The Harried Mystic

I am an expert worrier.

If awards were given for it, I would no doubt be up for one of them. All who know me well, members of my family and close friends, are well acquainted with the prolific nature of my imaginings,absent positive information, about the whereabouts and safety of those I deeply care about. My son’s recent trip to the Philippines and to the site of an active volcano, Mount Mayon, about which I wrote last week, is a case in point. Thankfully, he and his companion are now safely back in South Korea, but four days without any contact had my imagination going full tilt.

As a man who knows worry, I am particularly well suited to counsel others who struggle with the same but with a severity and intensity far greater than mine. One of my clients, in fact, suffered debilitating degrees of worry when her daughter drove alone to and from work every day. She needed to hear from her daughter on arrival and departure to be sufficiently assured that all was well. On the occasions when, for whatever reason ( like her daughter’s cell phone needed recharging) the worry was so great that she would be paralysed by fear and became physically ill, unable to do anything.

Most of the people I know spend a fair bit of time invested in worry. The range of worry goes from negative passing thoughts to the case I just mentioned of an inability to function at all. A few of my acquaintances seem to worry very little. They move from thing  to thing, event to event, with relative ease. I say “seem to worry little” because I do not know them well enough to judge beyond social impressions.

What is the root of worry? In that it occurs with such frequency, does it have adaptive significance? Is there a brighter side to worry?

While worry generally has a negative valence, it represents cognitive rehearsal of possible events. Catastrophizing thoughts are neurotically inspired by experience and/or impressionistic absorption of sensational and powerfully emotional stories in the press of tragedy, misfortune, and mayhem. In the positive, however, worry reflects a strong capacity to image alternative futures.

It is an intuitive form of scenario planning. The dilemma is that, too often, the “worrying” reflects selective sampling of only negative, or worst case, scenarios. From the standpoint of evolutionary adaptability, worrying, as cognitive rehearsal of untoward events, can alert one to keep up needed vigilance in intrinsically dangerous circumstances. It makes one alert and ready to respond. Carried to the extreme, however, it undermines one’s capacity to be agile and to thrive. Incessant worry robs us of the capacity for joy.

So, what to do about worry? Well, one thing that is sure to fail, and you see well-meaning people doing this to worrying friends and family members all the time, is to tell worriers “not to worry.” This is a useless and, in fact, demeaning admonishment. It is as useless and inane as telling the depressed person to stop being depressed, or telling the person with panic attacks that there is nothing warranting panic. It is no less a foolish counsel than to tell a diabetic to stop being concerned about what s/he eats.

The solution does not lie in putting all worry aside, but to redirect the underlying skills on which it depends: visualization, anticipation, and vigilance. Excessive worry is best-managed by shifting to the brighter side of visualization, anticipation and vigilance and finding the very plausible middle. In effect, this is scenario planning.

The trick is to watch the worry and redirect energy to visualizing the full spectrum of possible outcomes and not choosing only from the negative extreme. I am not suggesting something as facile and superficial as the lately much tauted practice of “positive thinking”. While this has become a much hyped formula in self-help theater, it actually misses the finer point. Thinking “scenarically” involves navigating what is unknowable and uncertain by considering the entire spectrum (realistic positives and negatives both, but with focus on how best to put in place what one can to mitigate real vs imagined risk).

In the case of the client I referred to earlier, who worried to the point of psychological and physical disability, this meant deliberately and insistently reminding herself of the seriousness and care that her daughter actually brought to driving, her maturity, demonstrated safety mindfulness and reliability: all points she shared with her daughter in a series of conversations after we discussed the value of her doing so. Her work also involved visualizing her daughter proceeding on the highway in a timely, competent, and safe way on her trip to and from her job (having agreed to a process for reassuring mom that would not add undo anxiety to her own busy day).

As part of her new practice, my client would visualize her daughter’s genuine confidence and astute attention to road conditions, leaving several car lengths ahead, signaling before making lane changes, and being comfortable in the driver’s seat without undue distractions. Fairly quickly, she earnestly  got in touch with how proud she is of the woman her daughter had become.

After working very hard at widening her aperture in visualizing a wider range of scenarios, though the negative ones recurred daily also, my client went from paralyzed by her fears to worrying with a capacity to nonetheless live her life. This is all about the “neuroplasticity,” about which I wrote in an earlier post, and the laying down of new neural pathways.

I apply the same strategy to my own worries. They are always there but occupy less psychic space than they might otherwise. The faculty of scenario thinking is a blessing, not a curse. It needs, like all strengths, however, to be tempered to avoid excesses in the ways in which it is applied to avoid restricting the range of what we visualize to primarily the tragic possibilites. This too is spiritual practice.

Worry invites us to inspect the root of our fears and to better know ourselves. It serves a very real and important function. As we look at our own cycles of thought, we are better able to captain our own ship, and deal with the complex entanglements of our lives. As we discipline the mind appreciatively, and preferably not with harsh medications and self-denigration, we open up greater and greater psychic space in which the Spirit can flower.

Though challenge and distress and unfortunate circumstances may surely come, we cultivate a resilience and the self-knowledge to apply energies of mind and body in ways that make a difference over things we can affect. This is “crucible-centered” leadership: learning from the tougher times by facing them head on with the knowledge that we will get “up to bat” once again.

To drown in our darkest worries is to drown before the water has even reached our feet. If, instead, I think of how to best act given the possibility of a threatening flood, my worry becomes concern and my thoughts have constructive purpose. I learn and become more able, not disabled, in advance.

“Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.”
Arthur Somers Roche

“People get so in the habit of worry that if you save them from drowning and put them on a bank to dry in the sun with hot chocolate and muffins they wonder whether they are catching cold.”
John Jay Chapman

If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I’d have fewer imaginary ones. ~Don Herold

Nerves and butterflies are fine – they’re a physical sign that you’re mentally ready and eager.  You have to get the butterflies to fly in formation, that’s the trick.  ~Steve Bull

Thinking through [scenario] stories, and talking in depth about their implications, brings each person’s unspoken assumptions about the future to the surface. Scenarios are thus the most powerful vehicles I know for challenging our “mental models” about the world and lifting the “blinders” that limit our creativity and resourcefulness.
– Peter Schwartz, The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World

Let us be concerned and take action in anticipation of possibilities where we can, invest our energies so that we can adapt and face the future with agility, and not obsess about catastrophic scenarios that make us fearful, hesitant, and paradoxically less able to act when circumstances call on us to do so. This practice breeds authentic courage and genius in the face of uncertainty.

© Brother Anton and The Harried Mystic, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.