What Would You Be Thinking About?

I had a great idea today about getting underneath the thinking and worrying that I am always doing. Try this:

When you find yourself obsessing about that next skirt, bag, meal, trip, man, job…ask yourself: "What would I be thinking about if I wasn't thinking about this?"

Ten bucks (toward that new bag) says that under your  worry thinking is either an old pain that would resolve if you just let it out, or a big creative idea that is just waiting to spin you into joy--but you are scared.

I'm going to try this interrupter, "What would I be thinking about if I wasn't thinking about this?"

You try it too.

Melt Down Day

A melt down this morning. Not pretty. Computer is frozen. Voicemail won’t record. I’m running late. I’m furious about work and deadlines. Streams of colorful language. Slapping my hands on the desk. Like I said, not pretty. And I think, “This is what we don’t tell the newcomer.”

And then I think, “Pray”. And I think, “You can change this thinking”. And I think, “Move a muscle, change a thought.” So I go in the other room (After I snap at my husband--Like I said, not pretty.) And I pick up a reference book and it falls open to a page with this quote:

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.” Bertrand Russell wrote that. And I laughed—sort of. But I knew it was no accident to see that quote. That is what we tell the newcomer.

Feeding Chicken Little

A week of worry and the end result is having my head yap at me non-stop. This morning at the gym I visualized the scary thoughts as gremlins and mentally tossed them over the rail of the elevated track. I pictured them scurrying on the gym floor. Then, realizing that what these thoughts are always saying to me is a rotating medley of: “He’s bad; they’re bad; they don’t like you; it won’t work”. I thought, Oh, it’s Chicken Little running in circles saying, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling”.

So I changed my mental picture to see myself tossing squawking chickens over the rail and watching them flap and cluck and squawk out all the varied and constant fears that fill my head.

When I pulled on my sweatshirt to leave the gym I took one more look over the rail and said, “Here chickie, here chickie” and imagined tossing handfuls of corn to my fear-filled little chickens and hoping they stay at the gym today and out of my head!

Throw Them Over the Edge

Managing my own thinking—and not scaring myself to pieces –is one of my ongoing challenges. Here is my new strategy to deal with scary thoughts.

Every morning I walk at the YMCA. The track is elevated and overlooks the large gym floor below. That’s a help often because I get to watch the Pilates class or the killer Boot Camp group grunting and puffing thru a workout that would kill most Marines. Watching them makes me very happy to be walking or jogging on the track.

Today as the fear thoughts started in on me I had a new thought, “Throw them over”. So each time my head cooked up a new “What if…” scenario I’d say “Nope, over you go.” and toss that thought and picture over the railing and onto the gym floor below. It also helped to imagine these scary thoughts as scared, bratty little kids so when they land on the gym floor they can run around and wear them selves out—away from me!

Don't Worry Be Happy

Last week I walked across the street to look through piles of phonograph records and bins of old dishes spread across our neighbor’s lawn. Their grown children were cleaning out the house and having a sale. Just weeks before we’d taken our own boxes of similar things to the thrift store and felt well pleased to have those odds and ends gone. Now we were looking through someone else’s stuff, and delighting in finding a “very useful” mixing bowl, and some “these could be handy” small wooden shelves.

The things that most often find their way back to our house are books, and I found myself sitting on the neighbor’s porch sifting through boxes of hardbacks and paperbacks. There were the usual yard sale staples: mysteries and romances and a big pile of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. I have a fondness for those; I grew up with them and met many great authors in those striped, four-in-one hardbacks.

In my neighbor’s stash was something else that I recognized from childhood; a set of books by Dale Carnegie, the grand master of personal improvement. There was a copy of his famous, How to Make Friends and Influence People, but the book that I reached for was How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. I asked a nearby teenager, “How much?” “Ten cents”, said the girl. I gave her a quarter and walked back to my porch to read the familiar text.

When I was a kid, Dale Carnegie’s books were on the top shelf of my father’s bookshelf. As a quintessential first-generation, self-improving, education-valuing, always striving, Depression survivor, my father read these books over and over. And, like the typical second-generation, take-achievement-for-granted, life-is-easier kids that we were, my brothers and I made fun of Dale Carnegie every chance we got.

I have to tell on myself now, though. I am my father’s daughter. His drive for self-improvement and habit of worry was passed to me by nature or nurture. Over the years I’ve spent thousands on classes, courses, workshops and retreats. I’ve tried every remedy and herb that promises peace. I even gave a huge wad of cash and an armload of flowers to get a secret mantra from Transcendental Meditation.

Now I laugh. I could have just looked at my father’s books. Opening How to Stop Worrying I skim the table of contents. The message—in stories and quotes-- is this: Change your thinking. Change your mind. Be in this day. Dale Carnegie seemed to know what the Beatles learned in India: Let it be. I flip to the title page and see that “Worry” was written in 1950, and my copy is from the 46th printing.

If Dale Carnegie wrote this today he’d be a guru and superstar; Oprah would have him on her show and he’d do the celebrity workshop circuit. I grin to imagine a scenario in which Dale Carnegie would be rumored to be the man that changed Madonna’s life. She’d wear a gold “DC” necklace instead of a red kabala string, and, when pushed, she’d whine that no one really understood her devotion to Dale.

Though he was successful in his day, Dale Carnegie wrote his books for the post-WWII, GI Bill, self-improving, house-buying, ladder-of-success fathers of the fifties. His was a male message since it was presumed that the man of the house was the one who was worrying about the bills and the bosses and how to pay for the babies. That too was my Dad.

My father is not around to thank today. He died before I started my own journey of self-improvement. So I’ll claim this musty book as a gift from my father’s spirit. There is nothing new under the sun. Be here now; live in this day; laugh at yourself and grow up.

What If?

All day today I am at my worst. Torturing myself with, “What if?”
What if I get fired? What if he loves someone else? What if she moves away? What if it’s bad news from the doctor? My imagination is experienced and powerful. I give my whole self to these questions that leave me in a puddle of anxiety and fear. I do the dialogue, sets and costumes and then I edit, edit, edit.

The energy that goes into this. The distraction from my own good life. The creativity misused.

Late in the day, as I tell a friend what I have been doing, she says, “Don’t try to stop this cold. You have too much of a habit and your ego just loves to make up these stories and deliver them to you. So work with it; ask your head to give you new versions of each story.”

So now, tired from a day of self-terrorizing I ask:

What if he proposes?
What if the MacArthur Foundation calls?
What if I have to give an award acceptance speech?
And yes:
What if I win the lottery?

Addiction to Fear

Last night I lay awake from 2am until 6am. In the first hour I was running an inventory of all the bad things that could go wrong in my relationship: he will do this or that; he will say this or that; he could get sick, die, leave me, love someone else. With each one I complete the thought with my possible response: I will say this or that; I will do this or that and always, always: I will feel terrible.

Now what is interesting is that I don’t need any of those things to happen to actually feel terrible. No, efficient gal that I am, I have already made myself feel terrible just by running through the scenarios and previewing or rehearsing the outcomes. The effect: I feel like shit.

It’s not new behavior. I have done this most of my life. I suspect I started this as a kid but then it was just background music. The sound track to a scared kid’s life. It was, I suppose, to be a kind of inoculation. If I can imagine it then I can be prepared for it maybe? But it took on a life of its own. Now it’s a habit.

It is an addiction too I realize because it actually produces a physical effect. I release adrenaline and cortisol into my body. Hence awake in the wee hours. That also is not new. I have been able to make myself crazy with rage or grief or terror with scenarios that never occurred. I produce the emotion and the physical effect.

You can imagine how good this is for the relationship.

But last night awake in bed and then in the living room I was able to see this from a slight angle. Maybe I was just tired enough to watch myself do this and I asked myself: If I spend 90% of my thinking time creating scenarios to scare myself what would I instead think or feel if I could reduce that by say 60%? I’m not sure I can stop this addiction to fear or this habit of shooting up my own adrenaline using only my mind but if I could interrupt it and reduce it what would that produce?