How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

"You probably know his classic self-help book, How to Win Friends and Influence People . This was a later book but it’s still old—from the 1950s. Some of the examples are quite dated. But again, as with Jeffers’s book, I really like the way anxiety is not medicalized. It doesn’t open with a list of the different kinds of disorders. And it doesn’t insist on the idea that we live in a newly stressful world and blame that for causing the problem of anxiety. He talks about how it’s useful to realize that anxiety is part of the human condition and always has been, and points out that, actually, there are lots of sensible ideas that you can use, helpful ideas that you can read about and try—again not to eliminate anxiety, but to dampen it down or live a meaningful life alongside it. I loved it for that reason. Yes. One thing he talks about is living in ‘day-tight compartments’, the idea that all you can ever do is deal with today. He talks about trying not think too far beyond that, and gives various strategies for doing that. It’s basic things he offers, often based on CBT principles, but this book pre-dated CBT. He talks about how to think about problems differently, to think about how likely the bad outcome is to happen. Part of CBT is to break the problem down and think about how likely it is that your worry will materialise, which is exactly what he suggests. “If you’re prone to anxiety, you don’t think in terms of best-case scenarios, ever” He talks about distracting yourself, about writing things down—with the idea that once you’ve written something down, it loses its hold over you. The problem with the worry is that it goes round and round and round in your head. But actually, once you write it down, it loses some of its power. People still talk about these ideas now. What I found appealing, having read a lot of the more recent, clinically-oriented books as well, is realizing that anxiety is something people have always been trying to figure out. There are sensible ways of dealing with it without calling it a disorder or health problem. Some people have been totally crippled by that terror and never recovered from it, of course, but certainly not everyone. Another thing I like about his book is that he gives lots of examples of people in really objectively awful, frightening situations and what they learned from that. For instance, someone in the US Navy in World War Two described being in a submarine and being torpedoed. He was basically lying there waiting to die, and it’s about how he dealt with that. The book is useful is terms of realising that some people go through some awful, stressful situations and still find ways to cope. This is similar to Carnegie’s argument, and many other psychological approaches. It sounds good on paper, but of course it’s incredibly difficult to do. You touch on the point that worry is futile most of the time. It’s not a useful thing to do. Often people hold on to it because they think it’s useful to help them solve problems, but it doesn’t really. It has a very limited initial use in helping you identify potential problems, but it doesn’t help you do much about them. Once you’ve identified the issue, you’re better off switching into problem-solving mode. Beyond that limited benefit of identifying problems—which in itself might not be very useful, depending on the situation—worry is just a massive, massive waste of time. It’s awful. I look back on my own experience and it was such a deeply frustrating waste of time. It’s so rarely useful. It makes things so unpleasant while you’re waiting to find out that the bad outcome doesn’t happen. And yet, at the same time, there’s something so captivating about it. If you’re prone to worrying, you have to work so, so hard not to let it take over the way you think or the way you behave. I initially wanted to study medicine. I took psychology A-level on a bit of a whim. I’d started doing history and I didn’t really like it, so I swapped a month in and psychology was what was left. But I really fell in love with it. I find people fascinating – the way they think and behave. It wasn’t a direct route from personal anxiety to psychology, although you do get a lot of people in psychology who are prone to these problems, so it may be a way that others come to the subject."