What, Me Worry?
“The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now.” – Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
If you ever have been labeled a worrywart, you may worry that your anxiety is out of proportion to someone else’s anxiety. You may worry that you worry too much. You may be in a constant state of anxiety about what might happen to you, or someone else. Maybe you are focused on all the negative things that happened in your past. You may wonder if any or all of this is normal.
In fact, most people who come into therapy for anxiety, and even depression, want to know that they are not going crazy, because that is a major, common, frequent and natural concern. Common questions are, “Is this normal worry?” “Can I recover from this?” “Will I lose my mind?” “Am I crazy for feeling this way or having these thoughts?” and even, “Am I normal?”
What is normal worry versus abnormal worry, anyway?
Karen Swartz, M.D., Director of Clinical Programs at the John Hopkins Mood Disorders Center, reports that the difference between normal worry and more serious worry such as someone with a generalized anxiety disorder is the amount of time spent in worry. Someone with a normal amount of worry might focus on their past or future concerns an hour a day. But someone labeled with an anxiety disorder might worry an average of up to five hours a day. Maybe more.
That is a lot of time spent in either the past or the future. Think of what else you could be doing with all that time without getting your heart rate up, gritting your teeth, biting your nails, and focusing on the “what ifs.”
Alfred E. Neuman was a fictional character, a mascot for the magazine Mad that started in the 50’s. At one point they would put the word “idiot” under his face. His motto was, What, me worry? This irreverent magazine that was revolutionary for its time made me think about how they chose that motto. I used to believe that their thinking was, “You would have to be an idiot not to worry about your life.”
It wasn’t until my mother died eleven years ago that I thought about how the gulf between my own death and me had grown shallower and I began to worry about my own end of life. A peer had expressed a similar thought to me as a way of offering sympathy for my loss. Her mother had died years before. “Now,” she told me, “there is no one left to keep us from our own demise; after our parent’s die, that’s it.” I remember thinking how unsympathetic she sounded. But when I really listened to the new awareness she had gained, I realized that this was her sincere struggle for words of comfort.
She was right in that we have no more safety net and that we are next in line. Until she offered me her observations, my own death was the furthest thing from my mind. I had only been focused on what kind of life I would have without my mom around. But now I had my mom’s death to grieve and my own death to worry about.
It is pretty common in this second half of our lives to wonder, “How much time do I have left? Is this the last time I will see my sister, brother, child, grandparent, uncle, aunt, spouse, friend?” You don’t want anything to happen to yourself, but your biggest fear is that something will happen to someone you love. If you stand in any line at a coffee shop, at an airport, or at work, you may hear someone end a phone conversation with “Love you.” We don’t want to miss an opportunity to send our love out, letting a special person know we care. It will be difficult enough to live without a person we have loved throughout our lives. Not letting them know how much we care could mean living with guilt forever.
This time factor is a major source of anxiety.
Statistics from the American Psychological Association show that more than eleven percent of adults over fifty-five suffer from anxiety disorders. That is one in every nine adults. These statistics account just for the people who are anxious enough to respond to surveys.
Who expects anxiety to take center stage in the second half of our lives? Aren’t we supposed to be calm, peaceful, happy, joyful and contented at this time of our life? Instead, if you have experienced anxiety throughout your life, you may find that your worries linger and even increase.
“How can a person deal with anxiety? You might try what one fellow did. He worried so much that he decided to hire someone to do his worrying for him. He found a man who agreed to be his hired worrier for a salary of $200,000 per year. After the man accepted the job, his first question to his boss was, "Where are you going to get $200,000 per year?" To which the man responded, "That's your worry.” - Max Lucado
Sometimes you don’t even realize just how anxious you are. It can be so second nature that before you know it, you are stressed out and frazzled. How many of you can relate to some of the anxiety in the following example?
Say you are driving down the highway pondering the time it will take you to get through the line at Café au Lately and still be on time for work. You don’t go to that large coffee house chain because you find the coffee bitter and the lines too long. You’re listening to KWHOA 290 FM and the radio blasts “In a New York Minute” by The Eagles. Singing along, you think what a nice soothing melody it is. “In a New York minute, everything can change …Johnny got up, dressed all in black went down to the station, and he never came back.”
Whoa—he never came back? “If you find someone to love you better hang on tooth and nail,” the Eagles sing.
You wonder if there is some psychic message in this song meant just for you.
Why am I hearing this song at this moment while I am driving at a high rate of speed and this guy in front of me is going soooo slow? Man, it’s true—anything can happen. I need to change my will. We left all our extra money to our neighbors Frieda and oh, what’s his name, her husband that helped Aunt Betty during her cancer treatment? But we’ve moved five times since then. What was the name of that street we lived on? And what extra money? It’s all gone now because that financial advisor we met in line at Costco said, “Put it in stocks.” We might as well have dumped it in the toilet. What was that jerk’s name? Why did we listen to him? Shoot, I better call my mother-in-law and tell her I love her because life is just too damn short….Where’s my phone? Damn it all, it slipped under the seat, I can still see out the windshield, I‘ll just kick it over close to my left leg where I can pick it up. There it is. Wait, did I just say “Damn it all?” That’s what my mother used to say. I never say that. Is she calling me or coming to get me to take me to that place we go after we die? Is this serendipity, a coincidence, or maybe a sign from God? What is going on with me? Am I going crazy or what?
No. It’s just a song about how life can end in the blink of an eye. Or is it?
Anxiety, oh joy!
Check in next time for the myths about Anxiety and one of the best methods for treating anxious thoughts with a brief treatment that really WORKS.