What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [28]
First, is it irrational?
We must calibrate our bad weather inside against the real weather outside. Is what you are anxious about out of proportion to the reality of the danger? For some of you, living in the shadow of terminal illness, violence, unemployment, or poverty, anxiety is often founded in reality. But for most of you, daily anxiety may be a vestige of a geological epoch you are no longer living in.
Is your anxiety out of proportion to the reality of the danger you fear? Here are some examples that may help you answer this question. All of the following are not irrational:
A fire fighter trying to smother a raging oil well burning in Kuwait repeatedly wakes up at four in the morning because of flaming terror dreams.
A mother of three smells perfume on her husband’s shirts and, consumed by jealousy, broods about his infidelity, reviewing the list of possible women over and over.
A woman is the sole source of support for her children. Her co-workers start getting pink slips. She has a panic attack.
A student who has failed two of his midterm exams finds, as finals approach, that he can’t get to sleep for worrying. He has diarrhea most of the time.
The only good thing that can be said about your fears is that they are well-founded.
In contrast, all of the following are irrational, out of proportion to the danger:
An elderly man, having been in a fender bender, broods about travel and will no longer take cars, trains, or airplanes.
An eight-year-old child, his parents having been through an ugly divorce, wets his pants at night. He is haunted with visions of his bedroom ceiling collapsing on him.
A college student skips her final exam because she fears that the professor will look at her while she is writing and her hand will then shake uncontrollably.
A housewife, who has an MBA and who accumulated a decade of experience as a financial vice president before her twins were born, is sure her job search will be fruitless. She delays preparing her resume for a month.
The second hallmark of anxiety out of control is paralysis. Anxiety intends action: Plan, rehearse, look into shadows for lurking dangers, change your life. When anxiety becomes strong, it is unproductive; no problem-solving occurs. And when anxiety is extreme, it paralyzes you. Has your anxiety crossed this line? Some examples:
A woman finds herself housebound because she fears that if she goes out, she will be bitten by a cat.
Consumed by the fear that his girlfriend is unfaithful, a young swain never calls her again.
A salesman broods about the next customer hanging up on him and makes no more cold calls.
A fourth-grader is often chosen last for teams and refuses to go to school anymore because “everybody hates me.”
A writer, afraid of the next rejection slip, stops writing.
The final hallmark is intensity. Is your life dominated by anxiety? Dr. Charles Spielberger, a past president of the American Psychological Association, is also one of the world’s foremost testers of emotion. He has developed well-validated scales for calibrating how severe anxiety and anger are. He divides these emotions into their state form (“How are you feeling right now?”) and their trait form (“How do you generally feel?”). Since our interest is change in personality, with Dr. Spielberger’s kind permission I will use his trait questions.
SELF-ANALYSIS QUESTIONNAIRE3
Read each statement and then mark the appropriate number to indicate how you generally feel. There are no right or wrong answers. Do not spend too much time on any one statement, but give the answer that seems to describe how you generally feel.
Scoring. Simply add up the numbers under your answers to the ten questions. Be careful to notice that some of the rows of numbers go up and others go down.