If you struggle with chronic worry but aren’t sure where it comes from, this reader question is for you…
A reader asks:
I’m a worrier but I don’t understand why. I had a very happy childhood. And while I have some stresses in my current life, overall my life is quite good. I’d even say I’m generally pretty happy. But I just worry a lot about all sorts of things. Obviously it makes me more anxious than I’d like to be, but it also causes problems in some of my relationships—mostly with my husband and kids. Where does worry come from?
Not all emotional problems originate in terrible childhoods or traumas. In fact, my experience is that most people’s emotional struggles have much more ordinary origins. And when it comes to chronic worry specifically, there are a couple of non-obvious causes I frequently see with my own clients….
1. Confusing Worry the Noun with Worry the Verb
Many people get into the habit of chronic worry because they think of it exclusively as something that happens to them and over which they have relatively little control.
This is understandable because to some extent they’re right: Sometimes worries do just pop into our minds. This is worry the noun—it’s a thing that happens to you. And it happens to all of us from time to time.
But the mistake is to assume that this is the only way worry happens or that you have no control over it once it happens.
See, in addition to being a thing that happens to us—and over which we have no control—worry is also something we do, a mental behavior. This is worry the verb, or what I sometimes call worrying. And while it feels similar to worry the noun, worry the verb is something you do have control over.
For example:
- Suppose you’re working at your desk and you see an email pop up from your business partner.
- Immediately, a worry (worry the noun) pops into mind: Oh no, something probably happened to the Tyson deal and now we’re going to have to work all weekend to fix it.
- But now, in response to this initial worry (which you don’t have control over), you engage in more worrying—worry the verb: What if we lose the deal completely? That’s a quarter of our revenue for this year… we’ll be screwed! We’ll probably have to fold the company and I’ll be back to working another boring corporate job. But I won’t make as much income as I do now so we’ll have to sell the house, switch the kids’ schools, and I might even have to get a second job…
Now, here’s why this distinction between worry the noun and worry the verb matters for this question of what causes chronic worry:
When you worry in response to your worries, you reinforce your brain’s habit of worry.
Put a slightly different way: When your brain talks to you in the form of a worry, and then you make the decision to talk back, your brain learns that you want more of those worries.
This is the very boring, very unsexy, and very common cause of most people’s chronic worry:
When you respond to your worries with more worrying, you only make the worries more common.
So, what do you do?
The most important thing you can do is to try and become more aware of your initial worries. And when you do notice them, label them as worry the noun and remind yourself that you don’t have to keep worrying, worry the verb.
Here’s a little mantra that will help:
Don’t get into conversations with your worries.
2. Worry Is Your Coping Mechanism for Anxiety
At this point you might be thinking to yourself:
I get that I shouldn’t talk back to my worries or keep worrying… But it’s really hard not to!
Totally agree. Like any strong habit, chronic worry can be difficult to break free of. But critically, it is just a habit. And all habits can be broken with the right approach.
Most of the time, the key to breaking an especially bad habit is something called functional analysis…
Functional analysis is a method for understanding and modifying unhelpful habits—mental and physical—by identifying the underlying psychological need they serve.
And when it comes to breaking the habit of chronic worry, the need it often serves is to alleviate the anxiety of helplessness and uncertainty. In other words, in the very short term, worry makes you feel in control and certain, which is rewarding for your brain, and as a result, keeps that habit sticking around.
For example:
- Your daughter left for college a couple weeks ago and you find yourself worrying about her a lot even though you have no evidence that anything’s wrong.
- But if you look at the situation carefully, you realize that your worry isn’t so much a response to your daughter and her situation as it is a response to you and your situation which involves—for the first time—a serious lack of control over your daughter’s life and a lot of uncertainty about how she’s doing.
- Understandably, this produces a lot of anxiety in you. And because anxiety feels bad, it’s natural to want to alleviate that emotional discomfort.
- And for many people, worry serves that function because—if you think about it—worry feels a lot like problem solving, and therefore gives the illusion of control and certainty.
So, regardless of the details, if you have a habit of chronic worry, it’s likely sticking around because it serves the function of temporarily alleviating your anxiety around either lack of control (helplessness), uncertainty, or both. But this temporary anxiety relief comes at a steep cost: More worry and more anxiety long-term!
The way out of this vicious cycle is to train yourself to tolerate and accept the anxiety of helplessness and uncertainty instead of assuming you have to do something to make it go away. And like any training regimen, the key is to start very small and slowly work your way up.
So, begin by looking for very mild moments of helplessness or uncertainty in your life and use them as practice opportunities for tolerating the anxiety that goes with them rather than avoiding it or trying to make it go away.
A Structured Exercise to Reduce Chronic Worry
If you’d like a bit more structure in your attempt to break the habit of chronic worry, there’s one exercise I recommend the most because over the years I’ve seen it be incredibly effective for so many people.
It’s called Scheduled Worry.
The gist is that by counterintuitively making time to worry on purpose, you train your brain to be less afraid of it (and the anxiety it produces), which leads to much less long-term worry and anxiety.
To learn more, check out this mini-site, which includes a free Scheduled Worry Quickstart Guide you can download: ScheduledWorry.com →