost anything that just doesn’t feel “right” inside of us. We walk into a room that’s cluttered or loud and feel overstimulated. A friend is vague in their response to our invitation and we’re left wondering what’s up with them. While we are aware that these instances aren’t inherently dangerous, they stir some feeling inside of us that our brain interprets as uncomfortable. If we’ve built a worry habit, worry is what we start doing to manage the feeling.
To add in one more layer here, the trigger for the worry could actually also be something totally unrelated to emotion – or at least it starts out that way. We might experience a something in our physiology related to a body change (hello, perimenopause) or even just heat or altitude changes. Perhaps we can’t catch our breath as easily or our heart rate increases. Or maybe our hormones are fluctuating in a way that prompts more agitation inside of us. Nothing may have changed in terms of our actual circumstances, and yet our body is giving us the signals that are usually associated with threat. And those body signals have become well practiced at kicking in our worry habit. We begin to worry, and we label the whole experience anxiety.
This is important because we generally think of anxiety going something like this: something “bad” happens or we believe it will happen, we worry about the bad thing, we “feel anxious” in the form of physical agitation. What I’m suggesting here is that oftentimes what’s happening is slightly different:
Our bodies feel some level of dysregulation or discomfort (for any host of reasons, physiological, stored trauma, situational, etc).
Our minds scan around for what could be causing the distress (sometimes they correctly identify; often they don’t).
Our worry habit kicks in because it’s what we have learned to do to cope with the uncomfortable feelings.
If you are with me so far, I’m going to add in the next step in the process, which is a real bummer for all of us who have developed these worry habits as a way of trying to regulate ourselves.
Our mind worries (pictures or rehearses the feared future), and visualizing that future state increases the physiological discomfort inside of us (our heart rate goes up, our stomach turns, etc.)
Because our bodies are in distress again, our minds again scan for the problem, and they of course believe it to be just how bad this issue must be. And so they worry more.
The mind doesn’t differentiate between actually experiencing the feared outcome and imagining the feared outcome, and so worrying about it creates much of the same cascade of cortisol as if it were indeed happening. Everyone from Roman philosophers to Mark Twain have warned us that when we worry, we suffer twice (assuming the worried outcome actually happens), and yet we continue to do it. Why?
I don’t believe it’s because we love to suffer, but I think it’s because our brains have essentially become addicted to process of worry. Worry, as you saw above, is a self-reinforcing activity. We worry, which in itself creates more anxiety, and so we worry more. We struggle to get out of the loop.
And why did we start? Because, again, somewhere along the way – back as a kid trying to navigate a hefty school load or uncontrollable circumstances at home or really anything we couldn’t solve (which is most things at that point) – worrying worked, at least a little. It was a way to escape the direct experience of what was happening (overwhelm) and feel like we were doing something about it. Maybe it even helped us feel successful (good grades! avoiding that one feared outcome!) and it got locked in. We had a good high a few times and we’ve been searching for it ever since. But meanwhile, the drug is making us miserable.
The question naturally becomes how do we get off it. How do we break this worry habit that for many of us has become so deeply entrenched, we’re barely conscious of worrying, much less thinking of it as a ‘strategy.’
I use the drug analogy here cautiously but intentionally. I’m not suggesting they are exactly the same, but just like weaning ourselves off of some kind of substance, interrupting the worry habit does require a level of focus and the art of restraint.
For most of us, at least to start, we aren’t going to be preventing worry so much as catching ourselves and pivoting. In fact, maybe we won’t even pivot at first, but just start to recognize in real time the subtle shapes and dogged persistence of worry. As I said before, what I’m including under the label of ‘worry’ here is not just biting our nails as we imagine a worst case scenario. It could be any of the mental processes that we do to manage the future. That might look like ruminating on a thought, idea, or circumstance, obsessively trying to figure something out, rehearsing something in your mind, or making lots of lists and plans. Any of all of these, while they can feel productive on some level, will reinforce more anxiety. Getting familiar with the particular contours of your own worry habit helps you start to recognize it in real time.
With that clarity, we have more opportunity to interrupt the force of the loop. Many of us will want to interrupt it with our mind – the place where we feel most comfortable – but in my experience, that often doesn’t work for very long. We try to redirect our thoughts, but they subtly end up back in the loop. What I find more helpful is to consider how you can change the situation or your physiology. If you’re in bed ruminating about the meetings you have tomorrow, walk around the house once to shift your setting and your breath. Splash water on your face. Pop earbuds in and turn on bilateral beats. Text a friend to ask how their presentation went today. We will need to pull ourselves out of the recesses of our busy brains to interrupt the thinking loop.
This isn’t easy at first – namely because the neural pathways in our brain are well paved and we’ll want to do what’s most familiar. Our minds will try extraordinarily hard to convince us that we need to get back to our form of worrying or bad things will happen. Our minds warn us that we won’t be prepared. We’ll never figure out the solution. We’ll be even more overwhelmed. None of that is objectively true, but we’re used to letting our minds boss us around, and so it can feel really hard to disobey.
A little reminder that has helped me and others in these situations is this: if you can ruminate, the feared thing is not actually happening right now. Perhaps it seems obvious, but this differentiation is important for our brain to take in. As I mentioned before, our minds don’t particularly distinguish between the emotional distress of something happening mentally versus in reality, and so calling out the difference can help to draw this line.
And then comes what is perhaps the most challenging instruction of all, which is to be willing to sit in the uncomfortable energy. This is the energy that the worry was trying to help usher us away from (even if it also ended up producing more of that energy). Being with it means, of course, tolerating feelings we don’t particularly like or may even be very afraid of, and so it requires a good amount of practice. Our minds will again try to convince us that if we don’t do something to rid ourselves of the feeling, we won’t survive it or it will last forever. And unfortunately, the only way that we’ll ever disprove those beliefs is by doing something different than we’ve always done.
Fortunately, sitting with the discomfort of anxiety, uncertainty, powerlessness, or whatever other feelings tend to bring up worry for us, doesn’t mean just literally sitting doing nothing. It helps to feel like we can do something while experiencing this energy. In meditation practice, we talk about finding an “object” of meditation – something to focus on.
One favorite when trying to be with energy of anxiety is to focus on bringing our unconditional warmth to it. Pema Chodron once gave the image of melting the ice cube, and I particularly love this one. We can imagine the discomfort we don’t want to feel as the cold, sharp form of an ice cube and see ourselves as directing a compassionate, warm energy toward it. Not to eradicate it, but to slowly and lovingly melt it.
There are plenty of other images and ways of working with the uncomfortable energy of anxiety, but the bottom line is this: we have to be willing to stay with it to some degree versus staying addicted to the escape. The drugs of worrying and overthinking are powerful and full of false promises. They shrink our lives and convince us that they are our only salvation.
Breaking out of the worry habit honestly feels dangerous at first. When we’ve spent our lives believing that we can only protect ourselves through our mental effort, we feel vulnerable and exposed initially. But what happens when we start practicing coming back to present again and again (and again) is that we begin to develop a basic trust. A trust that our worry isn’t the answer. That sometimes things work out without our effort. That all we can do is meet the moment we are actually in. That we are more durable than we think.
A Note: The concepts and practices I talk about here are some of the things we work with in You School: Transformative Tools for Self-Leadership. I’ll be starting a new cohort of the the experience soon.
