Anxiety

Summary of Richard Carlson’s ‘Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff’

September 4, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Stress follows a peculiar principle: when life hits us with big crises—the death of a loved one or a job loss—we somehow find the inner strength to endure these upheavals in due course. It’s the little things that drive us insane day after day—traffic congestion, awful service at a restaurant, an overbearing coworker taking credit for your work, meddling in-laws, for example.

It’s all too easy to get caught up in the many irritations of life. We overdramatize and overreact to life’s myriad tribulations. Under the direct influence of anguish, our minds are bewildered and we feel disoriented. This creates stress, which makes the problems more difficult to deal with.

The central thesis of psychotherapist Richard Carlson’s bestselling Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff… And It’s All Small Stuff (1997) is this: to deal with angst or anger, what we need is not some upbeat self-help prescriptions for changing ourselves, but simply a measure of perspective.

Perspective helps us understand that there’s an art to understand what we should let go and what we should concern ourselves with. As I mentioned in my article on the concept of opportunity cost, it is important to focus our efforts on the important stuff, and not waste time on the insignificant and incidental things.

I’ve previously written about my favorite 5-5-5 technique for gaining perspective and guarding myself against anger erupting: I remove myself from the offending environment and contemplate if whatever I’m getting worked up over is of importance. I ask myself, “Will this matter in 5 days? Will this matter in 5 months? Will this matter in 5 years?”

Carlson stresses that there’s always a vantage point from which even the biggest stressor can be effectively dealt with. The challenge is to keep making that shift in perspective. When we achieve that “wise-person-in-me” perspective, our problems seem more controllable and our lives more peaceful.

Carlson’s prescriptions aren’t uncommon—we can learn to be more patient, compassionate, generous, grateful, and kind, all of which will improve the way we feel about ourselves and the way that other people feel when they are around us.

Some of Carlson’s 100 recommendations are trite and banal—for example, “make peace with imperfection,” “think of your problems as potential teachers,” “remember that when you die, your ‘in-basket’ won’t be empty,” and “do one thing at a time.” Others are more edifying:

Let others have the glory
Let others be “right” most of the time
Become aware of your moods and don’t allow yourself to be fooled by the low ones
Look beyond behavior
Every day, tell at least one person something you like, admire, or appreciate about them
Argue for your limitations, and they’re yours
Resist the urge to criticize
Read articles and books with entirely different points of view from your own and try to learn something

Carlson’s succinct insights have hit home with legions of the hurried and the harried. He became a bestselling author and a sought-after motivational speaker. Before his tragic death in 2006 at age 45, Carson followed up “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff…” with some 20 tacky spinoffs intended particularly for spouses, parents, teenagers, new-weds, employees, and lovers.

What Airline Disasters Teach About Cognitive Impairment and Decision-Making Under Stress

February 27, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Airline disasters often make great case studies on how a series of insignificant errors can build up into catastrophes.

As the following two case studies will illuminate, unanticipated pressures can force your mind to quickly shift to a panic-like state. As it searches frenetically for a way out of a problem, your mind can disrupt your ability to take account of all accessible evidence and attend rationally to the situation in its entirety.

Stress Can Blind You and Limit Your Ability to See the Bigger Picture: A Case Study on Eastern Airlines Flight 401

Eastern Airlines Flight 401 crashed on December 29, 1972, killing 101 people.

As Flight 401 began its approach into the Miami International Airport, first officer Albert Stockstill lowered the landing gear. But the landing gear indicator, a green light to verify that the nose gear was correctly locked in the “down” position, did not switch on. (This was later verified to be caused by a burned-out light bulb. Regardless of the indicator, the landing gear could have been manually lowered and verified.)

The flight deck got thrown into a disarray. The flight’s captain, Bob Loft, sent flight engineer Don Repo to the avionics bay underneath the flight deck to verify through a small porthole if the landing gear was actually down. Loft simultaneously directed Stockstill to put the aircraft on autopilot. Then, when Loft unintentionally leaned against the aircraft’s yoke to speak to Repo, the autopilot mistakably switched to a wrong setting that did not hold the aircraft’s altitude.

The aircraft began to descend so gradually that it could not be perceived by the crew. With the flight engineer down in the avionics bay, the captain and the first officer were so preoccupied with the malfunction of the landing gear indicator that they failed to pay attention to the altitude-warning signal from the engineer’s instrument panel.

Additionally, given that the aircraft was flying over the dark terrain of the Everglades in nighttime, no ground lights or other visual cues signaled that the aircraft was gradually descending. When Stockstill eventually became aware of the aircraft’s altitude, it was too late to recover the aircraft from crashing.

In summary, the cause of the Flight 401’s crash was not the nose landing gear, but the crew’s negligence and inattention to a bigger problem triggered by a false alarm.

Stress Can Blind You into Focusing Just on What You Think is Happening: A Case Study on United Airlines Flight 173

United Airlines Flight 173 crashed on December 28, 1978, in comparable circumstances.

When Flight 173’s pilots lowered the landing gear upon approach to the Portland International Airport, the aircraft experienced an abnormal vibration and yaw motion. In addition, the pilots observed that an indicator light did not show that the landing gear was lowered successfully. In reality, the landing gear was down and locked in position.

With the intention of troubleshooting the landing gear problem, the pilots entered a holding pattern. For the next hour, they tried to diagnose the landing gear glitch and prepare for a probable emergency landing. During this time, however, none of the pilots monitored the fuel levels.

When the landing gear problem was first suspected, the aircraft had abundant reserve fuel—even for a diversion or other contingencies. But, all through the hour-long holding procedure, the landing gear was down and the flaps were set to 15 degrees in anticipation of a landing. This significantly increased the aircraft’s fuel burn rate. With fuel exhaustion to all four engines, the aircraft crashed.

To sum up, Flight 173’s crew got preoccupied with the landing gear’s malfunction and harried preparations for an emergency landing. As a result of their inattention, the pilots failed to keep tabs on the fuel state and crashed the aircraft.

Stress Can Derail Your Train of Thought

Under pressure, your mind will digress from its rational model of thinking.

The emotional excitement from fear, anxiety, time-pressure, and stress can lead to a phenomenon known as “narrowing of the cognitive map.” This tunnel vision can restrict your field of mindful attention and impair your ability for adequate discernment.

Situational close-mindedness can constrict your across-the-board awareness of the situation and force you overlook alternative lines of thought.

Idea for Impact: To combat cognitive impairment under stress, use checklists and standard operating procedures, as well as increased training on situational awareness, crisis communication, and emergency management, as the aviation industry did in response to the aforementioned incidents.

Moral Disengagement Leads People to Act Immorally and Justify Their Unprincipled Behavior

November 20, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Temptation of Christ on the First Day of Lent

Rationality Drives Human Behavior Only After Emotion and Impulse Lose Their Hegemony

People adapt moral standards that dissuade them from objectionable behavior. But these moral standards do not serve as a steadfast regulator of their moral actions. Occasionally, circumstances can make people to become selectively disengaged from those moral self-sanctions and end up pursuing unprincipled actions.

Particularly when people feel angry, pressured, or depressed, their mental footing tends to ebb away. Any state of emotional threat can let up their determination to act ethically and resist temptations. They lose discipline, get into a defensive mode, and become susceptible to thinking only about short-term benefits. They are more likely to engage in self-absorbed behaviors that they would otherwise spurn, especially if the payoff for such behavior is high and the odds of getting caught and punished are low.

Circumstances Sometimes Sway People to Engage in Behaviors That Conflict with Their Internalized Moral Standards

Moral disengagement is the psychological phenomenon that describes how people rationalize behavior that is at odds with their own moral principles. For example, suppose a teenager who has a principled framework that forbids theft. If he takes a newspaper without paying for it from a Starbucks store, he may rationalize his actions by telling himself that Starbucks warranted some harm because it overcharges its consumers and, until recently, purchased not all its coffee beans from certified fair trade sources.

People engaging in wrongdoing often see that the rules are uncalled-for and unjustifiable. In their judgment, even though they may be breaking the rules and flouting conventions, they’re persuaded that they’re really not doing anything wrong because the rules deserve to be violated.

Moral reasoning usually deprives people when they devalue their prey and malign their victims (“her tattletaling deserved it” or “he brandish a knife, hence I pulled out my gun.”)

Stanford Psychologist Albert Bandura, who introduced the concept of moral disengagement, identified eight cognitive mechanisms (book) that disengage a person’s internal moral standards from his/her actions, thereby causing unethical behavior without conspicuous remorse or self-censure.

Idea for Impact: Be Wary of Suspending Your Moral Standards to Reduce Self-Censure

When circumstances or people provoke you to potentially regretful behavior, realize that you are a self-determining agent, and that you have a moral and ethical responsibility to behave with integrity and pursue wholesome actions. Step back and ask yourself, “Normally, would I judge this contemplated action to be wrong? Are my ways of thinking flawed? Am I defending the harm I am causing by blaming others? Am I criticizing the victim to justify my destructive actions?”

When in doubt, use Warren Buffett’s rule of thumb for personal integrity: “I want [people] to ask themselves whether they are willing to have any contemplated act appear the next day on the front page of their local paper—to be read by their spouses, children and friends—with the reporting done by an informed and critical reporter.”

Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal

November 8, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Give sorrow words;
the grief that does not speak;
whispers the o’er-fraught heart
and bids it break.
—William Shakespeare, Macbeth (Act 4, Scene 3)

Confronting Upsetting Experiences: Expressive Writing for Healing

People often block out thoughts that provoke negative emotions as a way of reducing their stress and regulating their moods. However, intentional suppression of deep-seated emotions not only increases susceptibility to illness, but also amplifies the emotionality and associated psychological effects of the suppressed thoughts.

Discussing, venting, clarifying, or expressing a trauma is a natural human response. When this necessity is inhibited, emotional stress and physical illness ensue.

Facing up to deeply personal issues can promote physical health, well-being, and beneficial behaviors.

The scientific research on the benefits of putting negative experiences into words is extensive. Studies have shown that expressive writing about oneself and one’s traumatic or stressful experiences does produce significant health benefits. Expressive writing helps ameliorate mood disorders, reduces symptoms among patients with serious illness, improve a person’s physical condition after a heart attack, and even enhance memory.

Writing about Emotional Topics Brings About Improved Physical and Emotional Wellbeing

James Pennebaker, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, first investigated expressive writing as a healing process in the 1980s. Since then, research that spawned from Pennebaker’s pioneering studies, has revealed benefits could accrue to those who were dealing with divorces, lost love, death of loved ones, job rejections, terminal illness, even college students struggling with first-year transitions.

Here are the main points about the expressive writing method:

Choose the part of the day when you are most contemplative (that’s the morning for most people.) Sit down at a place where you are not likely to be disturbed.
Reflect about a very personal and important event. Consider a significant emotional upheaval that influences your life the most or has in the past. Your topic can be about a distress or failure, lost love, health-, school- or career-related anxiety, relationships, inner conflicts, death of a loved one, or just about any topic that you would like to express.
If you’re writing about an experience or an event that involves another person, it can help to organize your writing as a letter to that person, whether alive or dead.
Write your deepest thoughts about your chosen event or experience continuously for 20 minutes. If you run out of things to write or reach a mental block, just repeat or recap what you have previously written.
In your writing, deeply explore your thoughts about the event and describe its effect on you. In other words, write both about what happened and how you feel about it. Think about how you can handle these events and their consequences now—what you can do specifically.
Connect your personal experiences to other parts of your life. How do they relate to your childhood, your parents, people you love, who you are, or who you want to be?
Write for yourself as your thoughts arise. Be as direct, intense, and serious as possible. Do not worry about grammar, spelling, comprehensiveness, legibility, or structure. On the opening day of writing, your stories are not very structured, but over the three or four days, you will develop a more structured narrative.
After writing for 20 minutes, do not look back over. Simply fold the papers you used, seal them, and put them away (read more about the “worry box technique.”) Unlike psychotherapy, the expressive writing technique does not employ feedback to the participant.
Make a mental note of how you feel. It is not unusual to feel sad or disheartened after writing—these feelings usually fade away in an hour or so. In research experiments, many participants have reported crying or getting upset by the experience of writing about emotional upheavals, but most participants testify that the writing experience was meaningful in helping them organize their experiences.
Repeat this exercise for four consecutive days. You can write about the same experience on all four days or about different experiences each day. If you choose to write about the same topic on all the four days, try to wrap everything up by the fourth day.

Note that expressive writing is distinct from keeping a daily journal in that it allows people to step back for a moment and evaluate their lives. Pennebaker once said, “I’m not even convinced that people should write about a horrible event for more than a couple of weeks. You risk getting into a sort of navel gazing or cycle of self-pity. … But standing back every now and then and evaluating where you are in life is really important.”

Translating an Emotional Experience Into Language Makes the Experience Graspable: it Can Help You Find New Meaning in Life’s Ordeals

New research has shown that expressive writing—followed by expressive rewriting—can improve happiness and lead to behavioral changes. Narrative storytelling of an unpleasant and chaotic experience may make the experience and its effects more controllable. For instance, according this New York Times article,

At the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute, life coaches ask clients to identify their goals, then to write about why they haven’t achieved those goals. Once the clients have written their old stories, they are asked to reflect on them and edit the narratives to come up with a new, more honest assessment. While the institute doesn’t have long-term data, the intervention has produced strong anecdotal results.

Idea for Impact: Expressive Writing Can Help Change the Way You Feel About Traumatic Events and About Yourself

Expressive writing is a method of self-help that supplements the value of therapeutic talking to someone accepting and non-judgmental.

By exploring your deepest thoughts and feelings with a reflective, inquiring, honest attitude, you can shift perspective. Standing back and reflecting on your suffering from different points of view can bring about an improved emotional state. You can create your greatest opportunities for change by confronting the realities, reframing your experiences in terms of your values and priorities, and identifying impediments that stand in the way of purpose, joy, and contentment.

For more on the means and methods of expressive writing, as well its many confirmed physiological and behavioral benefits, read James Pennebaker’s Opening Up: the Healing Power of Expressing Emotion (1997) and Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing (1999)

Anger is the Hardest of the Negative Emotions to Subdue

August 18, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Lekha Sutta, an aphorism of the historical Buddha that has been preserved orally by his followers, identifies three distinct ways that anger manifests in individuals:

Firstly, the Buddha refers to the individual who is like an inscription on a rock. His anger stays with him for a long time; it does not war away by wind or water.
Secondly, the Buddha relates an individual who is habitually angered, but whose anger does not stay with him for a elongated time, to an inscription in soil that rubs away by wind or water.
Finally, the Buddha identifies an individual who is like water. When he is spoken to or treated rudely, he stays impervious, pleasant, and courteous—in the vein of an inscription in water that disappears right away.

Here’s a translation of the Lekha Sutta from the Pali by the eminent American Buddhist monk and prolific author Thanissaro Bhikkhu:

Monks, there are these three types of individuals to be found existing in the world. Which three? An individual like an inscription in rock, an individual like an inscription in soil, and an individual like an inscription in water.

And how is an individual like an inscription in rock? There is the case where a certain individual is often angered, and his anger stays with him a long time. Just as an inscription in rock is not quickly effaced by wind or water and lasts a long time, in the same way a certain individual is often angered, and his anger stays with him a long time. This is called an individual like an inscription in rock.

And how is an individual like an inscription in soil? There is the case where a certain individual is often angered, but his anger doesn’t stay with him a long time. Just as an inscription in soil is quickly effaced by wind or water and doesn’t last a long time, in the same way a certain individual is often angered, but his anger doesn’t stay with him a long time. This is called an individual like an inscription in soil.

And how is an individual like an inscription in water? There is the case where a certain individual—when spoken to roughly, spoken to harshly, spoken to in an unpleasing way—is nevertheless congenial, companionable, & courteous. Just as an inscription in water immediately disappears and doesn’t last a long time, in the same way a certain individual—when spoken to roughly, spoken to harshly, spoken to in an unpleasing way—is nevertheless congenial, companionable, & courteous. This is called an individual like an inscription in water.

These are the three types of individuals to be found existing in the world.

Idea for Impact: Learn to Corral Your Anger and Manage Your Emotions

Like everything else in the world, anger surfaces and passes away, restoring your previous sense of calm and stillness. Not identifying the nature of anger and allowing it to take over your state of being can lead to disastrous outcomes. Verse 222 of the Dhammapada (tr. Thanissaro Bhikkhu) states,

When anger arises,
whoever keeps firm control
as if with a racing chariot:
him
I call a master charioteer.
Anyone else,
a rein-holder—
that’s all.

Anger destroys careers. It destroys relationships. As long as you lack the capacity to withstand negative emotions such as anger, you will be at a marked disadvantage in life.

The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be

June 2, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Understanding the deep-rooted basis of our negative emotions and their destructive consequences can help us navigate the turmoil that sorrow, love, anger, greed, envy, pride, and fear can invoke in our lives.

The pioneering American psychologist William James argued in his famous 1884 essay “What is an Emotion?” that emotions and their effects on our attitudes and our behaviors is bidirectional. That is to say, “bodily disturbances” are manifestations of our emotions and those reverberations are really the fount of the emotions themselves.

Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion. Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colourless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we could not actually feel afraid or angry.

“Geological Upheavals of Thought”

I’ve been reading American philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s outstanding—albeit demanding—book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. The initial chapters contemplate the power of emotions and the manifestation of emotions in all aspects of our thought stream.

One of the central positions of Nussbaum’s book is that our sentiments and emotions spring from internal narratives—the stories we ponder within ourselves about who we are and how we feel. Emotions are acknowledgments of our indigence and lack of self-reliance.

Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.

…

Emotions … involve judgments about important things, judgments in which, appraising an external object as salient for our own well-being, we acknowledge our own neediness and incompleteness before parts of the world that we do not fully control.

…

Emotions should be understood as “geological upheavals of thought”: as judgments in which people acknowledge the great importance, for their own flourishing, of things that they do not fully control—and acknowledge thereby their neediness before the world and its events.

…

Human beings … are the only emotional beings who wish not to be emotional, who wish to withhold these acknowledgments of neediness and to design for themselves a life in which these acknowledgments have no place. This means that they frequently learn to reject their own vulnerability and to suppress awareness of the attachments that entail it. We might also say … that they are the only animals for whom neediness is a source of shame, and who take pride in themselves to the extent to which they have allegedly gotten clear of vulnerability.

Nussbaum notes that our strong emotions stem from our intolerance and from the disruption to our internal narratives about what comprises perfection:

The emotions of the adult life sometimes feel as if they flood up out of nowhere, in ways that don’t match our present view of our objects or their value. This will be especially true of the person who maintains some kind of false self-defense, and who is in consequence out of touch with the emotions of neediness and dependence, or of anger and aggression, that characterize the true self.

Idea for Impact: People who lack the capacity to withstand psychological distresses such as anger, fear, frustration, and sadness are at a marked disadvantage in life. Learn to manage your negative emotions.

Learn to Manage Your Negative Emotions and Yourself

May 12, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Negative emotions not only take their toll on our mind, body, and spirit, but also hinder your liberation from suffering, according to the Buddhist way of life.

People who lack the capacity to withstand psychological distresses such as anger, fear, frustration, and sadness are at a marked disadvantage in life. When faced with life’s unceasing challenges, they respond with greater emotional distress. Worse yet, rather than deal with the challenge at hand wisely, they engage in destructive behaviors, often with verbal and physical aggression toward themselves and others.

There’s great strength in learning to divorce yourself from negative emotions

People with lower tolerance for distress usually spin their wheels and find as many escapes—including substance abuse and binging—as their troubled minds can conjure up. Instead of allowing themselves a modest amount of grieving, rebounding quickly, and moving on with their lives, they feel victimized. They avoid people and situations that may provoke frustration, discomfort, embarrassment, and uncertainty. In due course, their mind, body, and spirit start to atrophy.

Speaking of the need to expand the human capacity of resilience and equanimity and learn from adversity to achieve success, the renowned Hindu spiritual teacher Swami Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–93) once said, “The secret of success behind all men of achievement, lies in the faculty of applying their intellect in all their activities, without being mislead by any surging emotions or feelings. The secret of success in life lies in keeping the head above the storms of the heart.”

Having a propensity to react negatively will hurt your career and personal life

When the celebrated American tennis player Andre Agassi (who was infamous for his temperaments) was asked in a Harvard Business Review interview if he learned to manage his emotions when he played, Agassi replied,

I’ve seen people use emotion, positive or negative, as a tool, and it works for them. But typically, the more you can remove emotion, the more efficient you’ll be. You can be an inch from winning but still miles away if you allow emotion to interfere with the last step. So you have to accept the weather, heat, rain, stops and starts, the line calls, whatever your opponent is giving you, however tired or injured you are. There are so many things that can distract you from taking care of business. The only thing you can control is your engagement.

When you learn to better understand, tolerate, and harness negative emotions, you become empowered.

Learn to manage your negative emotions and yourself. From Buddhist perspective, learn to thoughtfully attend to your negative emotions with an emphasis on neither suppressing them nor acting them out. According to verse 4.34 in Udāna, eighty stories that contain eighty utterances of the Buddha,

Whose mind is like rock, steady, unmoved,
dispassionate for things that spark passion,
unangered by things that spark anger:
When one’s mind is developed like this,
from where can there come suffering & stress?

Equanimity is thus at the center of Buddhist practice, which prescribes many forms of disciplined practices to overcoming the harmful effects of destructive emotions. According to the Therīgāthā (“verses of the female elders”,) a set of principles composed by senior nuns during the lifetime of the Buddha,

If your mind becomes firm like a rock
And no longer shakes
In a world where everything is shaking,
Your mind will be your greatest friend
And suffering will not come your way.

Idea for Impact: Negative emotions and the destructive behaviors they breed are essentially always wrong—they are psychological errors you’ll do well to eliminate in yourself.

This Trick Can Relieve Your Anxiety: “What’s the worst that can happen?”

April 4, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

I’ve previously written about how a great many of life’s anticipated misfortunes, adversities, trials and tribulations will never come to pass. Much of your worrying is ultimately fruitless and anger is often pointless.

Today, I shall discuss a technique you can use to let go of anxiety.

The Remedial Benefits of Deliberating, “What’s the Worst That Could Happen?”

When you face anxiety, nervousness, fear, or worry, try the following technique: imagine all possible negative consequences of the situation you are confronting. Then, conceive of the worst outcome, even if there’s little chance events will turn out that way—imagine everything that could go wrong, in the worst possible way. Envision the worst outcomes.

When you exaggerate your fears and imagine the worst thing that could happen, you make your impending fears look unreasonable. You will realize that even the worst possible scenario isn’t so terrible after all. Often, this deliberation—and your sense of humor—usually restores your perspective on the anxiety you’re facing. You’ll realize that, at the worst, nothing that could happen to you is ultimately that significant.

Bertrand Russell, one of the west’s great intellectuals, was an advocate of this ploy. In The Conquest of Happiness, this extraordinary mathematician and brilliant philosopher asserts that happiness is in no way a passive endeavor, but a condition that takes a lot of work. Discussing how to avoid worry through the cultivation of right attitudes, Russell wrote,

A process … can be adopted with regard to anxieties. When some misfortune threatens, consider seriously and deliberately what is the very worst that could possibly happen. Having looked this possible misfortune in the face, give yourself sound reasons for thinking that after all it would be no such very terrible disaster. Such reasons always exist, since at the worst nothing that happens to oneself has any cosmic importance. When you have looked for some time steadily at the worst possibility and have said to yourself with real conviction, “Well, after all, that would not matter so very much,” you will find that your worry diminishes to a quite extraordinary extent. It may be necessary to repeat the process a few times, but in the end, if you have shirked nothing in facing the worse possible issue, you will find that your worry disappears altogether and is replaced by a kind of exhilaration.

To Get Rid of Anxiety, You Must First Embrace it

Russell’s method of overcoming anxiety and worry hints at the Stoic practice of “premeditatio malorum”—contemplating potential misfortunes in advance and reinstating emotional calm through positive affirmations. This classic technique of the Hellenistic world in due course laid the foundation for exposure therapy where anxiety is treated via exposure to stressful events either in vitro (in the laboratory of the mind) or in vivo (in real life.) Russell provides this explanation of exposure therapy:

Worry is a form of fear, and all forms of fear produce fatigue. A man who has learned not to feel fear will find the fatigue of daily life enormously diminished. … The proper course with every kind of fear is to think about it rationally and calmly, but with great concentration, until it has been completely familiar.

Idea for Impact: When confronting your fears, denial is never a wise strategy, positive action is!

The Roman lyric poet Horace advocated, “remember to keep a calm and balanced mind in the face of adversity” (loosely translated from the Latin “aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem” in Odes, II, 3.)

When faced with potential adversity or anticipated worry, try imagining the worst thing that could happen. This strategy for approaching your worries can help you to maintain an assertive, self-determining attitude even in the presence of very real and serious fears and threats.

Cope with Anxiety and Stop Obsessive Worrying by Creating a Worry Box

November 8, 2016 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Most worry is ultimately fruitless

Worries and concerns trouble us all. We waste valuable time worrying about things. As the American motivational author Leo Buscaglia once wrote, “Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.”

In a previous article, I suggested a mindfulness exercise to help you realize the temporal nature of worry. I also emphasized that most of your anticipated adversities will never occur.

Despite the transitional nature of anxiety and worry, mental anguishes can overwhelm your mind. Sometimes these negative emotions can spill over and seep into the fabric of your day.

Obsessive anxiety and worry can wreak havoc on your body. Stress from worrying about life’s many “what ifs” can actually manifest in physical and medical problems, if you let them. For instance, say you are troubled about an upcoming exam in your least favorite course at college. Your worrying could become so compulsive that your apprehensions about the exam could interfere with whatever else is going on in your life. If unchecked, your worry could manifest in higher acid levels in your stomach. Then, you may start worrying about developing stomach problems if you don’t stop worrying. Your worries thus snowball and consume even more of your time.

Writing about your anxieties and worries can help you cope with current concerns

An effective way to stop agonizing and let go of troubling thoughts is to keep a “worry box.”

Find a box and designate it as your worry box. Keep it in a handy location. (A “worry journal” may be just as effective.)
Whenever you feel drowned in worries or have anxious thoughts circulating ceaselessly in your mind, take a piece of paper and jot down each worry as it arises. Write down as much about your worries as you feel like writing.
Drop your note into the worry box. Try to imagine mentally letting go of your concerns. Turn your attention to other matters.
Every so often, empty your worry box and throw away your worry notes without looking at them. If you want, you could read them—you will be surprised to see how many of your worries feel unfounded in hindsight, but were in fact seriously troubling in the immediate storms of distress.

Idea for Impact: Maintaining a “worry box” to deposit your anxieties and worries can help you break free from them and prevent them from disrupting your life.

Lessons from the Princeton Seminary Experiment: People in a Rush are Less Likely to Help Others (and Themselves)

June 16, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi 3 Comments

Vincent van Gogh's The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix)

In the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29–37 in the New Testament,) a Samaritan helps a traveler assaulted by robbers and left half dead by the side of the road. Prior to the Samaritan, a priest and a Levite pass the injured traveler and fail to notice him. Conceivably, the priest and Levite’s contempt was because they didn’t sincerely follow those same virtues they espoused as religious functionaries. Possibly, they were in a hurry or were occupied with busy, important—even religious—thoughts. Perhaps the Samaritan was in less of a hurry since he wasn’t as socially important as the priest or Levite and was therefore not expected to be somewhere.

The Princeton Seminary Experiment

Inspired by the parable of the Good Samaritan, Princeton social psychologists John Darley and Dan Batson conducted a remarkable experiment in the 1970s on time pressure and helpful behavior. They studied how students of the Princeton Theological Seminary conducted themselves when asked to deliver a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan.

The students were to give the sermon in a studio a building across campus and would be evaluated by their supervisors. The researchers were curious about whether time pressure would affect the seminary students’ helpful nature. After all, the students were being trained to become ordained priests; they are presumably inclined to help others.

As each student finalized his preparation in a classroom, the researchers inflicted an element of time constraint upon them by giving them one of three instructions:

“You’re late. They were expecting you a few minutes ago…You’d better hurry. It shouldn’t take but just a minute.” This was the high-hurry condition.
“The (studio) assistant is ready for you, so please go right over.” This was the intermediate-hurry condition.
“It’ll be a few minutes before they’re ready for you, but you might as well head on over. If you have to wait over there, it shouldn’t be long.” This was the low-hurry condition.

As each student walked by himself from the preparation classroom to the studio, he encountered a ‘victim’ in a deserted alleyway just like the wounded traveler in the parable of the Good Samaritan. This victim (actually an associate of the experimenters) appeared destitute, was slouched and coughing and clearly in need of assistance. The seminarians were thus offered a chance to apply what they were about to preach.

“Conflict, rather than callousness, can explain their failure to stop.”

Researchers were interested in determining if their imposed time pressure affected the seminarians’ response to a distressed stranger. Remarkably, only 10% of the students in the high-hurry situation stopped to help the victim. 45% of the students in the intermediate-hurry and 63% of the students in the low-hurry situations helped the victim.

The researchers concluded, “A person not in a hurry may stop and offer help to a person in distress. A person in a hurry is likely to keep going. Ironically, he is likely to keep going even if he is hurrying to speak on the parable of the Good Samaritan, thus inadvertently confirming the point of the parable… Thinking about the Good Samaritan did not increase helping behavior, but being in a hurry decreased it.”

In light of their training and calling, the seminarians’ failure of bystander intervention is probably not due to indifference, self-centeredness, or contempt. (Compare with the plot of the series finale of American sitcom Seinfeld, where Jerry and friends are prosecuted for failure of duty to rescue.) The dominant cause is time pressure. Most of the students who believed they had enough time to stop did so. In contrast, the vast majority of those who thought they were late did not stop to help. In other words, the perception of time pressure or “having limited time” resulted in behaviors incongruent to their education and career: the devotion to help others. Time pressure triggered these well-intentioned students to behave in ways that, upon reflection, they would find disgraceful. The weight of a time constraint caused the students to put their immediate concern of being on time before the wellbeing of someone in need.

We’re in such hurry that we don’t stop to help ourselves

“I’m Late, I’m Late for a very important date,
No time to say hello. Goodbye.
I’m late, I’m late, I’m late, and when I wave,
I lose the time I save.”
—White Rabbit in the Disney musical “Alice in Wonderland” (1951)

The Princeton Seminary Experiment offers an even more personal lesson. As the researchers in this experiment expound, when we speed up and feel rushed, we experience a phenomenon known as “narrowing of the cognitive map.” That is, we miss details, we are not present enough in the moment to notice what is really important and we do not make the most beneficial choices for ourselves.

As we make our way through life, not only do we not stop to help others—we also do not stop to help ourselves. We neglect our own needs. We fail to nurture ourselves. We surrender, we settle, we lose hope. We compromise ourselves and become what we often settle for.

Our noisy world and busy lives constantly make us hurry as somebody always depends on us being somewhere. We constantly rush from place to place as if our lives depended upon it. We rush while doing just about everything. We are at the mercy of commitments often imposed by others.

Life moves quickly. And we’ll have missed it.

We fail to nurture ourselves We’re too busy, we’re too hurried and we’re too rushed. When people place demands on our time, our first resort is to cut out that which is most valuable. We are so busy meeting deadlines that we cannot make time for our loved ones. We abandon physical exercise to get to meetings on time. We avoid medical checkups critical to our well-being. We engage in behaviors that can put ourselves at risk for negative consequences in the future.

As our world continues to accelerate and our pace of life picks up speed, the clock’s finger turns inescapably. Life moves on by quickly, and soon enough we’ll have missed it entirely.

Idea for Impact: Be ever-conscious of the fact that time is the currency of your life

The German theologian and anti-Nazi descendent Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) wrote in his “Letters and Papers from Prison”, “As time is the most valuable thing that we have, because it is the most irrevocable, the thought of any lost time troubles us whenever we look back. Time lost is time in which we have failed to live a full human life, gain experience, learn, create, enjoy, and suffer; it is time that has not been filled up, but left empty.”

Make the best use of your time. Interrupt your busy life to help yourself by living more fully in the present. Nurture yourself. Your needs belong to the top.

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Anxiety

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The Princeton Seminary Experiment

“Conflict, rather than callousness, can explain their failure to stop.”

We’re in such hurry that we don’t stop to help ourselves

Life moves quickly. And we’ll have missed it.

Idea for Impact: Be ever-conscious of the fact that time is the currency of your life

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