Tonight at the Ideas Cafe we discussed what is worrying, whether there is an opposite to worrying, is there an optimal level of worrying that we should have..............
1. We can think of hope as the opposite of worry. While hopelessness is not quite the same as worry, hope is close to an opposite. Another thought is that "over confident" is the opposite of worry. This is instructive as to the value of worry, that we may become over confident if we have not worries at all. Of course it can be that there is no real opposite to worry, that the opposite to worry is not worry and that people who are not prone to worrying just ends up doing other things instead of spending time worrying.
2. Worry is like an internal alarm system to alert us to something bad that may be about to happen. In this analogy, worry is a good tool to bring our attention to something that may turn bad so that we can do something about it. The analogy is also useful in looking at nuisance alarms that bother us but are not really that useful to us. Therefore worrying about things that are not worthwhile is like having nuisance alarms, it saps our energy without doing something useful for us.
3. Worrying can only happen because we have the capacity to anticipate the future and to look at the possibilities that can happen. Young children do not worry before they can project and anticipate into the future. Teenagers worry a lot about things that seem unimportant to adults. As they mature, these teenage worries fade and are displaced by more substantial issues. Some think that our worrying decreases as we age and mature while others think that we may worry more as we age as we are now experienced in more ways that things can go wrong. Perhaps it is the net balance of the two trends as to whether we become less or more worrisome as we age.
4. Worry can be a cognitive state of recognizing a worrisome situation, or a mood when one is more pessimistic of how things will turn out. It can also become debilitating when one is gripped by it instead of using it to trigger some preventative action.
5. An internal dialog often happens when one worries. It can be an imagination of what is to come and how the various possible scenarios can be handled or it can just be thinking how bad it can be without being able to find answers as to what to do.
6. Sometimes, worry results from having too many options making choosing difficult. This is typical of high school graduates facing the important decision of choosing a career when anything seems possible at that point.
7. Worry, like any other emotional response, can be tamed through practice. While the initial worrying response to a situation is an emotional reaction, our response to this reaction can be to delegate the responsibility to someone else, to buy insurance for a possible accident, to come up with a proper action to mitigate the outcome of concern etc. We can always delay it, sleep on it, just so that it does not over power us. We can also convince ourselves that we have done what we can and that the rest of it is out of our hands and therefore not productive to spend time worrying about it.
8. Does language play a part here if there is no direct opposite to the word worry? Is there no such word because we do not have this sentiment or do we not feel this sentiment because there is no such word in the language for us to think about it and communicate about it?
I am sure I have missed out some of the discussion as it was an active discussion tonight. Please feel free in commenting on what I may have missed and post some of your thoughts in the comment section!
Oliver.
Timely post, Oliver. I was researching this topic yesterday and found an excellent article. Am a worry-wart to tell the truth and yeah, often I let worrying affect my judgment. So being able to look at this in a different light is refreshing -- and effective.
ReplyDeleteThis is the post I was reading: http://superperformance.com/worry2.html
That is a great post you referred to Ben and Suanne. It is similar to a lot of our discussion and also put in concrete examples of what to do in dealing with these mental dialogs we have when we worry. While the post may seem long, I found it well worth the while to read through!
ReplyDeleteThanks a lot!
Hi Oliver,
ReplyDeleteI meant to mention it during the discussion, but, as it often happens, we moved in a different direction:): When we formulate our worries in the form of coherent thoughts and identify them as worries we are already in an active stage of doing something about whatever it is that worries us. Because when we simply worry (at least when I simply worry) the disturbing feeling is there; the object of the worry is there; perhaps the sensation of alarm or panic is there, but the thought "I am worried about x because of y", or "I am worried that x will happen" (instead of simply "Ah-a-a, x will happen") comes later and the formulation itself is a cognitive activity. So this kind of an inner dialog (I prefer to call it a monolog, though:))is important for the decision making. Unless, of course, it turns into "to be -or-not - to be" kind of drivel, and then it is destructive. So there - worrying is a good thing, because it alarms one to possible trouble, unless it is excessive, and then it is bad. We are just on the lookout for the Archimedean place to stand (interestingly enough, in some other languages his saying was translated as "a point of support") to measure the right amounts of everything.
Looking forward to our next week discussion on right and wrong. Should be fun.
Shula
Thanks Shula.
ReplyDeleteAs I was trying to get to during the meeting, whether there is an "optimal" level of worry where it is enough to give us an alarm of the important things and not so much as to dominate our cognition.
Following on your thread of the difference between worrying and plain thinking about the situation, I think worrying has an emotional component to it. Dispassionately thinking about a situation in the future, logically figuring things out is not worrying.
In fact, worrying is the trigger that calls our attention to this situation in the future that may have bad consequences. I will go as far as saying that it is likely our amygdala, the part of our brain responsible for motivation and emotional behaviour that starts the worrying before we move the idea to the prefrontal cortex for analysis.
It is perhaps parallel to fear. We feel fear before trying to figure out why we have the feeling and then do something about it.
It is also like anger. We feel anger in a situation, but when we try to analyze why we are angry, we look at the judgments we make of the situation and the value systems we use to make those judgments. Some times the anger response is not justified.
With this hypothesis, worry is like fear and anger, it is our emotional snap judgment of the situation to alarm us in a hurry but subject to correction by analysis.
There is no easy "optimal" level of worry because worry is our quick reaction to external events and we do not have control of the external events.
However, it is up to our logical side to filter out the worries that are false or nuisance alarms as well as to silence the legitimate alarms after we have handled the situation the best we can.
I have some doubts about controlling our emotions though. Don't psychiatrists warn us about suppressing emotions only to have them do long term damage to us?
Controlling differs from suppressing. But perhaps a better term will be "understanding" our emotions. When you uncerstand your emotions (worry, anger, fear) you are in a some degree of control over it, because you realize the causes (and, hopefully, the reasons) for those emotions. There is no need to suppress them in order to deal with them. The question is whether we can modify our emotions. I beleive that we can, precisely because there is that cognitive component in them that alows for understanding. Understanding often leads to the possiblity of modification.
ReplyDeleteAs for thought vs. worrying. You seem to take Hume's approach to motivation. He thought that reason cannot motivate action; only emotions can. I don't disagree (here is that dobule negative again that philosophers like to use:)). What I was trying to say was that when you are aware of your worry, you are already at the stage of thinking about it. Formulating to yourself the object of your worry in lingusitic terms is a cognitive activity. I beleive that this is so for most of our emotions.
What do you think?
I wonder what the psychiatrists have to say about the difference between suppression and control.
ReplyDeleteI think we can use logic to moderate our emotional response to the situation but emotions by their nature is a fast response and therefore not likely to be controlled by logic at the source of the emotions.
This may be why the recommended method for someone who is easily angered is to take deep breaths and count to 10 before reacting. I am assuming this strategy allows the prefrontal cortex logic component time to come in and override the immediate response from the amygdala.
Seems to me the initial trigger for the emotions: worry, anger, fear is still not understood or easily controlled. People take drugs like ativan and other relaxants to calm down from nervousness so my guess is that it is not so easy to train the starting of the emotions or else chemical therapy will not be as popular.
I do agree that we can, through logic, convince ourselves as to whether the emotional reactions are valid or not after we started worrying, being afraid, or have already become angry.
We need some input from psychiatrists and neural science researchers!
Yo,Uncle....eventually i got rid of the greatfirewall....leaving an comment here with you. As in the last 2 decades I lived on my own, I didnt feel any worry that much. As more and more sentimental thoughts did came along to life...here we go and I got the blues...:>
ReplyDeleteHi nephew! Good to hear from you from the other side of the Chinese wall. Sorry to hear about you getting the blues.
ReplyDeleteWhat goes up must come down, they say. Does it not also mean that what comes down must also go up? Is it better to have the ups and the downs than not to have any ups and downs at all?
Oliver.