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.