all kinds of troubles
Worry has both negative and neutral definitions. Psychologists who study climate change describe it as an emotional state that often inspires behavioral responses to reduce the threat. What distinguishes worry from general worry is its emotional nature and the fact that it prepares people for change.
However, psychologists also define worry as an emotional experience involving unpleasant and persistent thoughts about the future. There’s no denying that worrying does a lot of harm. For example, some researchers believe that there is a "limited worry pool," so that anxiety about one thing inhibits worry about other things.
Extreme worry is associated with poorer physical and mental health, for reasons including disrupted sleep and avoidance of cancer screenings. Extreme, abstract and automatic worry - frequent and difficult to control - is associated with generalized anxiety disorder. Worries that have generalized to many different issues are more likely to be unhelpful and problematic than worries that focus on specific discrete issues.
But on a more modest, local level, worry can be useful. For example, in wildfire-prone Australian states, researchers found that constructive worry was associated with wildfire preparedness. It is associated with better academic performance and more attempts to quit smoking. One study found that concern about climate change was the strongest predictor of climate policy support (suggesting that environmentalists may be more effective when they appeal to the public's concerns rather than their fears). Because worry is future-focused, it has greater adaptive potential than rumination on the past.
Three mechanisms are outlined for this purpose.
- First, by worrying about something, we are more likely to think of reasons to take action and be motivated to do it.
- Second, worry is a reminder to do something—in effect, an unresolved uncertainty or worry keeps popping up in the mind as a mental process to ensure we try to resolve it .
- Third, worry can involve effective preparation, planning, and problem solving.
Like the relationship between stress and performance, Watkins says there seems to be an inverted U-shaped relationship between worry and helpfulness: Too little, and you're not motivated enough; too much, and you're paralyzed.
This is clear, for example, from the range of emotions brought about by deep concern about the climate crisis. Climate burnout inhibits action, while climate anxiety leads to mental numbing. But understanding, inhibiting and redirecting these can also inspire change.
Like any emotion, worry has its place. This is a signal. It essentially points us to something that may be coming and gets our attention there. It motivates us to ideally prevent something bad from happening or at least prepare for it.
Early studies of the Covid-19 pandemic appear to bear this out. A study of Covid-19 risk perceptions in 10 countries looked at worry as the emotional component of risk perceptions. The survey assessed risk perceptions through a range of measures, including asking participants to rate how worried they were about the virus. Unsurprisingly, people perceived a higher risk if they had been directly exposed to the virus. But if they had more prosocial views—that is, a belief in the importance of altruistic behavior—they also had higher risk perceptions. Higher risk perceptions were significantly associated with preventive health behaviors, including handwashing, wearing a mask, and maintaining social distance.
Steps to Worry Better
Part of what makes Covid-19 so emotional is its uncertainty. Constructive concerns are easier when dealing with a specific time frame. The 2016 U.S. presidential election, for example, fueled Sweeney's political concerns. Two years later, before the midterm elections, she allayed those fears by writing more than 500 postcards encouraging people to vote.
Her research on maintaining well-being while waiting for a potentially negative outcome showed that she could mitigate the worst effects of worry if she aimed to stay positive during the campaign and then prepare for the worst on election day. As she puts it, she couldn't "find a job to worry about" until push came to shove.
Of course, many people may have good reasons to worry about forces beyond their control. But in these cases, understanding the worry that there is no work to do can help resolve it. A three-step process to channel worry and redirect it if necessary:
Flag concerns
Run a mental list of possible actions to deal with the problem.
If all possible actions have been taken, try to enter a worry-reducing state such as flow, mindfulness, and awe.
Mobility is particularly useful in dealing with the stress of Covid-19. Flow is a state of absorption that is moderately challenging and a means of tracking progress. In preliminary research on the mental health of Chinese people who have not yet been quarantined, mobility is associated with less loneliness and more health-promoting behaviors. Although mindfulness is associated with many (perhaps too many) health benefits, mindfulness was actually associated with more loneliness and unhealthy activities in the Chinese study. That’s because flow provides a “refined distraction” that makes time fly, while mindfulness forces attention to ongoing uncertainty. One takeaway might be that mindfulness is more useful in difficult but brief situations, whereas entering a flow state is more adaptive when there is no finish line in sight.
Gardening, for example, makes people feel cold, despite having reached 500 days of continuous use on a language learning app, and even finding themselves turning crazily to their favorite data analysis when trying to achieve a flow state. These, like more challenging game types, are examples of intrinsically rewarding activities with measurable progress that can help people get into a flow state.
Watkins , a clinical psychologist and mood disorders researcher at the University of Exeter, has updated his tip sheet for improving well-being during the pandemic and is evaluating a well-being app for young people in Europe: "Existing literature predicts, Moderate concerns about the coronavirus, combined with an understanding and belief in social distancing, will improve compliance with guidelines. In contrast, excessive worry or worry about a range of issues may make it more difficult to take effective action."
The upshot of this is that, for example, people who are concerned about returning to the workplace should plan in specific detail how they will reduce the risk of commuting and maintain social distancing, rather than stressing about what might go wrong. “The former will help them prepare and plan and feel more in control, while the latter will lead to more catastrophic fears, imagining worst-case scenarios and heightened anxiety.
Specific recommendations from the psychologists' research include the importance of maintaining some sort of routine, staying connected to loved ones and community, and finding ways to transform worries into empathic concern for others.
When considering how to emerge from lockdown, for example, much of the time has been aimed at cautious optimism. But taking time out each week to reflect on whether there are any threats or risks that she should be more worried about.
For many of us, achieving balance with our worries can be a useful goal, even if it may always feel a little unsettling.
