In my theory and opinion, all of us are a little bit crazy. What I mean by this is that we have what I call “cultural insanity”. For instance, do you know anyone that does not worry? Probably not. Everybody worries, but what does it effect? What does it help? I think you will agree with me, it doesn’t help, yet everybody still does it. But why?
We worry because it is reinforced. This “reinforcement history” occurs something like this: There are reasons why we worry. If we do not worry, people will think that we do not care. If we do worry, they think we care a great deal, whether we are doing anything or not. We could be the laziest person on the job but if we walk around worrying, people think that we are doing something; that we care. But, we even feel guilty if we don’t worry sometimes, thinking it means that we don’t care. The worry doesn’t actually do anything, but it gets reinforced in this way.
Worry also gets reinforced because we tend to feel that we have control over situations when we worry. For instance, worrying about whether my son will drive off the road during a winter storm as he drives back to college will not in and of itself get him there safely, but subjectively, if I worry, I have a sense of keeping him on the road. I don’t admit this because it is crazy!
But I do worry because it subjectively soothes me. When he arrives, I can say “oh good, now I can stop worrying” as if my worrying were keeping him on the road in the first place. Now, if I get a call from my son saying that he has slid off the road, what is the first thing I say? I say to myself, “ I knew that was going to happen” and my worrying has been reinforced and I now feel that I predicted this outcome.
Worry is always reinforced, especially if you are a big worrier, because when you are a big worrier, you are worried about so many things and how many things actually go wrong? Very few, so subconsciously at the least, you begin to associate worry with a positive outcome.
So, there is how your positive reinforcement history for a maladaptive way of coping develops. That is what gets us hooked on worry.
One of the things I really like about Enlight is that it is a treatment application that actually benefits the average person. Anybody can get an Enlight application and it could help them, because of the simple fact that we are all born worriers. The great news is that Enlight resolves this!