Chronic worry functions like a parasite, increasingly getting the host—that’s you!—to spend time and energy on producing and maintaining worry, rather than pursuing the hopes and dreams you have for your own life. This chapter will look at how it does this, and suggest a way out.
But first, I want to tell you the story of a parasitic flatworm, the formal name for which is Leucochloridium paradoxum.
Yes, I know, my family wasn’t much interested in this story either. But I think once you’ve read it, you’ll have a better appreciation of what’s at stake here, and how the worry game is played.
This parasitic flatworm is a microscopic creature and is often found living inside amber snails. It spends a large portion of its life cycle inside snails, but when it comes time to reproduce and make baby parasites, it can only do this inside the belly of a bird, which is its preferred environment. There it can live off the bird’s food and have a secure home in which to lay eggs, which will give rise to new generations of parasites. The eggs it lays return to the ground in bird droppings.
The parasite spends much of its life cycle inside a snail, which crawls around on the ground, under rocks and leaves. So how, you might wonder, does it get inside the belly of a bird?
The amber snail likes to eat bird droppings. When these droppings contain parasitic eggs, baby flatworms hatch inside the snail and begin a nefarious plot of mind control.
The first thing these flatworms do is locate the brain of the snail—and if you’ve ever had trouble finding a small lost item at home, imagine what a job this is, finding the brain of a snail! But they find the brain, and bring to it a substance, a hormone or a neurotransmitter.
The chemical that the flatworm brings to the snail’s brain leads the snail to act differently than before. The snail no longer moves “at a snail’s pace” but moves about much more rapidly. All activities which serve the purposes of the parasite are maximized, and all activities that only serve the purpose of the snail are eliminated or greatly reduced. The snail no longer seeks out other snails with which to mate. If focuses exclusively on moving around rapidly and getting food.
But that’s not all! Now, under the influence of the flatworms, the snail has a whole new view of life.
The snail has the ability to change its outer color. Normally, the snail favors dull, bland colors, a thousand shades of brown, which blend into its environment and hide it from predators. But now the snail “thinks” to itself, I’ve always wanted colored eyestalks! Its eyestalks blossom into bright colors. And the flatworms find their way to the snail’s eyestalks. Normally the snail can retract its eyestalks at will, but the flatworms engorge and fatten the eyestalks to the point where they can’t retract. The flatworms hop around in the brilliantly colored eyestalks, making them pulsate and appear to move, looking for all the world like a caterpillar on the move. (Search Leucochloridium paradoxum on the Internet if you want to see videos!)
And, under the continuing influence of the flatworms, the snail now thinks, I’ve always wanted to sunbathe! So the snail, which heretofore has always preferred to stay in dark, shady places, now climbs to the top of a tree and basks in the sun, displaying its brilliantly colored, caterpillar-resembling eyestalks.
And the next thing you know, the parasites are inside the belly of a bird! Birds generally don’t eat snails, but they’re so attracted by the eyestalks that look like caterpillars that they pluck them off for a tasty meal, leaving the snail to grow a new pair. This goes on for the rest of the snail’s life. It’s become a zombie snail, functioning as a host for more parasites.
The parasite has literally hijacked the self-care agenda of the snail. The snail now acts in ways that further the purposes and interests of the parasitic flatworms, rather than the purposes and interests of the snail.
That’s what chronic worry does. Chronic worry literally hijacks your own self-care agenda and makes it serve the maintenance of chronic worry, rather than your plans, dreams, hopes, and aspirations. That’s how insidious this is. Your life becomes more about worry and less about your work, your relationships, your fun, your intellect—everything that makes life worthwhile.
How does this happen? And how can you roll this process back and regain control of how you spend your time and energy in life?
You probably get a sense of how your life agenda has been hijacked when you recall how much time and energy you spend not just worrying, but also engaging in the anti-worry techniques we looked at in chapter 3. What did you used to do with all the time and energy that now gets tied up in worry and anti-worry? You probably actually did more things, things that were important to you in your role as parent, spouse, friend, neighbor, employee, and so on. You had interests, passions, and ambitions that you wanted to follow. And you probably followed them and did things with a lot less mental struggle than you experience now.
It’s not that you didn’t worry at all. You certainly did, because everybody worries to some extent. But you were probably more likely to go ahead and engage in activities that were important to you. You gave the speech to the PTA or some other public meeting, even though you were nervous about public speaking; you went on vacation to an unfamiliar place, even though you had worries about getting lost or feeling out of place; you sold your home and moved elsewhere, even though you had doubts if it was the right thing to do; you had an annual physical, even though you were a little nervous it would find something bad; you applied for a new job, even though you were nervous about interviewing and weren’t sure if it was the right time for a job change, and so on.
When you get caught up in chronic worry, it doesn’t just disturb your peace of mind. Chronic worry leads to systematic changes in the way you think and behave, just as the parasitic flatworm changes the behavior of the snail. And these changes don’t further your own values and aspirations; they further the maintenance of the worry, just as the changes in snail behavior favor the parasite’s interests, rather than the snail’s.
Chronic worry redirects much of your time, attention, and energy to worry rather than life. It leads you to spend more and more time “in your head,” in your internal world, trying to get your thoughts arranged the way you think they should be, always struggling and fussing with worry rather than getting out into your external world and living, doing whatever it takes to be the good parent, good friend, good employee, good neighbor, or good whoever you always wanted to be. It leads you to invest your time and energy in worry, and struggles with worry, rather than in being the person you wanted to be and living the life you hoped for.
How does chronic worry hijack your agenda? The hijacking of the snail starts when it ingests the parasitic eggs. Your hijacking started when you adopted and developed certain types of beliefs about worry. Over time, maybe all the way back in early childhood, you developed some beliefs about worry. These are typically beliefs that you rarely notice or reflect upon, beliefs which have a strong influence on how you think and how you act. Much of their power comes from the fact that you rarely notice or reflect upon the thoughts, and so they exert a powerful subliminal influence, much like propaganda.
These beliefs all have an ironic aspect, because they all consider worry to have value. It probably sounds silly to say that, because doesn’t everyone recognize that worry is a useless activity? Isn’t that why people who struggle with chronic worry want to overcome it, because they realize it’s a useless diversion of their time and energy? But it’s not as simple as that. If you consider closely how you react to worry, I think you will find evidence that whatever you may say or think about worry being nonsensical and pointless, you actually do behave, some of the time, as if worry has some important value and power all by itself.
People don’t often talk about these beliefs with others, and often don’t directly think about the beliefs. Most people don’t recommend worry to others, and you probably don’t either. At first glance, when you look at these beliefs below, you might be likely to dismiss them as having nothing to do with you. But give each one a little consideration.
I’ve talked with so many people who subscribe to this idea. It seems to them that, if they expect the worst, they won’t ever be surprised or experience an overwhelming feeling about some sudden bad event. For them, worry is a kind of dress rehearsal for bad events that might happen in the future. They rehearse and study their lines, the scene, and their likely reactions, and feel dread now, somehow thinking this will protect them from feeling really bad someday, as though worry were a vaccine against feeling overwhelmed in the future.
People who are influenced by this belief don’t like to feel optimistic. They’re suspicious of optimism because they think the universe, or God, will “even things out” by giving them something bad because they’re feeling optimistic. This has a superstitious aspect to it, as when people “knock on wood” because they just said something optimistic, and they hope to prevent that statement from backfiring on them.
They may also think that God, or the universe, is likely to give them something good when they feel pessimistic. They often think of “expecting the worst” as a kind of preparation for bad events, a form of “paying your dues.”
Try holding some optimistic thoughts to see if the simple act of holding positive thoughts makes you a little nervous.
Hold these thoughts in mind for a couple of minutes, and see how you feel about them. If holding these thoughts makes you a little uncomfortable, it’s probably because you do tend to believe, at some level, that It helps if I expect the worst.
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.
This belief can make worry seem like a double-edged sword. On the one hand, if you worry about the “right” things, maybe the worry will prevent bad things from happening. On the other, if you fail to worry about them, maybe this will cause bad things to happen. How can you ever be sure which are the right things to worry about? This idea sure makes worry seem important!
Now, if this idea were really true, we wouldn’t need to spend trillions on the military—we could just organize our civilians into worrying about war. We’d draft worriers, rather than warriors! But then we’d have to worry about whether we were preventing war or causing it.
Unlikely as it seems, many people subscribe to this idea, sometimes in a superstitious way. They may actually feel nervous when they notice that they’ve been worrying less, as if somehow they stopped paying their dues, and they need to get that payment in the mail right away.
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.
It’s certainly true that if there’s something you’re supposed to do (say, water your plants) and you fail to do it (and they die), then that’s your fault. But there’s a big difference between worrying and doing.
This is a surprisingly widespread belief. It shows how we often fail to recognize the important distinction between thoughts and action.
If you have children, you probably want to be a caring parent, and also to be seen as a caring parent by your family and friends. The best way, probably the only way, to judge how much parents care for their children is to look at their actions. Do they attempt to fill the child’s needs, physical and emotional? Do they make an effort to balance assisting the child and fostering independence? Do they work at the very difficult task of communicating with the child through the various developmental stages of childhood?
Caring is demonstrated by doing. Yet in our culture, we do tend to attribute some positive characteristics to worry. It’s so common for people to reflexively, automatically, think that caring is somehow demonstrated by worrying.
It’s a very basic human frailty to assume that thoughts are always important, and especially that one’s own thoughts are particularly wise and important. It’s a kind of vanity. Our brain produces thoughts, and if we want to evaluate our thoughts, we have to go back to the organ that produced them in the first place. No wonder we often think they’re more important than they are!
If you’ve ever had a song stuck in your head, you’ve had the experience of noticing that some thoughts, like song lyrics, get very stuck in your mind, despite their lack of importance.
When you’re anticipating some kind of potentially difficult encounter with another person—say, you’re going to ask for a raise, or talk to a neighbor about his noisy dog—you might repeatedly find thoughts playing in your head as you imagine how the conversation will go.
How often do those thoughts turn out to be accurate, and how often does the encounter go the way you anticipated?
If you could pick and choose what thoughts you have, and what thoughts you don’t have, there might be something to this idea. Certainly it would be good to use your powers of mind control wisely, if you had such powers, and if your thoughts affected those you love.
Do your thoughts affect the people around you?
Do you control your thoughts?
Let’s see. Can you now hold in mind a flag without any red, white, or blue colors in it?
I think you’ll find, when you consider these questions, that your thoughts have no influence on anyone else, unless you choose to share them, and even then the effect of sharing your thoughts with others is unpredictable.
I think you’ll also find that, while you can apply your thoughts to a problem like a crossword puzzle or a tax calculation, you also have thoughts that occur to you spontaneously, even when you wish they wouldn’t.
Make a list of the worry beliefs you hold. This will give you the opportunity to decide how you want to relate to these beliefs. Do you want to continue to act in accordance with these beliefs? Do you want to play with them? What would the Rule of Opposites suggest about responding to these beliefs?
Chronic worry can slowly, almost invisibly, infiltrate your beliefs and your life in ways that hijack your hopes and dreams for your life and turn you into an agent of worry rather than a person who lives the life he wants. Identifying these beliefs, and applying the Rule of Opposites, can do for you what killing off the parasites would do for the amber snail.