The Worry Trick summary

Ask yourself this: What’s going to happen tomorrow? If it’s a weekday, maybe you’ll wake up at the usual time. Go to work. Traffic could be bad, so you might be a little bit late – Why not? It’s happened before. You could be in a serious car accident. It’s not impossible.

The thing is, we all go through life as if we know what to expect. Chances are tomorrow will be as regular and forgettable as the vast majority of other days in your life. A worry-free mind knows this. So if a doubt arises, it’ll leave just as easily. 

But if you suffer from excess worry, things look different. You experience doubts about the future as if they were immediate dangers. 

Worry loves it when this happens. When you treat your doubt as if it were danger, you naturally respond to it in a way that makes it worse. That makes it grow.

Think about it. What do you do when you start to worry? When you have that first sneaking feeling of doubt? Because your brain interprets it as danger, your first reaction is to try to stop it. This ends up with you arguing with yourself, and when you argue with yourself you can never win.

You see, you can only worry about the future – about something that could happen, however unlikely. But the truth is, you don’t know what will happen in the future. And it’s incredibly difficult to prove that something won’t happen, no matter how hard you try. In fact, to the worrying mind, the more you try and fail, the more evidence there is that the bad thing could happen!

So, reasoning and arguing make it worse. What about distraction?

That’s about as easy as being asked not to think about your first childhood pet. Even if you haven’t thought about Flopsy the bunny in decades, I bet he’s at the front of your mind now. Distraction doesn’t work either.

That’s the worry trick. Doubt interpreted as danger, which you naturally try to stop. The harder you try, the more successful the trick, and the more you worry.

If you keep trying to stop something but that just makes it worse, it means your methods need examining. You need to stop trying to change the worry itself. Instead, try changing the relationship that you have with worry.

Let’s explore that idea.