You’re nineteen years old, wrapping up your sophomore year of college. That term paper you’re writing, the one that has to be hand-delivered to your professor’s mailbox by end of day, is a dozen pages short. As of this moment, while you stare mindlessly at the screen, you’ve got today’s date at the top and a title you’re unhappy with. And the reason you’re stalling and surfing through Facebook status updates is that you didn’t read two of the three texts required to form a proper response.
And you skimmed the third.
If you’re not worried at this moment, the content of this book is of no use to you. I envy your cold detachment. You’ll achieve great things.
Of course you’re worried! You’ve got seven hours to push out twelve pages of material on a subject you know very little about. No, it’s not an impossible feat, but it’s certainly stirring up some nerves. We can all agree that this is a legitimate worry, and for the purposes of this book (and your study of and battle with Anxiety), we’re going to call this type of worry a signal.
SIGNAL
“I have a final paper due before dinner
on two texts I haven’t read!
And I haven’t started!”
Why a signal? Well, because at that moment, the knocking knees, knot in your throat, cold sweats, and affected breathing—all physical manifestations of your worry—are prompting you to put out effort. Your body is signaling you to TAKE ACTION. “Move it! DO something!” You must own up to the difficult situation you’ve put yourself in, acknowledge the worry and the physical symptoms associated with it, and develop an abbreviated plan of attack. Take action! Accept the mediocre title and move on! Get off Facebook and start writing! You call a classmate who’s read the assigned texts and invite him or her over for breakfast. You call your professor (commence sobbing) and beg for an extension on account of the three final exams you’ve endured this week. Or, alternatively, you call your professor (still sobbing) and invent a semi-plausible story about a computer virus . . . or an unpleasant breakup . . . or a dormitory fire that destroyed all of your possessions, including the hard drive on which your paper was saved, and thank God you weren’t in the building at the time!
Whatever moral standard you choose to live by, no matter how much sobbing you choose to employ, the signal is still TAKE ACTION: move, work, write, create, call, plead, invent, lie (anything except stay still, sulk, stare, stall, succumb).
Anything worth worrying about is worth problem solving. (Of course, the key to living by my motto is to know what is worth worrying about and what is not.) Either the worry pops up and it’s a signal that we have some problem solving to do . . . or it’s plain old noise.
Noise is what its name suggests. Buzzing. Nuisance. Interference. It’s irrelevant. It’s repetitive. It’s downright irritating at times. It’s not productive or useful or worth listening to. Noise is static.
SIGNAL
Your teenage daughter is out on a date.
She was due home at midnight.
It’s now 2 am.
NOISE
You have OCD, and unnecessary “checking” is your thing.
As you hear the hotel door close behind you, you think,
“Did I lock the front door when I left home this morning?”
Let’s give a more in-depth example of noise.
You, an overachieving nineteen-year-old sophomore, completed your term paper days in advance of the due date. To say you were comfortable with the assigned texts would be an understatement; you could probably recite them from memory. Rather than handing in the paper early, you used that spare time to review your essay response, making minor changes and correcting some overlooked grammatical errors. You deliver the final draft eight hours before the deadline and e-mail your professor a copy as well.
You awaken at 3 am, panicking. Wait—what if I totally missed the point of the assignment? What if I misread the prompt? What if I summarized too much and analyzed too little? What if I forgot to include the bibliography? What if I get a D on this paper?! That would really bring down my final grade and my GPA. My parents would be really disappointed.
Talk, talk, talk. Worry, worry, worry.
What tells us that this is noise as opposed to a signal? First, it’s three o’clock in the morning. You (like most of us) have declared three o’clock in the morning as sleep time. Pursuing the worry at 3 am brings you no benefits, even if it is a valid concern. You’ve got to treat it as irrelevant noise.
Second, must I remind you that you are not the procrastinating, underprepared college freshman? You are the diligent, bright student who is mindful of the deadline and goes above and beyond as opposed to doing just enough. Having reexamined the paper multiple times, you most likely would have noticed if your response was off target. Don’t you agree? See where I’m headed here? You have found nothing tangible to substantiate your worry, nothing to legitimize the fear that you’ve “blown it” and put a big, ugly dent in your GPA. Earning a D is not impossible, sure, but it’s unlikely.
Mark this one as noise and go back to bed.
SIGNAL
You and your partner had an argument at breakfast.
You both said some mean things and then
stormed off to work. Neither of you has apologized.
NOISE
You called your partner at 10 am, apologized,
and scheduled to talk when you both get home.
But you are still dwelling on the argument
instead of focusing on your work.
Or let’s imagine that your son (or your daughter, niece, whoever) has been accepted to their top choice school in New York City. And while you know that this is an accomplishment worth celebrating, you’re overcome by worry. What if another terrorist group attacks New York? It happened once. It can happen again. If my daughter [son, niece, relative] goes to New York, she won’t be able to protect herself from something like that. I don’t want her to go. It’s too dangerous. There are plenty of other schools . . . and so on.
You’re right. She won’t be able to protect herself. And you can’t protect her either. We have no control over the fate of New York City or its residents. We can’t predict the future. And unless you are employed by the CIA and are privy to information that states otherwise, no one has detected a current threat on the City of New York. Yes, 9/11 was a horrific, devastating, tragic event. But it was also a singular event. Its impact on our minds and memories, and our spirits and families does not substantiate the worry that it will happen again, in New York City or in Toledo or Kansas or anywhere in between. No signal exists here; no call to action. Here is that irrelevant, repetitious noise, posing as a signal, posing as something worth worrying about.
Step Back
Worry is supposed to be only a trigger for problem solving. It is not supposed to last a long time. But Anxiety’s goal is to get you confused as to what is a valid concern and what is noise and then to get you to dwell on the worry instead of solving the problem.
As long as you’re actively engaged in that worry, you’ll never be able to decipher whether it’s a signal or noise. So when a worried thought pops up, take a step back, disengage from your upset about the specifics. Examine the worry and then decide if it’s a signal or if it’s noise. If you conclude that it’s a signal, that’s wonderful! You can do something about a signal. Signals come with solutions. Signals we can handle.
On the other hand, if that worry pops up and sounds like noise, you can’t solve it. No solution exists. The paper’s been handed in (twice!). No changes can be made at this point. Getting out of bed at 3 am and rereading the response is caving in to the noise. Your easy-listening station is picking up static, and you’re turning up the volume, trying to decipher the lyrics to the song you can barely make out beneath all the noise. It’s time to change the station.
“What if I’m wrong?” you might ask. “What if I decide something is noise, but it’s actually a signal? What then?”
What then? Well, in most cases, your head would roll right off of your body.
Of course you might be wrong! Parked on an inclined road, you worry that you’ve left your car in neutral. You choose to dismiss this pesky worry, treat it as noise, and keep walking. Hours later, you return to that same spot and find that your car is missing—or, rather, that it’s rolled down the hill and into a tree . . . or another vehicle . . . or several other vehicles. It turns out the car was in neutral. Whoops! You screwed up.
I won’t sugarcoat it. There’s always the risk that you’re wrong when you decide a worry is noise. More important, you have to be willing to take that risk. “Nuts! I left my car in neutral. I’ll have to get that bumper replaced. Well, that was stupid. I won’t make that mistake again.”
SIGNAL
“I’m supposed to move the car by 7 am.
It’s 7:15 am. I hope it didn’t get towed!
I had better go move it!”
NOISE
“I’m supposed to move the car by 7 am. It’s 5:45 am.
I hope it doesn’t get towed! What if the alarm fails?
I had better wake up in an hour!”
Warning: What I’m about to say might just blow your mind. This right here might disrupt the whole worry system you’ve sculpted and perfected over the years. Ready? Brace yourself. Here it comes:
What you often worry about isn’t worth your attention.
Astonishing, I know, but ultimately true. The things your mind cooks up (the flawed term paper) aren’t always valid concerns. The burdens you take on (the pending terrorist attack) don’t necessarily need your shoulders to rest upon. And here’s the best part: If you happen to treat noise as a signal, you’ll hit a dead end as soon as you begin to problem solve. How reassuring is that! It’s foolproof! As soon as you give your noisy worry some undue attention by actively exploring solutions, you hit a wall. SMACK!
Signals require actions. Noise requires nothing. It’s that simple.
Try to resolve a noisy worry. I dare you. Try to wake up at 3 am, rewrite that twelve-page paper, sneak past security and into the administration building, break in to your professor’s office, retrieve the old paper from the desk, replace it with the revised copy, hack your professor’s e-mail, delete the digital copy you had e-mailed previously, sneak out, return home, go back in time, and resend the document. It makes for a great intellectual thriller, but in reality, it’s static. Change that station.
Either a worry represents a valid concern and therefore becomes the first step in your problem-solving process, or that worry is irrelevant, distress-provoking noise you should not address. Anxiety needs you to respond to a noisy worry as though it is an alarming signal. It would love for you to think, “This might be serious. It could cause me harm. I’ve got to pay attention. Even if it turns out to be noise, I need to feel certain that it is noise. Besides, I trust my feelings, and I’m uncomfortable right now, so something must be wrong. Why would these worried thoughts pop up in my mind unless there was a threat?”
Exhausting, eh?
For all of us, needless worries will blast away at us with content that, on the surface, sounds so serious. If you struggle with OCD, you might become compelled to wash your hands, based on this belief: “If I don’t wash my hands, I might make someone else dangerously ill.” If you become focused on the fear that you might bring salmonella home from the grocery store to your children, causing them grave illness or death, you’re going to feel highly threatened. Who wouldn’t become distressed if they believed in the imminent possibility of such catastrophic outcomes? If I thought it was highly probable that I would catch the flu by not washing my hands, I guarantee you that I would wash my hands thoroughly. I’d support my actions with this stance: “I’ve got a hectic life right now. I can’t cancel a week’s worth of writing or treatment sessions or conferences to fight off the flu. Not right now. I can’t handle that!”
But in this OCD example, contamination is the topic of your obsession, but contamination isn’t the issue. The issue is that Anxiety has you treating noise as though it’s a signal. Suppose I were to say to myself, “I’ve just imagined something inappropriate. That means I’m a bad person.” If I fall for that thought, I’d be highly distressed. I can’t handle the belief that I am inherently a bad person! If you suffer from OCD, then the topic of your obsessions is irrelevant; it’s noise. But OCD doesn’t let you understand that. It keeps you focused on the noise and makes you interpret it as a signal.
Well, if OCD isn’t about germs or being a bad person (or any of the other topics it generates in your mind), what’s it about? OCD is about you not being able to tolerate doubt and distress related to your theme. If you understood that, then the more accurate thought would be “If I don’t wash my hands, I’ll feel uncertain and anxious.” When an obsession pops up, it is a signal—a signal that you are having an obsession! And that obsession is designed to produce doubt and discomfort. It’s not a signal that something terrible is about to happen. I’m going to help you learn to handle uncertainty and distress. I can’t help you if you believe your obsession is truly about contamination or about being a bad person, because those messages are unhelpful noise that should not be addressed.
Maybe OCD has never messed with you, but you are generally a worrier. Then you likely dwell on a broad set of issues, particularly health concerns, your finances, relationships, and work or school performance. Anxiety has the ability to take a legitimate concern, such as being able to pay this month’s mortgage, and cause you to worry about it all day, every day, instead of focusing your attention on productive problem solving.
If I am a single father of three and I just lost my job, I am going to worry about how to put food on the table and pay the monthly rent. It wouldn’t be surprising for me to think, “If I can’t pay the mortgage at the end of the month, I could lose the house. The kids and I could end up out in the street. I can’t let that happen!” This is certainly a relevant concern. And my worry should trigger my creative intelligence to help me solve this problem. But if instead I fall into a subroutine of worry-without-an-action-plan, that will have no redeeming value. I’m not coming up with options to solve the problem. I’m not figuring out where my money is going to come from. I’m simply distressing myself by repeatedly reciting the nature of my problem. When we create a subroutine in which we worry throughout the day about such a topic, disconnected from taking problem-solving actions regarding a legitimate concern, then we are making a serious error in strategy.
If I can help you accomplish three essential tasks, you can win this competition. The first is to distinguish worries that are important signals from those that are irrelevant noise. Second is to make sure you act on the signals instead of simply worrying. We’ve been talking about these two tasks here, and we will continue in these next two chapters.
Your third task is to stop paying attention to the noise. We will spend the rest of the book learning some very interesting ways to handle those useless, irrelevant, unhelpful, and even hurtful worries.
We have already talked about the surefire way to get rid of worries, which is to avoid any actions that will provoke your distress. That’s why people stop flying, or never take the elevator, or refuse to touch anything that might be “contaminated.” When you avoid because of your irrational fears, Anxiety scores big-time points. So I’m going to show you how to step forward again, which means that those worries you silenced by your passivity will now return. When you start worrying unnecessarily—when you fret over some difficulty without the intention or ability to problem solve—Anxiety is manipulating you.
The quickest, easiest, and most helpful way to handle a noisy worry is simply to drop it and focus on anything else. If that intervention fails you and those thoughts become like a boom box blaring in your head, you will need a more nuanced response. Then it’s time to engage in our strategy. And our first task is to decide that attending to the topic of your noisy worry is the worst move you can make, one that guarantees you will lose.