This chapter introduces three daily maintenance tasks you can use to reduce your daily dose of worry and render the worry less disruptive over time. The first one involves regular exposure to worrisome thoughts. The second is a breathing exercise, and the third is a mindfulness meditation.
Use these as you would use a daily vitamin. They’re not antibiotics, or some other medication you take to relieve a specific ailment or symptom. They’re something you do on a regular basis, not to achieve some immediate, specific goal, but for their overall contribution to your health and wellness.
If you tried the experiment in chapter 8, you probably discovered that when you deliberately turned your attention to chronic worry, without resistance or distraction, your worry lost some of its emotional impact. My clients generally report that they get more relief from deliberate worry than they ever did from thought stopping.
They’re usually surprised by that, because it’s so—you guessed it—counterintuitive. They thought they’d get more relief from efforts to stop worrying than they would from deliberate worry. But it turns out that the opposite is usually true. You’ll probably find yourself encountering this realization time and again, as you work with the pattern of chronic worry. The Rule of Opposites is one of the best guides you have!
Chapter 9 offered a variety of quick ways to respond, on the fly, when you find yourself engaged in unwanted chronic worry. They all incorporated the Rule of Opposites, and some of them might have seemed silly. This isn’t because I’m silly, or because I think you’re silly. It’s because so much of the content of chronic worry is silly, and when you take that content at face value, you get fooled into fighting worry in ways that make it worse rather than better. Those responses are all good ways around this problem. I hope you’ve sampled them, and picked a couple that you can use when the need arises.
Let’s suppose you’re the manager of a medium-sized department at your workplace. You have your own work to do, and you have to supervise the work of a group of employees as well. You’ve tried several different ways to find the right balance between communicating with your staff and getting your own work done.
You tried leaving your door open all the time, so that staff could drop in to see you whenever they want. This encouraged them to stay in touch with you, and to advise you of situations that needed your attention, but it also encouraged a steady stream of staffers dropping by to chat, complain, and score brownie points with you, preventing you from getting your own work done.
Then you tried keeping your door closed, to discourage all but the most determined of staffers. However, this led staffers to increasingly hang around outside your office, sitting around idly, and making noise, while hoping to have a chance to catch your eye. The bolder ones would even knock on your door, or slip notes underneath it. Everyone’s productivity, yours and theirs, suffered as a result.
In that case, you might try a third method—setting a schedule for when staffers can drop in and see you, and also for when they should leave you alone unless they smell smoke. You might keep your door closed for much of the day, so you could do your work, and have it open at scheduled times each day, so your staff could see you when they need to. That’s the method I want to suggest to you for establishing a better relationship with chronic worry—schedule regular appointments for it.
You’d probably prefer being completely free of worry, but you also probably know by now that avoiding and opposing just gives it more energy. Worry appointments are more likely to help you. They’re designed for those persistent, unwelcome worries which are not of any use to you—chronic “what if” worries, which don’t point out problems you need to solve, but simply nag and bother you. They build on a feature of worry that you probably noticed when you did the experiment in chapter 8—turning yourself over to worrisome thoughts without resistance usually relieves them of their power.
This is time you set aside exclusively for worry. This idea may seem strange to you, because it runs counter to our usual instincts. But that’s often how it seems when you “fight fire with fire.”
“Fight fire with fire” isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a technique used to control forest fires. It involves deliberately burning all the flammable material that would otherwise fuel the fire in its spread. When the forest fire arrives at the burned-out part, it falters because it has no fuel left to keep it burning.
Resistance is the fuel by which chronic worry spreads.
During a worry appointment, which will last about ten minutes, you’ll engage in pure worry. Devote your full attention to worrying, and nothing else. Don’t engage in other activities, like driving, showering, eating, cleaning, texting, listening to music, riding on a train, and so on. Spend the full ten minutes worrying about whatever items you usually worry about. Make a list of your worries ahead of time, so you have an agenda, or use the list you developed in chapter 9. And don’t try to solve problems, reassure yourself, minimize problems, relax, clear your mind, reason with yourself, or take any other steps to stop worrying. Simply worry, which means reciting, repeatedly, lots of “what if” questions about unpleasant possibilities.
This will probably seem strange and awkward at first. However, if you’re reading this book, you’ll likely have lots of experience with worrying. Here’s a chance to use that experience for your benefit!
Schedule these times in advance, two a day, and write them into your schedule. Pick times when you have privacy and don’t have to answer the phone or the doorbell, talk to others, look after the dog or the kids, and so on. It’s usually best to avoid the following times: first thing in the morning on waking, last thing at night, or right after meals.
One more detail: worry out loud, in front of a mirror.
This is perhaps the most peculiar part, I know, but don’t skip it. It’s important!
The advantage of doing the worrying this way is that it helps you be a better observer of your worry. Most worry is subliminal. It occurs when we’re multitasking. We worry while driving, attending lectures, showering, eating, watching television, or doing some routine work that doesn’t demand much attention. And since we rarely give worry our full attention, it’s easy for it to continue endlessly.
Because worry comes in the form of our own subliminal thoughts, it has more power to influence us. And we all tend to assume that If it’s my thought, there must be something to it. We tend not to notice that we can think all kinds of nonsense, that thoughts are often only anxiety symptoms, nothing more.
When you worry out loud, you don’t just say the worries, you hear them. When you worry in front of a mirror, you see yourself doing the worrying. You’re not just worrying in the back of your mind. You’re hearing, and watching, yourself as you worry. The worry is no longer subliminal, and this will probably help you get a better perspective on it.
Worry appointments are deliberately structured this way to convert worry from a multitasking activity to a unitary one, in which you only do one thing—worry—and you do it with the fullest awareness and attention possible.
Watching yourself worry sounds, on the surface, like a bizarre, unwelcome exercise. You’d need a pretty good reason to do worry appointments.
And there is one! There’s usually a benefit that comes during the rest of the day, when you’re not engaged in a worry appointment. If you find yourself worrying when you’re off “worry duty,” you can give yourself the following choice: You can either
The postponing alone, the reduction in worry during the rest of your day, would probably be sufficient reason by itself to justify doing worry appointments. But there’s more! The regular use of worry appointments will also be a big help in changing your automatic responses to chronic worry, and help you take the content of the worrisome thoughts less seriously.
Taking action about worry is usually much more helpful than thinking about it, reasoning with it, or trying to change the thoughts “in your head.” Worry appointments are a good example of this. How about trying it now? Take ten minutes and do the exercise as I describe it above, and then come back to finish this chapter. Or, if this isn’t a convenient time for a worry appointment, maybe mark this page in the book, do a worry appointment at a convenient time and location later today, and then return to this page. I encourage you to try it. Doing is better than thinking!
I’ve worked with a lot of clients who came to see me for help with chronic worry, and I’ve asked most of them to use worry appointments. I’ve heard a lot of comments and reactions from people who tried them, and it’s usually not the reactions you might expect. When I first started offering this technique, I half expected to get angry feedback that I was an idiot and that they weren’t ever coming back! But that’s not at all what’s happened.
Perhaps the most common reaction clients have is that they tell me, “Boy, it’s really hard to fill the ten minutes!” This confused me at first, because these were people who worried a lot, and their days were often filled with worry. So how could it be hard to fill ten minutes? I wondered if it was just an excuse to avoid doing the appointments.
However, as I explored this further with clients, here’s what I discovered. They would start the worry appointment and fill a minute or two, and then not have any new worries to add. Normally, when they worried in a subliminal manner, they just kept repeating the worries again and again, and that’s what enabled them to worry for such long periods of time. They kept repeating themselves!
But when they did a worry appointment, they assumed they needed to have ten minutes of fresh material, without repeating themselves. And they couldn’t think of that many worries!
This points to a very important aspect of chronic worry. Although people often have the experience of worrying for long periods of time throughout the day, there are actually very few new worries surfacing during that time. It’s almost all repetition of the same minute or two of worrisome thoughts. That’s what made it seem hard to fill the ten minutes!
So, when you do worry appointments, don’t be concerned with having new, fresh worries each time. During the worry appointments, do what you do when you’re worrying spontaneously—just keep repeating the same old worries. If you have two minutes of worry material, repeat that five times, and there’s your ten minutes!
If you prefer, you can make up some new ones. Or I can lend you some of mine! The content of the worries during your worry appointment isn’t any more important than it is when you’re worrying the old-fashioned way. The important thing is simply to fill the ten minutes with the activity of worrying.
Another reaction I often hear goes like this: “I’m not sure I’m getting the same quality in my worries,” or “It feels like I’m missing something when I worry this way.” When clients tell me this, I usually say something like, “Well, do the best you can!” Of course, I’m kidding when I say that, and we discuss it further. This reaction usually indicates that this person has some beliefs about worry. Without consciously thinking it through, this person has developed some ideas about the “value” of worry, and to worry this way does imply a challenge to those ideas.
These beliefs include such ideas as It helps to expect the worst and Worry shows I care. A person who harbors the belief that worry somehow can have a beneficial effect on the future will naturally feel nervous when they first start to worry less, for fear that they’re not properly taking care of the future by worrying. I’ll take a look at these beliefs in chapter 11.
The use of worry appointments takes some commitment. I suggest you try it several times in the next few days. If it seems to work for you the way I describe in this chapter, then I encourage you to do regular appointments for the next two weeks. Review it again after two weeks and make a decision then about continuing or discontinuing.
I find that most people want to discontinue using the appointments a little sooner than I would recommend, but that’s all right. If, as often happens, they find that the chronic worry habit starts to creep in again after discontinuing, they can always resume, and stay with it for a longer time. It’s probably inconvenient and annoying to do regular worry appointments, and that’s why people are so often motivated to stop, even when they see the benefits. I think most people get a more permanent long-term improvement by staying with the worry appointments for months, rather than weeks.
A good way to commit to this is to keep a brief journal, listing your scheduled worry appointments and making notes of your reactions to the appointment after you complete each one.
Breathing is very often affected by worry and anxiety. We see this most dramatically when a person has a panic attack and feels like he is suffocating for lack of air. He’s not—no one suffocates from panic—but he is experiencing uncomfortable breathing, which tricks him into thinking some catastrophe is about to occur. People with chronic worry often experience a less dramatic but very bothersome discomfort with their breathing as well. This can include such symptoms as feeling lightheaded and dizzy, numbness and tingling in the extremities, difficulty getting a full breath, tension and heaviness, thoughts of passing out, and increased heart rate.
These symptoms aren’t at all dangerous but can grab your attention in ways that make it more difficult to respond to the worry. For this reason, I often find it helpful for people to learn a good breathing exercise. The point of the breathing exercise is not to control your breathing but to make it sufficiently comfortable that you can return your focus to what’s more important—responding to chronic worry.
You may have already tried deep breathing and not had much success. The reason for that is that most descriptions of deep breathing are incomplete. You’ve probably been told, and you’ve probably also read it as well, that what you need to do is “Take a deep breath.” If you’re like most people, that advice hasn’t helped you much. It’s good advice, but it’s incomplete. It doesn’t tell you how to take a deep breath. A good breathing exercise should tell you how to take a deep breath, and that’s what I’m going to do. Here’s the key: When you feel like you can’t catch your breath, it’s because you forgot to do something. You forgot to exhale.
That’s right. Before you can take a deep breath, you have to give one away. Why? Because, when you’ve been breathing in a short, shallow manner (from your chest), if you try to quickly switch to a deep inhale, it’s very hard to do. You’re very likely to simply take a more labored, shallow breath from your chest. That will give you all the air you need, but it won’t feel good.
Go ahead, try that now and see what I mean. Put one hand on your chest, the other on your belly. Use your hands to notice what muscles you’re using to breathe. Breathe very shallowly from your chest a few times, then try to take a deep breath. I think you’ll find that when you inhale, you continue to use your chest muscles rather than your diaphragm or belly. Deep breathing, by contrast, comes from your belly.
When you breathe in this shallow manner, you get all the air you need to live, but you can also get other physical symptoms which add to your discomfort. You might get chest pain or heaviness, because you’ve tightened the muscles of your chest to an uncomfortable degree. You might feel lightheaded or dizzy, because shallow breathing can produce the same sensations as hyperventilation. You might also get a more rapid heartbeat, and maybe numbness or tingling in the extremities as well.
All from breathing short and shallow!
Breathing is actually a sideshow in dealing with chronic worry. The most important response to chronic worry is to use the techniques in this book to develop a different relationship with worry. However, belly breathing can help in managing the physical symptoms of anxiety while you learn how to relate differently to worry. Use it for periodic comfort when you feel the need (but don’t turn it into another method of opposing and resisting worry).
Belly Breathing Exercise
Give it a try now. Go ahead and practice the breathing exercise for a few minutes.
Let your hands be your guide. They will tell you if you’re doing this correctly or not. Where is the muscular movement of the breathing? You want it to occur at your stomach; your upper body should be relatively still. If you feel movement in your chest, or notice your head and shoulders moving upwards, start again at step 1, and practice getting the motion down to your stomach.
This might feel awkward and difficult the first few times, because breathing in the short, shallow way is such an old habit for people who struggle with anxiety. Don’t let that bother you. It just means you need persistent, patient practice. Breathing style is a habit, and the best way to retrain a habit is lots and lots of repetition of the new habit.
This isn’t really something new for you. You used to breathe this way all the time, certainly when you were an infant and young child. In fact, if you want to see some world-class belly breathers, visit the newborns in any maternity ward. They don’t breathe with their chests at all—just their tummies, which expand outward when they inhale, and contract inwards when they exhale. Infants don’t do chest breathing!
You’ll know you’ve mastered this technique once your breathing feels more relaxing and soothing.
How often should you practice deep breathing? As often as possible, in sessions of one minute or so, for two weeks.
When it’s time to practice, the first thing to do is notice how you’ve been breathing. Then sigh, and switch to belly breathing for about one minute, as you continue doing whatever you were doing before you started. Don’t interrupt your activity. You want good breathing to be portable!
You’ll probably do best if you have a system for reminding yourself to practice. Here are some systems you might use:
Do this for two weeks, and you’ll be well on your way to changing your breathing for the better!
People often want to know if they have to breathe this way all the time.
The answer is no.
Just focus on mastering the technique through regular, brief practice. Add it to your list of automatic responses to worry. Use worry appointments, and mindfulness meditation, on a daily basis. And use the belly breathing whenever you feel the need. Over time, I think you’ll find that you use this kind of breathing more and more as you make it your new habit. But you can let that happen naturally just by following the suggestions above.
Some psychologists and health care professionals believe that professionals such as myself shouldn’t teach our clients belly breathing, because people may come to think of the breathing technique as a silver bullet, a lifesaver, and use it the same way they might use any other anti-worry technique.
They have a point.
Still, I find it useful to show this technique to most of my anxious clients because they often have a bad breathing technique, one that creates more anxious physical symptoms. These physical symptoms give rise to more worries and interfere with your ability to handle the anxiety. But keep this point in mind: Belly breathing is best used to help you work with the worry without getting so focused on unrealistic fears of asphyxiation and other physical concerns. Belly breathing will not protect you from physical threats because shallow breathing doesn’t actually cause physical calamities.
People who aren’t accustomed to meditation often think it involves a state of inner peace in which the mind is silent, without all the intrusive thoughts that can interrupt our inner calm. They may occasionally try meditation and feel discouraged when they don’t attain this state of inner quiet and calm.
This isn’t really what meditation is about, at least for most of us. A monk in a monastery, who devotes large amounts of daily time to meditation, may well obtain significant periods of inner peace and quiet. However, most of us will find that intrusive thoughts initially come to the fore when we set out to meditate and have a quiet mind. So meditation actually consists of noticing, and passively observing, all the thoughts that get in the way when we sit down to have inner peace.
This is particularly the case with mindfulness meditation. It’s a process of passively observing thoughts as they come and go while you focus on something basic like your breathing. Don’t try to engage in any discussion with your thoughts, nor try to silence or remove them in any manner. Simply observe them.
I attended a meditation workshop years ago at a conference. The workshop was held in a room adjacent to another workshop led by a speaker with a booming voice. I could hear everything this other speaker said as I tried to follow the meditation instructions. I focused on my breath, but kept having thoughts about what a stupid arrangement this was, and those thoughts disrupted my meditation. I had thoughts about the content of what the other speaker (whom I knew personally) was saying and I got irritated with him. I got irritated with the leader of my workshop for asking us to meditate in such noisy circumstances, and irritated with the conference sponsors for selecting such inadequate facilities. I probably looked passive and contemplative, as I sat there, eyes closed, but inside I had a raging storm of thoughts as I struggled to meditate while my unhappy, complaining thoughts grew louder and more numerous. Having thoroughly criticized the workshop, the conference, the sponsors, and the facility, my thoughts moved on to criticize myself, asking, What is wrong with you that you can’t just sit here and relax? I was actually entertaining thoughts of getting up and walking out when I noticed another thought drift across my mental horizon: That’s just the way you are. That simple thought allowed me to notice and accept my limitations, and I got back to the task of observing my thoughts. That’s meditation.
In this section is a simple practice of mindfulness meditation that can be of help in changing your relationship with chronic worry. (I also offer a recorded version on the website for this book: http://www.newharbinger.com/33186.) Some readers may like it well enough that they are motivated to look more deeply into meditation, to take some instruction and become further involved with meditation as a part of life. That would be great! There’s a lot of value to meditation. For others, this simple starter dose of meditation might be all you need.
Want to try it?
Do you immediately find, in your mind, reasons to postpone this, or to “think about it” before you experiment with it? This is a common occurrence. You can notice that thought for what it is, a thought, without becoming engaged with the apparent content of the thought. In other words, you can have the thought about waiting for a better time or opportunity to meditate, and simply do the experiment now anyway. Nobody says you have to do an excellent job of it, or pick the best time to do it. It’s just an experiment.
What’s that you say? You really have a good reason to wait? You’re on a train, or sitting in a waiting room waiting for a doctor? You have a headache, and could probably do a better job some other time? You’re too restless…or too tired…or too hungry? Those are excellent thoughts! You can have those thoughts, and you can also do the experiment. If you’re willing, go ahead and practice “yes, and,” rather than “yes, but.”
Here’s the exercise:
There, you’ve meditated!
What’s that you say? You don’t feel any calmer? That’s okay. If you had just done your first set of abdominal crunches, your stomach wouldn’t be any harder now either. However, with time and repetition, you will probably notice some gradual changes.
You’re annoyed at how the thoughts interrupted your effort to feel calm? That’s okay. Remember, meditation is about passively observing the thoughts as they rise up to interrupt the quiet. As you experience reactions of annoyance, or an urge to resist, you can notice those thoughts as well.
You don’t feel like you did anything? That’s okay. This is a brief introduction to experiencing the absence of effort, and the simple observation of thoughts as thoughts, rather than important messages or warnings. It’s likely to feel like “doing nothing” if you’re in the habit of responding strongly to your automatic thoughts.
You fell asleep? Well, that’s a problem. You can’t meditate while you’re sleeping. Maybe you need to experiment with a different chair, one that’s less conducive to sleep, or perhaps you can sit on the floor, with your back against the wall.
How about getting some regular experience with this process? Once a day, set aside five to ten minutes for meditation. Just take that time to go through the steps. You might find yourself having thoughts about how well, or poorly, you did the exercise, and you can notice those thoughts as you go, just like all the others. Just show up, go through the steps, and give the habit a chance to develop. After you become more accustomed to the practice, increase your daily time to ten to twenty minutes.
Our days are often filled with activities that we have to make happen, and it’s easy to forget that there are also activities that we just allow to happen. People who experience chronic worry are likely to think that they need to control the thoughts they experience, and make themselves experience the thoughts they want to have, rather than the ones that occur spontaneously. It usually doesn’t work so well.
The chief benefit of adding this technique to your daily activities is that it will help you become a better, and more dispassionate, observer of your own thoughts. Over time you will enhance your own ability to observe thoughts without becoming embroiled in the content of the thoughts.
People who struggle with chronic worry are sometimes hesitant to sample meditation because they have thoughts that suggest that maybe they’ll just encounter more unpleasant thoughts, and more struggle with those thoughts, when they meditate. My experience is that people generally find the opposite to be true. Experience with meditation usually leads people to be more tolerant and accepting of whatever thoughts they happen to encounter.
It’s the Rule of Opposites!
This chapter prescribes three activities for daily use that can help to moderate the amount of worry you experience on a daily basis. These can be the basis for a good maintenance program for keeping your relationship with chronic worry more evenhanded.