I’m fond of saying that “Worry is stress over something that has not happened, and may never happen.”
We all worry, but some of us worry so much that it can become a mental health problem. But why do we worry? What does it accomplish? Does it help us?
Worry, and a lot of other problems, are caused by delusional beliefs. Back in the 1950s, a psychologist named Albert Ellis (1913-2007) developed something he called “Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy” (REBT). This was the beginning of what is now known as “Cognitive Behavior Therapy.” Another key figure in the development of CBT was Psychiatrist David Beck (1921- ), who coined the term “Cognitive Distortion” to refer to exaggerated or irrational thought patterns often involved in conditions like depression and anxiety.
Unhelpful Thinking Habits
I prefer to call these cognitive distortions “unhelpful thinking habits.” As indicated above, they form the basis of pathological conditions such as Depression and anxiety disorders. But they are also the causes of the worry that plagues most of us.
Here are ten delusional beliefs held by many chronic worriers:
1. “I’m a born worrier”. No – worriers are not born, they are made. There are indications that anxiety has a modest, nonspecific genetic component to it, but there is no evidence that worrying is inherited. True, your mother or your father may have been a worrier, but it is likely that you simply learned the habit from them.
2. “If I worry about something it’s likely to happen”. No – most of the things that worriers worry about are highly unlikely to ever happen. But it is true that the more you worry about something, the more you think it’s likely to happen. That can lead to another common problem: the self-fulfilling prophecy.
3. “Just because something I worried about in the past didn’t happen, doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future.” No – most of what chronic worriers worry about is never likely to happen. If something you worried about in the past didn’t happen, there’s probably a reason for that, and that reason may well be around in the future. Alternatively, worriers catastrophise their worries to highly improbable ends (e.g. if a partner is 15 minutes late, the worrier will catastrophise that into the partner having an accident, being injured, being taken to hospital, etc.). The end points of catastrophized worries are highly improbable and as unlikely to happen in the future as they were in the past.
4. “Worrying will prevent bad things happening”. No – worrying alone never prevented anything from happening. Only actions stop things happening. Unfortunately, chronic worriers have very poor problem-solving confidence so are usually unlikely to reach a solution to a problem that they believe is worth acting on (see No. 6).
5. “If I’m anxious about something, it must mean it’s a threat or a problem.” This is called the fallacy of ex consequentia reasoning. We often misread the cues our bodies send us. We might think we are anxious when we are actually tired, in pain, bored, or in some other negative mood. These feelings don’t mean that what you’re thinking about at the moment is a threat or problem.
6. “I’m useless at coming up with solutions, so I have no choice but to worry.” Chronic worriers are as good as anyone else at thinking of useful solutions to problems, but they lack confidence. The worry itself might even make it more difficult for them to think!
8. “If I worry about others, it will show I care about them.” No – there’s nothing worse than knowing that someone else is continually worrying about you. If you do care about someone, then let them know that in more direct ways.
9. “If I let other people know what they do makes me worry, they will change their behaviour.” Chances are, they’ll just get angry with you. Family and friends can easily see through this form of emotional blackmail, and it’s one of the major causes of relationship problems.
10. “It is better to spend a lot of time thinking about a problem than making a snap decision.” No – most people make decisions on a daily basis by the way they feel, on the advice of others, or a “gut instinct.” Philosophers have told us for 6000 years that it is better to be rational than emotional; the reality is much more complex. We are able to make decisions much more quickly through the use of heuristics, which are “short-cuts” or “rules of thumb” that can make us much more efficient. We really don’t have to spend a long time thinking through every aspect of every issue before making a decision.