What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [27]
Your mental tongue. Attend to your tongue—right now. What is it doing? Mine is swishing around near my lower right molars. It has just found a minute fragment of last night’s popcorn (debris from Terminator 2). Like a dog at a bone, it is worrying the firmly wedged flake. Now that I am attending to the popcorn flake, it is hard to go back to writing.
Attend to your hand, the one not holding this book—right now. What’s it up to? My left hand is boring in on an itch it just discovered under my left earlobe.
Your tongue and your hands have, for the most part, a life of their own. You can bring them under voluntary control by consciously calling them out of their “default” mode to carry out your commands: “Pick up the phone,” or “Stop picking that pimple.” But most of the time they are on their own. They are seeking out small imperfections. They scan your entire mouth and skin surface, probing for anything going wrong. They are marvelous, nonstop grooming devices. They, not the more fashionable immune system, are your first line of defense against invaders. You thought your electric toothbrush was neat. It is Stone Age compared to the preventative maintenance, cleaning, waste detection, and debris removal that your tongue is so often carrying out on your teeth and gums.
Anxiety is your mental tongue. Its default mode is to search for what may be about to go wrong. It continually, and without your conscious consent, scans your life—yes, even when you are asleep, in dreams and nightmares. It reviews your work, your love, your play—until it finds an imperfection. When it finds one, it worries it. It tries to pull it out from its hiding place, where it is wedged inconspicuously under some rock. It will not let go. If the imperfection is threatening enough, anxiety calls your attention to it by making you uncomfortable. If you do not act, it yells more insistently—disturbing your sleep and your appetites.
Do you find your tongue’s swishy officiousness irritating now that I have called your attention to it? Do you now find twirling your hair as you read vexatious? There are behavioral techniques for reducing these activities, and there is even a drug that dampens such “tics.”1
Similarly, there are things you can do to reduce daily, mild anxiety. You can numb it with alcohol, Valium, or marijuana. You can take the edge off it with meditation or progressive relaxation. You can beat it down by becoming more conscious of the automatic thoughts of danger that often trigger anxiety, and then disputing them effectively.
But do not overlook what your anxiety is trying to do for you. In return for the pain it brings, it prevents larger ordeals by making you aware of their possibility and goading you into planning for and forestalling them. It may even help you avoid them altogether. Think of your anxiety as the “low oil” light, flashing on the dashboard of your car. Disconnect it, and you will be less distracted and more comfortable for a while. But this may cost you a burned-up engine.2 Our dysphoria should, some of the time, be tolerated, attended to, even cherished.
Guidelines for when to try to change anxiety. Enough praise for everyday anxiety—much of anxiety is wasted and needs relieving. Few scientists have researched the question of when we should try to change our anxiety level rather than attend to its message. But I can give you my own guidelines. What distinguishes most of the advice in the rest of this book from that in self-help books generally is that mine consists of my integration of vats of serious research leavened with a dollop of clinical wisdom. My advice in this case, in contrast, has more fallible backing some clinical lore and some common sense.
Some of our everyday anxiety, depression, and anger go beyond their useful function. Most adaptive traits fall along a normal spectrum of distribution, and the capacity for bad weather inside for everyone some of the time means that some of us will have terrible weather all of the time. In general,