How Not to Worry

I think we can all agree that worrying makes very little rational sense. Helpfulness-wise. Rarely is worrying helpful. And I full-heartedly agree with what my friend called the best career advice he read this year: put your headphones in, stare at your computer, and assume that everyone loves you until you are fired, or retire. (The Book of Mormon put it another way.)

But the truth is that demanding of yourself a stiff upper lip, when it comes to unhelpful emotions like worrying, doesn't really work. It is pretty clear to me that merely being made aware of something sensible and a verifiable fact does very little in the way of changing my behaviour. Only a crude understanding of human thought could posit that a life strategy's helpfulness as I see it carries much weight with the complex and mysterious brain-machine that is responsible for what I eventually say and do.

So if a stiff upper lip doesn't work, what does? The boring answer is analysis: many sad and lonely days slowly debugging the black box intricacies of your mysterious brain-machine.

The reason why analysis is more likely to work is because worrying is not necessarily irrational. The brain-machine has its logic, if one that gives more weight to survival than to your minute-by-minute psychological comfort. To change the outcome (worry), one must begin by assuming that the logic of worrying is valid, and then ask why.

Suppose the machine works thus. You worry about not being good enough (most common secret worry of everyone I've ever worked with). The internal structure of this worry, implicitly or explicitly, probably goes something like this: if I underperform, then I am worthless; if I am worthless, then I have no claim to other people's love and tender care which are absolutely necessary to my continual & thriving existence (because in my model of how the world works, people don't hand over their regard unless under duress from the awe instilled in them by evidence of my measurably superior intellect; and in this model I also identify entirely with my intellect, because evidently what else is there to human beings). So if I have no claim to TLC, then I am left to contemplate a combination loneliness and self-loathing in the dreary company of Netflix and nothing else. Sneer all you want at the plainly untrue, or certainly very questionable, claims in that sequence: if that is your model of how the world works, then the worry is entirely valid.

And faulty models of how the world works are no joke. Because these are not explicit, coherent, logical constructs. They are implicit, embodied, wordless intuitions built upon instinct and tradition, and half-forgotten childhood experiences, and the infinite stream of subversive media messages beamed at your subcortical systems every moment of your waking life. So, for the most part, you are not privy to the mechanics of how these world models come about. You are only privy to the result (the worry) and the dim but inescapable conviction that this worry is in fact plausible.

And not only plausible, but urgent. If fear of failure is connected by rigid conviction to a fear of rejection, then no amount of stiff-upper-lipping is going to suppress worrying. Rejection is no joke. It's not absurd to think that there might be some evolutionary logic for the emotion of rejection to be wired together with the prospect of actual, imminent and probably unpleasant death. Remember that scene in Gravity with the Hubble Space Telescope when Sandra Bullock's character is out on a spacewalk and there is a sudden wave of high-speed debris from a nearby satellite explosion and the space shuttle is destroyed and her attachment gear is wrenched off and she is catapulted into space? I submit that that's not entirely unlike what rejection can feel like: like being sent adrift into the deadly darkness of interstellar space, alone.

So rather than taking the tough-guy attitude that worrying is for women and weaklings, as a popular folk story from back home used to say, it might be more effective to engage with the worry (or - insert unhelpful emotion of your choosing) and debug it properly.

The skill of analysis and self-awareness is pretty much indispensable for an undespairing adult existence. And yet I'm sure it sounds trite and boring on paper, even if in practice I've seen it elude many a clever and educated people. It still eludes me, in the trenches of day-to-day existence, all the time.

Unconditional Positive Regard

In the real world people worry about status. They polish their highlight reels. They secret away their Impostor Syndrome. They try to play it cool. They judge and expect to be judged. They cleave the world into good and bad and winners and losers. In the real world, people understandably stick with being tough and tough-minded.

But there is another world, call it Neverland. That world which your tough-minded striver dismisses as naive, childish, impractical, and a festering ground for hippies and anarchists (you know, people without ambition, quote-unquote). I venture to submit that perhaps this other world might have some insights to offer.

You can read about it lots of places. I was reading On Becoming a Person ("a therapist's view of psychotherapy"), by the famous twentieth century American psychoanalyst Carl Rogers and I was very glad for it. Like Impro by Keith Johnstone before it, or Men, Women and Worthiness by Brene Brown; like Book of Life by Alain de Botton; like Great Thinkers by School of Life; like War and Peace by Tolstoy and The Notebook by Agota Kristof; like Steppenwolf and Siddhartha by Herman Hesse; like Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut; and like one of my favourite books of all time, L'Etranger by Camus. Like all these books and others, and this lady speaking at Google, On Becoming a Person filled me with this joy. A joy simple and steady and tranquil, like a warm summer's day in feeling format. This was Neverland.

What was this joy, this sense of something meaningful and important, this tranquility of mind, so unlike the tough-mindedness of the real world? I kept going back and forth.

In the real world, I worry about everything all the time. Have I done a good enough job? Have I upheld my values? Have I successfully avoided disappointing the people I care about? etc.

But back in Neverland, those worries lapse. Here, Dr Rogers speaks to me with soothing reassurance thus: In my relationships with persons, I have found that it does not help, in the long run, to act as though I were something that I am not; I find I am more effective when I can listen acceptantly to myself, and can be myself [because] the curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I change. His approach to relationships is humbling. It's a reminder of how much more empathy I could bring to my own, of how I could be judging less, accepting more, and trying harder to understand rather than dictate, to help rather than demand.

Dr Rogers reminds me of the virtue of giving (provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth) and acceptance (a warm regard for [the other] as a person of unconditional self-worth - of value no matter what his condition, his behaviour, or his feelings; (...) a respect and liking for him as a separate person, a willingness for him to posses his own feelings in his own way; (...) an acceptance of and regard for his attitudes of the moment, no matter how negative or positive, no matter how much they may contradict other attitudes he has held in the past; and acceptance of each fluctuating aspect of this other person; (...) a continuing desire to understand).

Why these virtues? Because, he continues, it is only as I understand the feelings and thoughts which seem so horrible to you, or so weak, or so sentimental, or so bizarre - it is only as I see them as you seem; and accept them and you, that you feel really free to explore all the hidden nooks and frightening crannies of your inner and often buried experience. And as with you, so with myself.

This unconditional positive regards is what Neverland has that the real world doesn't.

I have a Virginia-Woolf-type archetypal memory that helps me return to this feeling of unconditional positive regard. It is December, a few days before Christmas. It is cold. The day is almost over. I am walking through Covent Garden and everywhere there are people: people doing their Christmas shopping, people drinking in the pub, people talking, people walking, people everywhere doing their myriad people things. And I reach the plaza at Seven Dials, whence seven roads stretch outwards like the seven spokes of a cart wheel. And still more people can be seen sauntering underneath the Christmas lights, underneath the decorations, sauntering underneath the crests and mountains of the darkening winter clouds. The seven roads are sprawling like wide riverbeds through the tall canyon of buildings. And soundtrack to all this is Girl from the North Country, in a version by Bob Dylan, and it's a melancholy song. But melancholy and uplifting, and light with the sort of calm composure that one feels when one has accepted one's yearning as definitely unending and as the normal condition of one's life. It is just the right soundtrack. And right there is that joy, that melancholy and uplifting joy akin to reverence, expansive and suffused with awe, at life's tremendous capacity for suffering and still more tremendous capacity for growth. It's a joy as if of standing before the Project of Being, so much bigger than oneself, or one's mission, bigger even than the ambitions of one's species as a whole. For a moment, I feel free from the tragedy of unyielding tradeoffs, finite resources and finite lives of intolerable vulnerability. And from that perspective, Neverland's unconditional positive regard truly does feel like the only sensible attitude to existence.

Why I Read (Even the News) & How to Tell a Good from a Bad Story

Order makes me happy. I can spend a day organising papers. I organise drawers, too, and my calendar and the nuggets of wisdom from books I read. Order is my peace of mind. Order soothes me with the promise that the world makes sense. At least, once you think hard enough.

Order makes you happy, too. Hence this craze for material design and meditation and minimalism. And white space. Because without order there is chaos. And confusion and, worse of all, chance. All scary stuff. If I may grow lyrical for a moment, if you squint, life in all its forms is one long struggle for order, against a melancholy universe of noise and entropy and chance. We are sense-seeking machines. We seek to build a world of order, where things are clear, coherent, predictable - and therefore fair and safe. Order is safe.

Hence why I read. Intelligent thought is an organising principle. Comprehension turns this disheveled reality into a well-structured story inside of which the world makes sense. Smart people are like focusing lenses. They can take the bewilderment of Brexit, with its multitudes of strangers thinking things stranger still, and turn it into the neat thesis of the "left behind". So panic over. Here, we feel certain, confident and calm. Out there, anguish.

This is not to say, with postmodernism, that everything is a deception. Some of these stories are objectively truer than others. This is to say that intelligent thought makes me happy. Even in small doses. Here are just 313 words of dim unease sublimated into a block of rhythmic prose that you can share on Facebook. A good story makes the world intelligible. And bearable.

Hence why I read, even the news.

The news is annoying because it is essentially a slot machine. It even looks like a slot machine, all flashing headlines and that. It's a gamble. You hit refresh and maybe win a bit of better understanding. Or something funny about a cat. Mostly, you win nothing, he-said she-said blather from pundits and analysts who sound more and more like they might fail a Turing test.

To be fair to the news, its job got harder. Here is some history. News used to be about concrete if weird things happening to people nearby. Stuff you could understand. These days, concrete events have been replaced by patterns, analysis, underlying issues, explanation, charts and everything else needed to make sense of a complex world. The time of stories has expanded to include past (context), change over time (trend) and future (forecasting). Individuals have been replaced by representatives, experts, commentators and spokespeople. In the 1890s, you might have read a story about Miss Emilia Taylor from 224 Evelyn Gardens. Now, she will just be an English teacher in London (i.e. nationality, profession, region). Also, back then, the farther it was from where you lived, the less it was news. Now, you have to keep up with everything everywhere. Well, you don't. People who buy and sell stock across continents have to. It was for these people that news agencies like Reuters were set up, rather than the likes of you, with your boring individual existence and lack of a portfolio. All that came later, when someone invented rubrics, meaning a way of sorting readers into consumer groups. Still, self-ascribed members of the elite have always liked to have opinions about everything. I am thinking of Stepan Arkadyevitch from Anna Karenina: "for him, living in a certain society - owing to the need.. for some mental activity - to have views was just as indispensable as to have a hat".

But having views is indispensable not just because I move in a "certain society". Views are indispensable because they keep me sane. A good story is an ordered interpretation of reality. It is desk tidy for the brain. I would run out of room to breathe, for all the facts and data, without stories to assemble them into stable, comprehensive wholes. Great stories turn a pile of information into a single thought. One you can remember and hold in working memory and reason about without feeling faint. The thesis of the "left behind". Nationalism vs Globalism. The gig economy. And the better the story, the bigger the bucket. Good stories, like good explanations, have reach.

There is science to back this up. Cognitive science calls this assembling of information into coherent wholes chunking. To handle large quantities of information, we pack them into higher-order abstractions. Turning the key to start the engine, checking incoming traffic, putting the car into drive, steering and changing gear becomes "driving". Millions of people, with their sense of selves and habits and love affairs and daily struggle to make it to 50 without shooting themselves, become "Germans" or "generation X" or "digital natives" or whatever. Chunking is the hallmark of expertise. Chess grandmasters have chunked individual chess pieces into valid configurations, the way we all chunk letters into words (the chess "vocabulary" is much bigger). So we need chunking. We need these stories to make sense of the world.

The trick, of course, is finding the good ones. This is why I like brands. Daniel Kahneman says this: the basic test of skill is persistent achievement. What a brand does is advertise skill. And because its achievement is persistent, a brand helps you find important repositories of skill reliably. Great brands are great. I love The Economist, Book of Life and Steven Pinker. People can be brands, too, and great writers always are. It is hard to brand the news, because news is essentially random, but you can brand the quality of reporting and the skill of the people who do it. That is why I read The Economist. You can't brand a local grocery shop either, but Tesco and Waitrose have managed to brand the experience around one. I have a Twitter list called "great". Here I collect outstanding brands, the way a photographer might collect lenses. There is also "British politics", with a set of lenses, and "psychology and cognitive science", with its own.

Hunting for these brands, these people, these lenses, is like foraging. Except you are after good explanations rather than mushrooms. In theory, you have a choice between exploration (going from fertile patch to fertile patch) and exploitation (selecting a patch and sticking with it until it is no longer fertile). Darwin, for example, seemed to prefer serial exploitation, that is mastering one topic at a time (or, at least, this was the pattern he displayed in the 665 books in the diary he began when he was 28, they think he might have explored more in earlier years). In practice, it is all a bit random. Then again, collecting stuff always is. You just have to keep at it.

Which stories you collect is important. "No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant", says William Clifford in The Ethics of Beliefs; "it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resemble it before and weakens others". You can't get tricked by a piece of fake news by accident. Most people are rational. Rational just means that your views are consistent with each other. But you can be rational and wrong. Years of consistent deception will make you believe anything. A guy in a white coat will make you do most things. Again, quoting Daniel Kahneman: "For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs". So the brands you follow matter.

Luckily, truth has a nagging habit of turning up evidence. After a while and with sufficient intellectual rigour, you learn to tell the good story from the bad. As someone said recently, there is no post-truth way to fly an airplane (I think it was Brian Cox, but I could not find the quote). A foundation of good stories will keep you safe from lies, like a good immune system. The lies will try to fit in with them and fail. 

That said, some lies masquerade as truth quite successfully. This is because, given a choice, our brains will choose coherence over truth. The list of cognitive illusions is staggering. Here are just two from Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, fast and slow. If I say that Alain is "intelligent - industrious - impulsive - critical - stubborn - envious" and that Ben is "envious - stubborn - critical - impulsive - industrious - intelligent", you will like Alain better than Ben. Because order of information matters. Because we prefer to feel either one way or another about a person and ambivalence is hard. And if I repeat the phrase "the body temperature of a chicken" enough times and then ask you to rate true or false the statement "the body temperature of a chicken is 144°", you will rate it true more often than random. Because familiarity matters. As Dr Kahneman concludes: "The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen... Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance".

Still, I remain hopeful. We need stories, because we need order, because we need to feel safe. Our stories are like houses, they protect us from a reality that is far weirder, more random and more uncanny than we like to think. The trick is not to get rid of stories, but to continue to hunt for better ones.

Bad Luck

I realised something the other day. I realised that identities are contiguous parts of our bodies. And that we prefer guilt over bad luck.

This week, in acting class, we were discussing an exercise called the Assumptions Game. In this game, you pair with someone and give them a good looking over and observe the sort of thoughts that cross your mind. Perhaps, "this person is a musician" or "this person is kind" or "this person likes to wake up early" (often the person you are paired with is a complete stranger). Then you take turns to share these assumptions - you look straight at your partner and say "you like to wake up early". Your partner's job is to accept the statement, with a "yes I do" or "yes I am", after which you swap roles. As you can imagine, this exercise can quickly push people out of their comfort zone. In regular life, we self-censor for a reason. The first few things that occur to you are always more psychotic, obscene and offensive than you feel comfortable admitting, even to yourself.

Anyway, in this discussion, I kept referring to the Assumptions Game as the Prejudice Game, named so by my paranoia. While playing, I had felt this constant anxiety, like what if I am really a bigot only masquerading as a decent person. Bigotry is a sure path to ostracism, where I'm from. So I called it the Prejudice Game. For some reason, this seemed to annoy the teacher and eventually he cut me off, if gently, by insisting that I please call it a game of assumption not prejudice. 'Prejudice', he explained, 'would be if I were to say to you something like - if you can afford to live in London without working, then your father must be a dentist'.

That is when it happened. Had I been anywhere else, my brain would have happily just parsed the message and moved on ("prejudice is an offensive assumption, here is an example, you should call the thing by its proper name lest you put others off it" etc). But because I was in acting class, where we are conditioned to pay special attention to our breathing and posture and other physical sensations, I immediately realised I felt, for a moment, genuinely upset. First, I think I must have blushed. Certainly, I tensed, my pulse quickened, I felt an unpleasant lightness in my head and I mumbled in reply something I cannot now remember, which is a classic fight-or-flight response. Next, a cold shiver ran me over and my energy sapped. I had to fight the impulse to slide off the chair and curl up on the floor. For a few moments, I was speechless. Finally, I felt this wave wash over me, a wave of overwhelming sadness, in which were mingled a raw and silent rage and a vague sense of anguish and vexation. All this, in what must have been thirty seconds, if not less. I was astonished. You understand that I was fully aware this was all just conversation and that I was being a bit of a fool and that no harm had been intended. Yet a certain part of my brain had reacted to this simple, off-the-cuff remark the same way you might expect a two-year-old to react if you slapped it. I was so intrigued that I spent the next hour analysing this. And here is what I realised.

First, that I had reacted to having my identity threatened the same way I might have reacted to an actual physical threat. That is, what had in fact been upsetting had not been the put-down (which I fully deserved), but the notion, the illustrative example notion you understand, that I was living off my parents. I cannot emphasise enough how crazy this is. Turns out that being a strong independent woman is a core feature of my identity and that to have someone question it, even in jest, is wired to send an atavic part of my psyche into anguish. The fight-or-flight reflex proves it. What is more, under normal circumstances, I would have had no awareness of any of this. None at all. The higher faculties of my brain would have censored the initial reaction, on account of being completely crazy, and would have put in its place something more appropriate. But, returning to my metaphor that being human is like trying to get a full pint through a bustling crowd, at some level, splash splash. Identities are contiguous parts of our bodies!

Second, that it hurts to be misconstrued. It would have bothered me less, or not at all, had the thing been true. The real injury was being misjudged. Is that not fascinating? I mean, why? I searched my memories and concluded that this is always the case, I am always more upset at being rejected or put down because of a misunderstanding than an actual character flaw. Partly, because a misconstrual is to an identity what an injury is to a physical body. But partly, because I can forgive myself for being an idiot, whereas a misunderstanding is bad luck. And how do you forgive bad luck?!

There is something about bad luck that is utterly intolerable. I don't know what it is, but humans seem to be hysterically antagonistic to the idea of bad luck. We would rather feel guilty than unlucky and certainly we would rather feel guilty than unfree. The illusion of free will might be causing us to be angry all the time - at others as well as ourselves - but better that than to feel like a powerless "moist robot". I think this must be, at least in part, why even unsuccessful people seem to prefer to imagine that successful people deserve to be where they are. I find that fascinating.