Why being uncomfortable is important…

Earlier I told you about the time in my life when everything changed. It was hard to navigate this, and I made a lot of mistakes along the way, like most people.  We all learn through trial and error, and I am a big believer in figuring things out as I go along, rather than expecting to know everything I should be doing right now!  Being less hard on myself is a new thing for me and something I am working on every day.

This blog is a great example as this felt really out of my comfort zone.  I’ve been thinking about doing something like this for a few years but never fully committed. I suppose this is because, like many people, I doubt myself a lot. I think about whether I am good enough to talk to others about what I do and the idea of sharing ‘expertise’ feels incredibly uncomfortable. As an introvert, I spend most of my time trying not to draw attention to myself, so this is a strange and unfamiliar direction for me!

However, I also know that feeling uncomfortable is part of the deal with anything in life.  As a therapist and coach, this is exactly what I tell my clients.  Being uncomfortable is a vital part of self-development. Change is often a challenging process. After all, if everything was fine, why would anyone change anything?  

 There are several key psychological theories about managing change, but an important aspect of all of this, and particularly around reducing worry, is the ability to tolerating discomfort.  This is something positive psychology explores with regard to how we achieve wellbeing.  Research suggests that one of the components of wellbeing is being able to cope when things go wrong, to weather the storm.  Robert Biswas-Deiner & Todd Kashdan wrote about the importance of this for good mental health. In their 2014 book ‘The Upside of out Darkside’ they explore how acknowledging and accepting our negative traits and emotions as well as our positive ones can help us to build resilience and lean into strengths. They say that rather than see these feelings as a sign that we are failing, they are merely an acknowledgment of our humanity.  Biswas-Deiner discusses and example of how helpful it can be to acknowledge and tolerate discomfort in the video I have shared here.  This is a humorous but highly insightful take on the subject that I urge you to watch. I often send the link to my clients who really enjoy it and say that it resonates with them.  Let me know what you think in the comments.

The upside of your dark side with Dr Robert Biswas-Diener at Happiness & Its Causes 2015 - YouTube

 Kashdan, T., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2014). The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self -Not Just Your "Good" Self -Drives Success and Fulfillment. New York, Hudson Street Press. 304 pp., $25.95 hardcover + $12.99 epub, ISBN: 9781594631733.

First post…

Hi I'm Kelly and this is my first blog. Believe me, just getting this going is an achievement in itself, as I am incredibly untechnical but here we are.   I wanted to create this as my passion is helping people to stop worrying.

As a former worrier myself I remember how debilitating worry was in my life the anxiety and stress I felt and all the opportunities I missed out on because I didn't trust myself to handle them.  I had low self-esteem and major imposter syndrome, and my worry and negative thinking led me to make bad choices, impacted my relationships and limited my potential.

In 2012 a series of pretty big events were happening for me, culminating in some major life changes.  By 2015, I had experienced bereavement, loss, divorce, job changes, retraining, and moving with my children to a brand new part of the UK.   I can honestly say 2015 was one of the worst years of my life.  I ended it an anxious, depressed, unemployed, single parent with a house needing renovating, no DIY skills and wondering how I had ended up like this in my late 40s.

Fast forward 11 years and I have a successful private practise as a therapist, I've just completed my master’s degree to qualify as coaching psychologist at 59 years old, the house is still far from the show home I envisioned, but we're getting there. I have my family, good friends. I travel when I can and I'm happy.

I can honestly say I put this change firmly down to when I stopped worrying, because it was then that I started doing things and blasting through what was blocking my progress, and if I'm honest that was me.  It was my worrying about all the bad things that could happen; being judged, failing, looking stupid, being found out, that stopped me. My negativity and lack of belief in myself always held me back, kept me tied to the past and made me limit myself.

Once I recognised this and adjusted the way I thought about and approached things, everything changed.  So today is the first day of the Worry Revolution.  Worry chains us to the past, to negativity, to anxiety, to feeling stuck, but it's become so normalised people often don't question it.   I used to think that I should worry; that if I didn't it meant I didn't care, but I was wrong.  I care just as much, I take things seriously, I get things done.  I just don't chain myself to worry to do it.

So I wanted to start a blog that I've called the Worry Revolution because I feel we have to challenge the beliefs that we have about worry, about negative thinking, about fear of failure, and of change, all these things that stop us being the person we want to be.

In this blog I hope to talk about worry and why we do it; look at ways of reducing worry and negative thinking; explore how we can improve our well-being and enjoy life; and hear from others about their stories and discovering what's helped them be happier and build a supportive community together.  I am navigating my way through this new experience and hope, if anyone is reading this, that you will bear with me while I learn.

Thank you so much for reading this and I hope you will join me in the worry revolution.

 As this blog begins I would also like to thank the two individuals who trained me in CBT and MCT, Prof. Adrian Wells who developed metacognitive theory and therapy, and Prof. Marcantonio Spada who trained me in CBT and introduced me to MCT.

MCT vs CBT

Throughout this blog, I’ll be looking at ways to address worry and feel more able to interrupt it. We will also be looking at other types of unhelpful thinking like negative, ruminative and self-critical thinking, but let’s begin with worry.

Let’s think about what worry is….

…because you can’t change something if you don’t know what it looks like. I think this is partly because there are different definitions of worry. I did some googling and this is what I found.

Co-pilot says worry is “the state of being anxious and troubled over actual or potential problems.”

Cambridge dictionary: “a problem that makes you feel unhappy or frightened.”

However, both of these muddle worry up with feelings or problems rather than defining worry itself. A better definition comes from the Oxford Dictionary;

“to keep thinking about unpleasant things that might happen or about problems that you have.”

This definition makes most sense to me because it defines worry as a behaviour, something that we do when we feel overwhelmed or out of control. 

A behaviour of thought. And that’s good news…because we can change a behaviour.

I discovered this during a lecture when I was training to be a Cognitive Behaviour Therapist, and it blew my mind. I always thought worrying was part of my personality or inherited from my mum (an Olympic level worrier!).  To find out this was something that I did when I was uncomfortable was a massive turning point for me. It meant I could change

But how? The traditional way of working with worry uses CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) techniques.  

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).

Many of the books, videos and resources you will find are based on CBT techniques.  CBT explores the relationship between our thoughts, feeling and behaviours. Our experiences and the beliefs we form as a result can influence how we respond to things and the choices we make.  CBT will often focus on what the thought is and challenge its content. For example – “how likely is it that what you are worrying about will actually happen?”  so that individuals can see there is no need to worry.

CBT is an evidence-based treatment which means that it has been tested and found to be effective in treating specific issues. There are lots of ways of working with worry in CBT which we will explore as we go. 

I am a qualified Cognitive Behavioural therapist, fully accredited by the British Association of Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP).  This is the regulatory body for CBT Therapists.

If you are thinking of starting CBT, I would recommend accessing the BABCP website for guidance and using their register to check the therapist is known to them as you then know they are subject to BABCP regulations for practice.

Metacognitive Therapy (MCT).

Metacognitive Therapy (MCT) developed by Prof. Adrian Wells (2005), differs from CBT in a key aspect; rather than focusing on the content of thoughts and evidencing them, MCT takes a metacognitive view – exploring the thoughts about the thoughts.  It suggests it is rigid and recurrent thinking styles which maintain certain disorders and reducing these, through challenging beliefs around them and interrupting unhelpful thinking, can help people move into recovery.  MCT says this involves focusing attention on potential danger leading to unhelpful strategies such as worry (future focused negative thinking), rumination (prolonged, repetitive, negative thinking), threat monitoring, avoidance and reassurance seeking.  

We will look at each of these in more detail in later blog posts, and I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments!

MCT explores worry and anxiety in a different way to CBT. For example, a client is worrying about the common core belief “I am not good enough”.  As a CBT therapist I would ask, “what is the evidence that you are not good enough?”  This might work well in some circumstances, but in reality there are times when we are not good enough, or even when we are the evidence of this might not shake the belief.  So, this will only take us so far.

However, as an MCT therapist I would ask, “what is the effect of analysing whether you are good enough?”  Often, people will realise that their overthinking is making their anxiety and mood worse. This enables them to explore whether worrying and ruminating is actually keeping them stuck in their beliefs rather than moving them forward.  MCT also offers sustainable techniques to reduce their overthinking and problematic behaviours like procrastination and avoidance.

I am a qualified Metacognitive Therapist. If you are thinking of starting MCT, I would recommend accessing the Metacognitive Therapy Institute website for guidance and using their register to check the therapist is known to them as you then know they are fully qualified to practice.

Leaving thoughts alone…

Why do people run straight ahead of a danger instead of to the side? I was just watching tv and a hiker in the forest saw a massive tree start to fall. Now a tree is a tall, straight-ish bit of heavy wood pretty much.  So, you would imagine that when it falls over, if you are directly beneath it and run in the direction it’s falling, that’s not so good.  But if you ran to the side, you might be hit by a bit of foliage, but we wouldn’t be talking a Wiley Coyote situation (showing my age here, but I’m a Road Runner & Scooby Doo girl so there will doubtless be references here and there!)

So why do we think we can outrun worry by tacking it head on? Can we just step to the side instead? This is kind of like how metacognitive therapy works.  Often, we try to manage worry by evidencing and rationalising thoughts. But this will only get us so far, because sometimes the thought is true and there is a problem that we need to deal with. Other times, the thought may not be true, but it can still bother us. We tend to try to tackle the thought rather than the worry.

MCT says that a thought is just a thought, one of thousands a day we have, and we waste a lot of time trying to battle them instead of seeing them for what they are; just thoughts.  MCT suggests that looking for evidence doesn’t always get us where we want to be, sometimes bad things happen. But also, going over thoughts again and again keeps them in our attention so it is hard to move on from them.

MCT utilises a process which is already part of our cognitive processing call detached mindfulness. Adrian Wells and colleagues have done extensive research on this (you can see the references at the end of this article if you want to explore them further). Detached mindfulness refers to doing nothing with thoughts. This sounds strange to people at first. Our instinct with a thought is to disprove it or make it feel better or to simply suppress it. However, this also keeps it in our attention, and a thought needs our attention to exist. MCT takes the stance of seeing thoughts as coming and going throughout the day and engaging with the ones which are useful, rather than fighting the ones we don’t need.

So how do we leave thoughts alone?  When we first start this practice in MCT, my clients often feel this is a difficult and complex process. But honestly, it is something we doing already every single day.

What were you thinking about before you started reading this blog? Maybe tasks you have to do today? What to cook for dinner? A conversation you had?

What happened to those thoughts? Did you have to get rid of them or did you simply move on without actively engaging with them?

If you did nothing and just got on with your day…you just used detached mindfulness.  MCT utilises this ability to interrupt worry and rumination.  At this point most people say “but there must be more to it than that?!” and of course, they are right! However, this is a key factor in making that shift from feeling your worry is uncontrollable to having a strategy that actually works. We’ll continue to explore this within the blog.

 Wells, A. (2009). Metacognitive therapy for anxiety and depression. The Guilford Press.