The End of Worry: Why We Worry and How to Stop - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Reverend Will van der Hart is an Anglican vicar in London and founding director of Mind and Soul, an organization that is a Christian interface to emotional and mental health issues.

Dr. Rob Waller is a consultant psychiatrist working for the National Health Service in Scotland and an Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Rob partners with Will in the Mind and Soul organization.

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The End of Worry

1

Why We Worry

I am an old man and have known

a great many troubles,

but most of them never happened.

MARK TWAIN

When I (Rob) get up in the morning, I tend to do things that I think will be useful. I have breakfast to give me energy. I brush my teeth to keep them healthy. I put on clothes because others will appreciate it! My point is that we tend to do things we believe will have value. So what is there to worry about?

If you ask most worriers, they will tell you that churning away at things doesn’t help, but they think it does—at least at a deeper level. There must be something about worry that we think assists us, which means we do actually value it (like our old pair of comfortable jeans) and believe it is useful to us. And so we are reluctant to discard it.

In this chapter, we present worry as a process (or thinking style) with clear patterns and goals. Worry doesn’t just happen. We learn to do it over time, and it tends to operate the same way in different people. It is this that gives us hope, because if we can understand the processes and patterns, then that is the first step to overcoming worry.

Where Worry Starts

Worriers can typically trace their worrying back to childhood, and even to their parents or other family members who worried before them, so there is a genetic contribution to worry that is important to understand.

Psychologists talk about hardwired aspects of our personality, such as whether we are more introverted or extroverted. These aspects are neutral and not illnesses or problems. It is fine to be either an introvert or an extrovert—or even a mixture of both. All parts of the spectrum come with strengths and weaknesses that are well within the normal range, and are fully compatible with living a fulfilled life.

One aspect of personality that psychological testing has repeatedly shown to be part of the normal spectrum is “neuroticism”: a tendency to think about things and to be cautious. This has obvious advantages in life: for example, if you are neurotic, you are less likely to be the first one into a fight. But there is also a downside, in that you may be more reticent about going for a new opportunity. On balance, however, it is seen as a valuable aspect of human personality. Evolutionary biologists would say that neuroticism is genetically “successful,” that it has been helpful enough to have been selected over many generations. People who score highly on neuroticism scales are compassionate, careful, and make good friends. The other stable aspects of this type of personality are extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

Neuroticism is the part of personality that is least talked about. One common personality questionnaire, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, doesn’t even mention it.1 Instead, it focuses on the other four dimensions above. So why doesn’t it measure neuroticism? One explanation is that Myers Briggs was in part developed for business use, and businesses generally don’t see the advantages in neuroticism, but love extroverted, open, agreeable, and conscientious workers. The result is that, in our culture, people who tend toward neuroticism are made to feel they are abnormal—even when they are very strong in some respects and well within the normal human range.

Jonathan thought deeply about things. He liked to see situations well and truly proven before participating in them. He would often be the last person to adopt a certain fashion or fad, preferring to stick with “classic” styles and tried-and-tested ideas. Other people who were always off to the next big thing frustrated him; he thought there were more important things than the latest iPhone, for example. He placed his focus instead on spending time with people—often people who couldn’t afford the fashions anyway. They felt comfortable with him. He sensed that he was connecting deeply with them. His deep thinking meant that he remembered their birthdays and what they had said the last time they had met. They felt understood, but to him, the constant deep thinking caused him worry.

It’s true that people who come with this genetic background—the deep thinkers—are more likely to develop problematic worry. But this is only part of the story. Many people with this personality aspect do not worry, and the personality itself is not a problem—it is normal. So it is possible that instead of being problematic worriers, these people may simply be healthily slightly neurotic! However, given the link between neuroticism and unhelpful worry, if you do have a tendency to think deeply and cautiously, you may start to respond too deeply and too cautiously over time, whereas a less neurotic personality might brush things off more easily or not even give them a thought. A good example of this is if you experience a near miss, such as nearly going into debt, or nearly lose a parent to cancer, and you begin to think too deeply. This can lead to you making extra plans and taking extra precautions in the future to try to make sure something never happens again—and then to do a lot of worrying about whether these plans and precautions are enough, or not . . . or maybe they are . . . but then again . . .

Families can also contribute to this excessive thinking. They may live by sayings and mantras such as, “Better safe than sorry” or “You never know.” There is truth in these thoughts, to be sure, but there is also the potential to take them to extremes. There are also families where no one seems to worry, so a child feels he or she has to, or where a future divorce is so likely that there is no stable ground to rest upon.

The Reason for Worry

Worry is a normal human emotion, and there are times when it is perfectly right to worry—in fact, it would be odd not to.

Jackie is a mother whose son has joined the army and been posted to a war zone. She knows she can’t not care—this is impossible, not to mention immoral, for a mother. But neither does she feel she can allow herself to consider the possible ultimate consequences. If she were, for example, to contemplate her son being blown up, it would probably destroy her, and, at the very least, she would probably have a panic attack. So she ends up having a good old worry instead. If she is honest, her worry has become a comfort. And other moms in similar situations share this worry with her. Worry is her “friend” at the moment.

Jackie is not the only example we could give of healthy levels of concern growing to worry. Will and his wife, Louie, nearly lost their second child, Joseph Douglas, during the writing of this book. For seven consecutive weeks, their child was treated in the hospital for a serious breathing problem and a complex MRSA infection. Will described himself during this time as having been “the most genuinely and justifiably worried” he has ever been in his life. Interestingly, he says this felt very different from the sort of worry he normally experienced (and you will hear more about these two types of worry later in the book). Will described the sort of “justifiable” worry he experienced as similar to the anguish of the Prodigal Son’s father who watched every night for his...