Dr. Carbonell shifts the conversation about worry from efforts to analyze or banish it to changing one’s relationship to it, so that the presence of doubt or worry thoughts causes minimal distress. He puts an end to the internal fight by refusing to fight; if you refuse to dignify the contents of worry with concern and attention, you deprive your worries of what they need to grow and thrive.
What Is the Worry Trick?
The trick is this: you experience doubt, and treat it like danger.
When you struggle against your worries, you generally get more worry rather than less.
We can experience an emotional response to a false thought just as powerfully as we can to a true thought. Our emotions are reactions to the content of our thoughts, regardless of the reality (or lack thereof) behind the thoughts.
If you watch a really scary movie and become afraid, you might try telling yourself “it’s only a movie,” but this rarely takes away the fear. If you’re really worried about something, and a good friend tells you to “stop worrying about that,” that usually doesn’t help either.
One reason this rarely works is that we don’t directly control our thoughts. We can direct our attention to a particular problem, such as a math problem to be solved, or a crossword puzzle to be completed. But we can’t compel our brains to produce only the thoughts we want and none of the thoughts we don’t want. No one can.
The problem we have with worry isn’t just that we don’t control our thoughts. The problem is that we often forget that, or don’t know it, and think that we should be controlling our thoughts. This leads us to an unnecessary and counterproductive wrestling match with our thoughts.
You’re in the ballpark if you identified something about providing an alert to potential danger. It’s to identify potential problems and threats, before they develop into a full blown crisis, so that we can devise solutions and live more safely. That’s a good ability. We need that. More than any other species, probably, we have brains that give us the ability to imagine different future scenarios and plan responses. This is how some early hunter figured out how to trap huge mammoths in a pit where they could become food for the entire tribe. This ability helped us become the top predator on the planet, even in a world with bigger, stronger, and faster predators that had bigger teeth and claws.
Final fact you need about the amygdala: it only “learns,” or creates new memories, when it’s activated. Know what I mean by activated? I mean when you become afraid. When everything seems routine, and you’re just going along with business as usual, your amygdala is on standby and not making any new memories. It’s only when your amygdala detects what it takes as a sign of danger that it activates your sympathetic nervous system, enabling fight and flight responses, and then it will make memories.
Your opportunity to retrain your amygdala, and change your relationship with chronic worry, comes when you feel frightened or upset by your thoughts. If you had a dog phobia, you would retrain your amygdala by spending time with a dog, getting afraid, and hanging out with the dog long enough for the fear to subside. Then the amygdala would make some new observations about dogs, and as you repeatedly spent time with dogs, your chronic fear reaction would subside. You can’t “tell” your amygdala that dogs are okay, but you can create the opportunities for it to discover that.
And if you’re a person with chronic worry, the worrisome thoughts are your dogs. You can make progress the same way the person with a dog phobia makes progress—by working with your thoughts, rather than against them.
It’s the ultimate irony! Your efforts to stop worrying are the main reason you continue to worry.
Control is about what we do, not what we think and feel. That’s why our laws describe behavior that’s expected and restricted. Society expects people to control what they do—how they drive, how they treat others, how they wait their turn in line, and so on. Our laws and social norms aren’t based on what people think and feel because nobody really controls those things. Control is about what you do.
From the perspective of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), the answer lies with two important rules of thumb that govern our lives.
First, there’s a rule of thumb which governs our interactions with the external world around us, the physical environment that we live in. In the external world, the rule of thumb is something like this: the harder you try, and the more you struggle, the more likely you are to get what you want. Nothing is guaranteed, but you can improve your odds at getting something you want by making every effort possible. That’s the rule of thumb that governs our interactions with the external world. But that’s not the only rule we live by. There’s a second rule of thumb, one that pertains to our internal world of thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations. In this world, the rule is quite different. Here the rule is something like this: the more you oppose your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations, the more you will have of them.
This is one of the obstacles you face in dealing with the problem of worry. As a society, we value thought, and usually think of thought as one of our characteristics that sets us apart from animals, one of the highlights of billions of years of evolution. We value human thought. And most of us are vain enough to put a particularly high value on our own thought. Thought is good, powerful, and important, we believe, and my thoughts are especially good, powerful, and important. We certainly act this way in responding to worry. If we didn’t take these thoughts to be important, they wouldn’t cause us so much grief!
If you became dehydrated, perhaps because you played too much tennis on a hot, sunny day without adequate liquids, you could drink more water and solve the problem. If you were severely dehydrated, you might require intravenous fluids. That’s all it would take—resupply your fluids and the problem is fixed. Training yourself to handle your worrisome thoughts differently is not like the problem of resupplying your water. It’s more like the process of exercising to get yourself back into shape, or of dieting and losing weight. You will need to learn, practice, and continually follow some steps in order to improve and get the results you seek.
In order to figure out some good ways to respond to a worry, first clarify the kind of situation you confront now. You can do this by using the two-part test from chapter 2, which asks: Is there a problem that exists now in the external world around you? If there is, can you do something to change it now? If you get anything other than two “yes” answers—two “no” answers, one “no” and one “yes,” maybes, or whatever—then you don’t have a problem in your external world that you can solve right now. You have the problem of worrying. You’re being “baited” by Uncle Argument.
So meditation actually consists of noticing, and passively observing, all the thoughts that get in the way when we sit down to have inner peace. This is particularly the case with mindfulness meditation. It’s a process of passively observing thoughts as they come and go while you focus on something basic like your breathing. Don’t try to engage in any discussion with your thoughts, nor try to silence or remove them in any manner. Simply observe them.
扫一扫
4012
被折叠的 条评论
为什么被折叠?
到【灌水乐园】发言
