Worry can be beneficial
-- to a point
By LOU MARANO
WASHINGTON, (UPI) -- "Worry" and "anxiety"
are often used as synonyms, but a new study shows that worrying
actually may shield people from the harmful effects of anxiety
-- at least in the short term.
In preparing for an exam, for example, worry can generate some
concrete strategies to give the student some sense of control
and predictability over the outcome.
Anxiety is more of an emotional process, and worry is more of a cognitive mechanism one uses to fend off the negative emotion, Nathan Williams, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arkansas, told United Press International.
While anxiety tends to arise from fearful imagery, worry manifests in the form of words, Williams said. This difference is not just a matter of form, but it represents a difference in the way the brain interprets, processes and responds to information. Mental images have more instantaneous power to evoke emotional reaction, and this can lead to less logical less effective responses to threatening information.
"Anxiety is driven by imagery, and that imagery leads to pure, raw emotion -- often fear," Williams said. Engaging in worry allows people to translate those images into words, which can reduce the raw, negative emotion associated with the imagery.
Williams collaborated with Professor John Riskind of George Mason University to test the mitigating effects of worry. The researchers asked 96 subjects to view a series of images -- 15 positive in content, 15 neutral and 15 negative. After a five-minute distraction task, individuals were asked to recall as many of the 45 images as they could, and the order of recall was recorded.
Participants also completed two psychometric scales, measuring their vulnerability to anxiety and their proclivity to worry.
Subjects vulnerable to anxiety recalled more negative images than less vulnerable individuals. However, vulnerable participants who also reported in engaging in worry recalled significantly fewer of the negative images.
But doesn't excessive worry lead to depression or a negative outlook on life?
"That's certainly true," Williams replied. "That's part of the commonality between anxious and depressive symptoms. Usually on the depression side, we talk about it in terms of rumination. But the cognitive processes -- dwelling on negative events -- are very similar."
How much worry, then, is OK?
Williams said worry can be useful in mentally forecasting possible problems and rehearsing solutions. And in the short term, some worry might help one move past the fear and anxiety evoked by a severe stressor.
But worry also comes with a price. It becomes a problem when it is used rigidly and pervasively across situations.
And it can cut people off from their feelings, leading to what psychotherapists call "intellectualizing."
"Part of our hypothesis is that worry, because it does function as a cognitive avoidance of emotion, prevents people from engaging in emotional processing of negative things that happen to them," Williams explained.
"If the goal of worry is to help someone to put distance between themselves and fearful, anxiety-provoking negative imagery, the downside of that is by putting that distance there, it doesn't let the person emotionally process what's happening." So an imbalance of thought over feeling develops.
Williams said the more a person worries, the more abstract and distant the actual problem becomes. So worry can become problem solving gone awry. As the problem becomes more abstract, it becomes less linked to negative emotion. But the downside is it's hard to figure out a solution to an abstract problem.
And in our society, many of the problems that prompt the most worry are relatively abstract. Professional success, for example, is both an abstract and a subjective concept.
"We tend to find with worriers the more abstract the worry, the more difficult for the person to generate some kind of pathway toward accomplishing their goals," Williams said.
Other examples of "abstract" worries are the effects of aging and physical attractiveness. "Any personal qualities that are subjective by definition and aren't linked to easily definable objective criteria lend themselves to the abstract worry process," Williams told UPI.
The professor sees clinical applications for his research: Productive worry leads to solutions and concrete goals, rather than just prompting more worry.
Asked about the emotional skills slighted by an excess of worry and intellectualization, Williams referred to the work of Viktor Frankl (1905-1997), the Austrian physician whose Holocaust testament "Man's Search for Meaning" has inspired millions. Frankl's "logotherapy" views suffering not as an obstacle to happiness but often the necessary means to it. "Everything can be taken away from man but one thing -- to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances," Frankl wrote.
Williams said if one is engaging only in "what if?" -- i.e., thinking and cognitive abstractions -- in many ways this prevents "meaning-making" in Frankl's terms. "Even when bad things happen to us, when we can make meaning out of them, then they can be integrated into one's life. When all we do is deal with them through avoidance and distancing and abstraction, they can't be integrated," the psychologist said.