Are You a Worrier? If so, Understanding Why You Worry Will Help
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski/Unsplash
We live in worrying times. I don’t need to list all the scary stuff here, because if you follow the news you already know about it – or you may be one of the 40 per cent of people across the globe currently avoiding the news completely. And that is totally understandable, especially if you’re struggling with your mental health. The last thing you need is a daily blast of more stuff to feel anxious and worried about.
But if you are prone to worry and anxiety, you have probably struggled for most of your life – through more positive periods for humanity as well as negative ones. And that’s because your brain is more sensitive to threats, in your immediate and wider environment, than less-anxious brains. And threats in your imagination, that may or may not happen in future, but of course that doesn’t stop your poor, overheated brain from worrying about them.
Having treated hundreds of clients struggling with worry and anxiety, I know that these ways of thinking and feeling can be hard to change. Especially if this is your lifelong, default setting, the neural pathways in your brain that facilitate these painful cognitive and emotional processes are fibre-optic fast and strongly wired in. This is why, despite many different attempts to change these unhelpful patterns, you may feel a bit stuck and hopeless. I hope these ways of thinking about your problem will begin to shift that.
Worry and anxiety are not the same thing
I have written about this in previous posts, but it bears repeating: worry and anxiety are not the same. In fact, although people often tell me, ‘I feel worried,’ what they mean is, ‘I feel anxious.’ Anxiety is an emotion, which we feel as ‘affect’ in our body (often in the belly, as butterflies, tight muscles, fizzing energy or a feeling of dread). Worry is a cognitive process, a way of thinking, which is linked to the feeling of anxiety.
Let’s make this concrete – imagine you have a fear of public speaking, which is not unusual, because it’s the joint most common phobia in the UK. You work in a busy marketing team and your line manager asks you to present at the next departmental meeting, to around 100 colleagues. The moment she asks you to speak, you immediately feel a big spike of anxiety – your mouth goes dry, your muscles tense up, your heart races.
At the same time, you’re imagining speaking at this meeting, looking out at all those expectant faces. This continues throughout the day, your mind looping back to images of this scene – the sea of faces (looking bored and disinterested), perhaps seeing yourself looking tense and nervous, your hands shaking as you stumble through your speech.
The worry feeds off the anxiety, and vice versa, as catastrophic thoughts and images whirr round your head. And that creates new bad feelings, like stress, tension and a feeling of mental and physical exhaustion as you live through this horrible event, over and over, in your mind.
Your worrier is just trying to protect you
In parts-based models like schema therapy or internal family systems, we now get curious about which part of you is anxious and which is doing the worrying. Through an IFS lens, we would see a young, vulnerable part – who I call Little X, so Little Dan is the anxious part of me – feeling all those horrible feelings of anxiety, fear, dread, the gut-level sense that something awful is about to happen. And another part, the Worrier, doing all that worrying in your mind.
Because chronic worry can be horrible – stressful, exhausting, relentless – it’s easy to get angry or frustrated with this part. You might think, ‘I hate that damn Worrier! I wish it would just shut the hell up.’ And that would be entirely understandable, because it drives you crazy.
But remember in IFS, this part is called a protector. And I always think there is no part with a clearer protective intention than this one. It’s entire job is to anticipate threats, dangers, scary stuff and help you problem solve or avoid them. And it works incredibly hard to keep you safe. When you speak to this part, you often find they have been worrying away in the background, always on, ever vigilant, for a person’s whole life. Think about that: decades of relentless hard work, all to keep you from harm.
Although they can be annoying and their strategy is both unhelpful and outmoded, your Worrier deserves, in my humble opinion, nothing but love and appreciation. We might need to work on that strategy, because of course chronic worry is no fun. But their intention, their goal in life, is nothing but noble and good. Understanding this is the first step in helping this part soften, change and relax. When they are able to do that, your worry naturally decreases, which of course is what we ultimately want.
I hope that insight helps you understand your worry better – and watch this space for more resources on worry and anxiety, coming very soon.
Love,
Dan ❤️
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