Becoming a skilled worrier takes practice

Perhaps worrying is a skill that can be learned just like welding, learning to type, or driving a car while using a cell phone.  This doesn’t mean that we all become equally proficient at worrying. What is needed is diligent training, starting when we are young, the right kind of inheritance, information (genetic information) and the appropriate sensitivity to signals that can turn on pro worry genes and turn off those genes that might retard worry learning. That last sentence is quite a mouthful, the kind that can break a tooth if you bite down too hard. Some softening up is in order.

Before going any further it seems reasonable to point out that worrying must have lots of rewards otherwise it would disappear and that includes making us less rather than more anxious when we are in a worrying mood. After all if what we were worrying about were to actually be happening to us then that would be really scary. Worrying keeps the elephant from barging in on us.

It is highly unlikely that there is a single worry gene. More likely there are genes for things like skittishness, or being easily raddled, or jumpiness, which is relevant to worrying but also, is a useful ingredient for anxiety, or depression and you can add to your own list of uncomfortable goodies. As to training, that also is complex issue and not very well understood. Worrying has to be effective at least some of the time. If you worry that an elephant is about to enter the room or some other disaster is about to happen and it doesn’t well we have one more event in which worrying may have prevented what it is feared might happen. Seems that this is a good enough psychological reason to continue to worry.

Just got off the phone with Shlomo. Another bomb went off, this time in Haifa Israel. His girls are ok and they were near the blast site. Shlomo is an expert on vigilance and stress and how danger signals are processed by the brain and our endocrine system. He also is a highly accomplished worrier.

I have shared with him some of my worry skills, the ones that I have found useful for sustained and intense worrying. He felt that I had all the ingredients to become an expert worrier. In fact he added that I have already arrived. He gave me an added slap on the back noting that my knowledge of how different kinds of memory work and also about memory priming without awareness gives me an added plus in understanding my worrying and continuing my worry education. I guess he gives me extra credit for thinking about how environmental triggers get unwanted toxic thoughts to pop up in our heads. Finally Shlomo admitted what he knew was true and told me, “I agree that you can certainly keep up with me in a footrace on worrying.”

After I found out that his family was safe I asked Shlomo, Well do you think you know some worrying tricks that I don’t know”? He thought just for a moment, “Look Jake, we know the same stuff, the good stuff, the kind that can take your breath away and keep your eyes open well into the night, and sure, we each us have some unique tricks for stuffing a worry ball into a basket but those are the tiny details. No Jake, we know each other’s worry world and appreciate how good each of us is in sweating it out, forever” So there you have it.

Of course I had to poke about worry a bit more. I asked Shlomo,

“So Shlomo, how did we get so good that we recognize that we are world class worriers? And as usual with Shlomo it is always a give and take and he responded. “Maybe that is overstating our skill. We have a tendency to exaggerate how much we know. Let us say that we are at least excellent amateurs. But I should add, given our rich imagination I would think we are at least champs among the amateurs.”

So I responded to his vote of confidence. “OK, let me go through what I think it takes to get as good as we are. First off I think you do need some really good genetic makeup, the kind of central nervous system architecture that will support gifted learning about worrying. That is clearly a complex story because it is highly unlikely to be a single gene. After all nature is really important. You can’t be a basketball star if you are midget, nor a fabulous hitter in baseball if you don’t have amazing acuity and super eye-hand coordination. Next you need some early training experience. I don’t think you can become a skilled worrier if you start your training late, like as an adult. Have a parent that has perfected worry skills and shows them off often is an excellent modeling opportunity for any child. In my experience the best worriers were picking up their craft right around the time they were learning to walk and long before they would pick up a violin bow.

What kind of learning is really helpful? My guess is that it has to contain loads of scary stuff, the kind that is filled with uncertainty and scenes, where the hero, us, can’t escape, but just maybe, skilled worrying allows us to prepare and plan for the one escape route that is possible. It also is important to have those that are close to us share in the scary experiences because like a Greek chorus, the play without a supporting cast is incomplete. It is a bit like the value of learning to play the violin while a parent learns the instrument with you (as in the Suzuki method). Now after a good start early in life you need loads of opportunities for additional practice. Those practice sessions should be taken seriously, and that means you have to bring all of you into the practice, which includes making the scary stuff real as possible and of course taking ownership of what is happening around you. For example, in a high school advanced biology class, as the teacher goes over questions that have been on previous advanced placement tests realized that your correct answers are for questions being presented in class but the exam you will take will cover all of the material you do not know. Regrettably, many years of worry practice are required for you to become a really skilled worry competitor. Even with all of these conditions being present it is still is not enough to produce world class worrying. What you also need are the tools to imagine coming disasters, including quick intelligence, a very vivid and creative imagination, and it also helps to be able to image well. This last set of ingredients are the sauce that can really make worry taste perfect, because now you have in place the tools to take what you have learned and practiced and raise that knowledge to a state of intense worrying. Now you can aspire to become the talented movie director who can take experiences and make mind movies that are rarely seen on worry screens by run of the mill worriers.”

Of course Shlomo and I both realized that I have left out key specific, measured, worry ingredients necessary for baking a really gourmet worry pie. For example, what kind of training regiment is best suited for learning skilled worrying. What are some of the conditions that retard effective worry learning? How much of worrying is modeled, i.e., children copying parents. How long does it take to learn to be a skilled worrier? Are there different types of worrying that are learned differently and genetically supported differently from one another. For example are some worriers obsessional and others not and how does this influence what type of worrier we become.

Shlomo listened to all this babble, and replied. He was enthusiastic. He told me “We should put together a workshop on worrying. I never realized how gifted we were.

Months later I sent Shlomo a note. ‘Shlomo, sorry you could not make it to the worry workshop that just took place. Turns out that we are just one type of worrier and maybe not quite as gifted as we initially thought. One of the speakers, a Prof.Starr from Upsula gave a talk on obessional thinking as a worrying style. He started with some personal remarks and then moved into the biology of what it takes to pick lots of little things to worry about; items that are all concrete and do not lend themselves to creative manipulation or the flight of imagination. For example, the mother who worries about her kid riding down the quiet street on a bike without a helmet, or not dressing warm enough to play in the snow, or worry about whether the blouse and skirt really go together and if not would this be embarrassing for their 10 year old. No, these are worries that are more about obsessional thinking than grand sweeping worry films directed without much constraint. Starr argued that the true worrier as opposed to the latter type, the obsessional, which he labels a pseudo worrier, is overwhelmed with angst for just a few themes but certainly not the waterfront of everyday events. Prof Starr went on to point out that worry is also not a unitary phenomenon (just as we suspected). Like other mental events, worry can be broken down into its component parts. In a brilliant set of studies he presented brain imaging pictures of the components of worrying in both true worriers as well as in pseudoworries.

Another speaker presented a theoretical model of how worrying develops. In a question and answer period he was reluctant to say even a word about how his research on the development of worry might be used to treat it. I wonder why.

I am getting increasingly uncomfortable.