Quotes from David A. Carbonell

We will also do better when we can recognize the worry thoughts as signs of nervousness and anxiety, the same as an eye twitch or sweaty palms, rather than some important message about the future

Worry predictions aren't based on what's likely to happen. They're based on what would be terrible if it did happen. They're not based on probability—they're based on fear.

Thoughts, however upsetting, foul, disgusting, annoying, and so on, are just never dangerous. It's discomfort, not danger.

Moreover, when you interact with the external world, you get more involved with realistic rules of thumb. When you're in your head, by contrast, you can imagine anything. This is why anticipatory worry is almost always worse than anything that actually happens in real life—there are no rules in your head, anything seems possible! In the external world, the rules of reality apply.

When you're under the influence of this belief, you tend to act as if the simple act of worrying can change the future, that it might prevent bad events from happening that would have otherwise happened. I'm not referring here to situations in which your thoughts lead you to take action, and those actions influence the future. Here I mean that people treat worry itself as something that can affect the future.

Questions to Consider If you were told that a neighbor never worries about his kids, would you think that was a good thing or a bad thing? Would you like to be known as someone who doesn't worry about your kids? If your significant other said to you, "I don't think you ever worry about me," would you take it as a complaint or a compliment?

When are we motivated to distract ourselves from unpleasant and worrisome thoughts? When we're not facing a clear and present danger. When the chips are not down. When the babbling of our cerebral cortex, rather than the self-defense of our amygdala, is center stage.

If you or I have a doubt that really bothers us, though, we're likely to respond very differently. We're likely to treat that doubt as if it were a sign of danger, rather than the usual discomfort we can feel about uncertainty. When you get tricked into treating the discomfort of doubt as if it were danger, this leads you to struggle against the doubt, trying to remove the unwanted thoughts from your mind.

The amygdala doesn't use language. It learns by association, and that's how it remembers

The problem you face is not the problem described in the catastrophe clause of your worry. The problem you face is the discomfort you experience in response to the worrisome thought, and your natural inclination to take that thought seriously and resist it. When you resist the thought with your usual selection of anti-worry responses, this is when you once again experience the difficulty of The harder I try, the worse it gets.

People who are influenced by this belief don't like to feel optimistic. They're suspicious of optimism because they think the universe, or God, will "even things out" by giving them something bad because they're feeling optimistic. This has a superstitious aspect to it, as when people "knock on wood" because they just said something optimistic, and they hope to prevent that statement from backfiring on them.

something bad happens and I hadn't worried about it, I'll feel guilty. This belief leads you to treat worry as a duty, or maybe even a beneficial activity. If you shirk your duty, bad things will happen and they'll be your fault.

The more effort you make to get those thoughts out of your head, the more your mind will justify the effort by viewing the thoughts as dangerous. The truth is, thoughts simply aren't dangerous. Actions can be dangerous; thoughts can only be unpleasant. If thoughts were dangerous, the obituary pages would be banned. There's no such thing as a "killer joke." The more you use distraction, the more you strengthen this impression that thoughts can be hazardous.

And, like every other trait, it's distributed in different proportions among the population, just like height. Some people have a lot of this tendency, and some just a little. It helps the tribe to have some of both types of people—aggressive warriors who have so little fear that they will go out and bring home a mastodon for lunch, and cautious members who won't have any part of that, but will also live long enough to raise a new generation, and feed it by growing corn.

When you treat worry as a danger that must be stopped or avoided, you're fighting fire with gasoline. Your gut instinct is actually pretty much the opposite of what would help. This is what gives the worry trick its power.