The clenched fist is a universal symbol of determination as well as of aggressive tension. — Calvert Stein, ‘Clenched fist as a hypno behavioural procedure’, 1963

Many years ago, I used to teach an old conditioning technique introduced by the behaviour therapist Calvert Stein, in the early 1960s. Stein had his clients clench the fist of their dominant hand and associate the gesture with happy memories and feelings. In some cases, clients are also asked to clench their non-dominant fist for a moment then slowly relax it, in order to symbolize the act of releasing negative emotions. I trained hundreds of therapists to use this simple technique. People like doing it. Although it has been used with a range of emotions, the consensus among my students was that it seemed particularly appealing as a way of coping with anger.

A client might be instructed as follows…

Close your eyes and imagine that you’re reliving a recent situation in which you became very angry. Begin before anything happened to make you angry, and go through the memory, as if you’re there right now, experiencing it again. As your anger begins to emerge, gradually clench your non-dominant (usually your left) hand into a fist. When your anger reaches its peak, clench your fist as tightly as you can, pause there for a moment, and nod your head so that I can see. [Pause.] Now, take a deep breath in, and as you exhale, begin to relax your clenched fist very patiently, in slow motion. Breath naturally, and with each exhalation, relax your whole body a little more, especially your left hand. Imagine that as you release the tension from your hand, you’re letting go of any angry thoughts or feelings. You can accept those feelings, without needing to hold onto them any longer. Allow all of your attention to be absorbed in the present moment, and the physical sensations in your body, as you release your hold on the anger, very slowly and patiently.

Over the years, I’ve come to think there could be hidden reasons why this gesture seemed so effective as a way of releasing anger. Obviously, unclenching the fist can be considered a universal gesture of “letting go”, and this symbolism is certainly very important. There’s also the fact that relaxation is being repeatedly paired with the anger-provoking memory, a well-established procedure known as counter-conditioning in behaviour therapy. Focusing attention on such a straightforward and tangible coping strategy can also allow the client to feel more in control of their response, which may counteract the loss of control often reported in anger. There’s also the simple fact that doing almost anything differently than normal when an episode of anger is about to begin can potentially disrupt the automaticity of old habits, and prevent the emotion from escalating. I now believe, however, that there may also be more subtle psychological factors at play in the use of this technique.

Secrets of the Fist

1. Slowing Down Time

The first is that giving sufficient attention to a physical gesture of this kind could potentially slow down our subjective perception of time, in a way that interferes with the normal psychological process of becoming angry. When anger is escalating, people report that things often appear to happen much more quickly than normal. That sense of rapid escalation can contribute to the feeling of “losing control” of your temper. During intense anger, we normally focus on the perceived threat, typically the offending behaviour of another person. This means, however, that our attention tends to be directed away from our own actions, and physical sensations, in the heat of the moment.

There is some evidence that, by contrast, focusing on certain physical sensations, such as the feelings accompanying muscle movements, can slow down our perception of time. A recent study found, for instance, that “overestimations of the duration of interoceptive stimuli [internal physical sensations] appear to be function of subjects’ ability to correctly perceive their own bodily information”, and noted that high levels of “salient stimuli” or internal sensations are capable of “effectively slowing the perception of time, which will appear to ‘stand still to the subjective observer'” (Di Lernia, D., Serino, S., Pezzulo, G., Pedroli, E., Cipresso, P., & Riva, G. (2018). Feel the Time. Time Perception as a Function of Interoceptive Processing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12). Time can slow down, in other words, when we become deeply absorbed in internal sensations.

This effect can be achieved by paying a lot more attention than normal to your own breathing, and patiently observing even the smallest sensations of movement. Slowing down a behaviour, such as unclenching the fist in tiny increments, may create a psychological buffering effect by flooding our capacity for interoceptive awareness. Doing this repeatedly, while reliving memories, or in real situations, in response to the early-warning signs of anger, may derail the escalation of the emotion by shifting attention away from the other person and back onto our own actions enough to reverse the perceived acceleration of time. It also gives us more time to pause for thought, hesitate, and change the course of our actions.

2. Cognitive Defusion

Another process involved may be what therapists nowadays tend to call “cognitive defusion”. The act of releasing the fist can be thought of as symbolizing “letting go” of angry thoughts and attitudes. For example, perhaps someone bumps into me and I instinctively have the automatic thought: What a total jerk! Releasing the fist, as I imagine letting go of the thought, may allow me to experience it in a more detached way —- having the thought but no longer buying into the thought.

We now know that this kind of psychological detachment is more important than previously assumed. It used to be widely believed that the goal of therapy should be to change negative thoughts and replace them with positive, or more rational ones. However, it’s now realized that changing our relationship with negative thoughts, including angry ones, may be a healthier and more natural way to reduce their impact on our behaviour. We experience an angry thought, and even repeat the words in our mind, without necessarily confusing it with reality, or allowing it to drive our emotions and behaviour.

While Stein’s technique focused on behavioral conditioning, therefore, its effectiveness may stem from more subtle cognitive principles—principles that Stoic philosophers explored many centuries earlier.

The Fist of Zeno

The ancient Stoics actually described a series of hand gestures, which symbolized different psychological states. The founders of Stoicism believed that “knowledge is the leading part of the soul in a certain state, just as the hand in a certain state is a fist” (Inwood & Gerson, 2008, p. 27). According to Cicero, Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism introduced this analogy:

And Zeno used to make this point by using a gesture. When he held out his hand with open fingers, he would say, “This is what an impression is like.” Then when he had closed his fingers a bit, he said, “Assent is like this.” And when he had compressed it completely and made a fist, he said that this was grasping (and on the basis of this comparison he even gave it the name ‘katalepsis’ [grasp], which had not previously existed). But when he put his left hand over it and compressed it tightly and powerfully, he said that knowledge was this sort of thing and that no one except the wise man possessed it. — Academica, 2.145

Marcus Aurelius appears to refer to this symbolism in a famous passage:

In our use of [Stoic] precepts [dogmata] we should imitate the boxer [pancratiast] not the swordsman [gladiator]. For the swordsman’s weapon is picked up and put down again. However, the boxer always has his hands available. All he has to do is clench his fist. — Meditations, 12.9

That would, if Marcus had been reading Zeno, naturally be taken to mean that the Stoic aims to arm himself with the core precepts of his philosophy as if he’s clenching them tightly in his fist, and experiencing them with what Zeno called katalepsis, or having a firm mental grasp of them.

Of course, we could also reverse the sequence described by Zeno, when it comes to false or misleading impressions, by letting them fall from our grasp. We begin by holding onto our angry thoughts and beliefs tightly, as if we are clenching them tightly in our fist. By literally unclenching our fist, we can symbolize the process of letting go of attachment to false impressions, negative automatic thoughts, and irrational beliefs, known as cognitive defusion.

To repeat what we were told above:

When [Zeno] held out his hand with open fingers, he would say, “This is what an impression is like.”

Place that alongside the well-known quote from Epictetus below:

Immediately, therefore, practice saying to every harsh impression: ‘You are an impression and not at all what you appear to be.’ Then, examine and test it by the rules you have, and first and foremost by this one: Is it about things that are up to us or about things that are not up to us? And if it is about any of the things that are not up to us, let this thought be ready at hand: ‘It is nothing to me.’ — Epictetus, Enchiridion, 1

Releasing our grip on troubling impressions such as “This guy is a total jerk!” can allow us to experience them with detachment. The gesture of holding the thought loosely in the open fingers of our relaxed hand, can be taken to symbolize that we could let it fall from our grasp, or pick it back up again. We have gained cognitive flexibility, by being able to treat the thought as if it were an object. We don’t have to buy into it, or even agree with it, in order to handle it with curiosity, and even playfulness, instead of rigidly gripping onto our angry thoughts and feelings.

Conclusion

I think there are several reasons why this technique appears to work well as an emotional coping strategy for anger management.

1. Unclenching the fist can be thought of simply as a gesture of “letting go”.

2. The relaxation involved in releasing the fingers can be used to counteract the physical tension involved in most anger.

3. The simplicity of the technique can allow you to feel more in control of your temper, because you have something easy that you can do to cope.

4. Introducing a novel behaviour can derail the old habits associated with getting angry.

5. Paying close attention to the tiny muscular movements can also slow down your subjective perception of time, in a way that directly counteracts the normal psychology of anger.

6. Thinking of releasing your grasp on the angry thoughts and holding them loosely in your open hand can become a way of maintaining cognitive defusion.

Let me know in the comments if you find this technique useful, and what you feel its main benefits might be.

This article describes a general framework for self-improvement that I employ in coaching. It’s based on Stoicism and third-wave cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). It’s evolved quite a lot over the years, since we first described a similar method in the original Stoic Week online course. Based on feedback from clients, I’ve added various adjustments, and made some notes that seem to help people put it into practice.

Values Clarification

In modern society, the majority of people orient their lives around external goals, such as wealth or reputation. Even people who pursue self-help tend to think in terms of outcomes, such as reducing anxiety or depression, which they hope to achieve in the future. Stoicism requires an epistrophe (conversion, literally “turning around”) or radical change of orientation in which we align our lives primarily with our core values, or the concept of virtue. This shift toward character-based values is also central to third-wave CBT, and has been found particularly beneficial in the treatment of clinical depression and certain forms of anxiety.

If you place supreme value on certain outcomes then your attention will naturally be drawn to the future, when you hope to achieve them, and away from the present moment. By placing more value on our own character than upon future outcomes we naturally ground our attention on our actions in the present moment. For that reason, I find that this “virtue ethic” perspective is essential to the goals of self-improvement, and it provides a foundation for everything that follows.

Instead of asking yourself what you want to achieve, ask yourself what sort of person you want to be. That’s similar to asking how you would define human flourishing or fulfilment (eudaimonia), which the Stoics define as the supreme goal of life. For many people that may consist in variations of the cardinal virtues (wisdom, justice/kindness, courage, temperance), or other important character traits.

I have found that self-improvement is difficult unless you have a way of tracking your progress. Rating yourself against the most important thing in life, your core values, is the best way to do this. Select the specific virtue, though, in relation to which there is the most room for improvement. Suppose you choose temperance. Ask yourself first of all how many minutes in total you invested yesterday in activities that involved exercising your temperance. Then rate yourself (0-10) for how well you exemplified temperance overall.

But, on the whole, tho’ I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it… — Ben Franklin, Autobiography

Stoic Mindfulness

Consider; if someone were to say to the eye, “See thyself,” as you might say to a man, “Know thyself,” what is the nature and meaning of this precept? — Plato, Alcibiades I

I have also found that some form of ongoing self-observation, or mindfulness, is an essential foundation for self-improvement. Otherwise, it’s common for people to practice self-improvement sometimes but then lapse into bad habits at other times. The Stoics called this continual attention to their own thoughts and actions prosoche — you could also call it Stoic Mindfulness. It is clearly impossible for mere mortals to be perfectly self-aware 100% of the time. Nevertheless, we can attempt to maintain awareness of our thoughts and actions more consistently throughout the day. When our attention wanders from our own behaviour, in a sense, it’s like taking our hands off the steering wheel of a car. We can only regain control of our lives when we are aware of how we’re behaving from moment to moment, in the here and now.

When you let your attention wander even for a little while, don’t imagine that you’ll be able to pick it up again whenever you want. Instead, keep this thought ready at hand: because of what you’ve neglected today, your affairs are necessarily going to be worse in the future. — Epictetus, Discourses, 4.12

Throughout the day, pay close attention to how your thoughts, actions, and feelings interact with one another. Observe whether your thoughts and actions are aligned with your core values, especially the one you’ve chosen to work on. Do your thoughts lead you toward greater temperance, for instance, or do they lead in the opposite direction? Seneca said that knowing that at the end of the day he would evaluate himself in relation to his supreme goal helped make him feel more accountable and motivated to pay close attention during the day.

“Practise, then, from the very beginning to say to every disagreeable impression, ‘You’re an impression and not at all what you appear to be.’ Then examine it and test it by these rules that you possess, and first and foremost by this one, whether the impression relates to those things that are within our power, or those that aren’t within our power; and if it relates to anything that isn’t within our power, be ready to reply, ‘That’s nothing to me.'” — Epictetus, Enchiridion, 1

When you encounter thoughts that create obstacles to acting in accord with your values, or which evoke troubling emotions, such as anxiety or depression, you can respond following the advice of Epictetus. Talk to the thought as if talking to a person (a strategy called apostrophizing in rhetoric). Say “You are just an impression and not at all what you appear to be” or “You are just a thought and not the whole story”. (The Greek can be taken to imply that the impression is not the whole truth about the thing it represents.) Alfred Korzybski, the founder of General Semantics, used to add the words et cetera to his thoughts to emphasize to himself, in a similar manner, that they were abstractions and not the whole truth about reality.

Think of the practice of Stoic Mindfulness itself as exemplifying your core values. perhaps even state to yourself, for instance, “I am paying attention to my thoughts because I want to develop more temperance.” Your goal is not to struggle against “bad” thoughts but rather to observe your mind from this perspective, distinguishing clearly between helpful and unhelpful ways of thinking, in relation to your core values and the goal of eudaimonia. The Dalai Lama described a similar Buddhist method that entails asking ourselves whether a thought leads us toward long-term happiness and wellbeing, or not.

Self-Evaluation

At the end of each day, before going to sleep, review your progress. First yourself from 0-10 in relation to the core value you’re working on. Then consider how you could improve your rating tomorrow.

The Stoics, and other ancient philosophers, asked themselves three questions each evening, derived from The Golden Verses of Pythagoras. These are how I tend to phrase them.

1. What did you do well in relation to your core value? (And how could you reinforce that and repeat it in the future.)

2. Where did you go wrong in relation to your core value? (And how can you address that and behave differently from now on.)

3. What else could you do in order to exercise your core value? (And when exactly are you going to do it?)

In particular, it’s essential to remember to praise yourself for even small progress, just as you would encourage a student. Of course, you must identify problems and fix them, and keep pushing yourself to make additional small changes in your behaviour that align with your values.

Activity Scheduling

Some people read self-help books and keep journals, but never change their behaviour. A good framework for self-improvement, in my experience, will emphasize commitment to change. A common obstacle to change is procrastination. We have to take the plunge to avoid this, by adopting an “experimental” attitude toward behaviour change. Start with small changes, take a “trial and error” approach, assuming that you will want to learn from and modify the tasks you are undertaking and the changes you are making to your daily routine.

Initially, I would suggest that you begin by identifying one small change or activity that aligns with the value you’re working on, which you can schedule a specific time to do tomorrow — you have to get the ball of self-improvement rolling. Think of this as a deliberate attempt to increase your self-rating score. When performing the task, make an effort to link it with your core values. At first, you should do this by actually saying to yourself, for example, “I am doing this for the sake of developing temperance”. If you want to push yourself further, repeat those words three times, before, during, and after, the task, to really strengthen the psychological link between the activity and your values.

It is often helpful to maintain a list of tasks that you could do immediately, in the near future, or every day, in accord with the core value you’re working on. Brainstorm an initial list of roughly 6-12 activities, if possible. There’s an additional step that many of my clients find extremely helpful. Go through your initial list and sort the activities into general strategies and specific tactics. Specific tactics are actionable right away, whereas to implement a general strategy you would have to come up with an example of how to put it into practice, i.e., a specific tactic that falls under that heading. For instance, “assertive communication” might be a general self-improvement strategy, whereas a specific example or tactic, that’s actionable, would be “Politely decline the next request I receive for an interview”, or “Ask my co-worker to review the draft of my presentation, even though he might not like what it says.” You can think of general strategies as subheadings, under which you can list several specific tactics, and organize a document in that way. This is helpful because some people tend to think too much in terms of general strategies, and need to be encouraged to come up with specific actionable steps that they can take. Others may come up with a number of specific tactics, which all fall under the same heading — they’re all just variations of the same general strategy. Ask yourself if you’ve overlooked a whole category of general strategies, which other people might use to exercise the value that you’re working on. This way you can fill in gaps or “blind-spots” in your self-improvement plan by identifying a more complete set of strategies and tactics.

Value-Driven External Goals

Over time, you may want to reintroduce certain external goals. You can now do this by making them subordinate to your core values. For example, you can ask yourself what goals might help you to develop more temperance, or would serve as evidence of progress in that regard. Sometimes you can work backwards by asking yourself what character traits (virtues) you would need in order to achieve your long-term goals, but be careful not to fall into the trap of making your virtues subordinate to external outcomes. Sometimes long-term goals need to be broken down into steps, or subordinate goals, achievable in the medium or short term.

Sometimes people stall at this point. So to prevent that from happening, brainstorm a list of steps you can take immediately that would constitute progress toward your goals, and which align with your core values. Schedule a specific time to take the first step, and get the ball rolling toward your goal. Remember to keep the link with your core values in mind by telling yourself, for instance, “I’m doing this because I value temperance.”

Values Clarification

Values work often begins as a sort of pen and paper exercise, with values clarification questions. In my experience, this can sometimes lead to procrastination. I invariably find that when people begin to change their behaviour, they start to redefine their values. So I would recommend adopting an experimental attitude, and beginning with a “good enough” definition of your core values, so that you can start making small changes to your daily routine.

Of course, it’s important to clarify your values. You need to know that you’re working on your true values and in the areas where you most urgently need to improve your life. The cycle of behaviour change and self-evaluation above will help you enormously in doing this. Once you’ve started using it, you can begin to focus in more depth on questions such as the following:

• What sort of person do you want to be in general, and in relation to the most important roles in your life?

• How would you define your core values? How might you explain to a child what it means to have wisdom or temperance, for example?

• How are your values related to one another? (Socrates believed all the virtues are one.)

• What would be the longer-term consequences of exhibiting more of your core values — for example, if your rating increased slightly, or went all the way up to ten out of ten?

Sometimes it’s also useful to ask yourself what traits you genuinely admire in other people. Are these qualities you could potentially value in yourself? What would happen if you behaved more like the people you most admire? Conversely, for people who struggle to articulate their values, it can sometimes help to consider the things they detest most about other people. In most cases, clients today tend to focus on politicians, and they may talk about how they can’t stand their dishonesty and hypocrisy, etc. That strong dislike implies, though, that they probably value opposing traits, such as honesty and integrity.

Examples

This routine provides a general framework for self-improvement. You can use it to enhance any specific self-help technique, and incorporate it into a broader philosophy of life, centred on developing your character, or the goal of eudaimonia. You’ll find that Stoicism and other ancient philosophies align neatly with this approach, and modern CBT can also fit within this broader perspective. Many clients have pointed out that it resembles the framework for self-improvement described by Benjamin Franklin, in his autobiography, which was also inspired by Greek philosophy, including the Golden Verses.

Let’s suppose that you consider “emotional resilience” to be a core value. (The Stoics might subsume that under “courage” or androsyne.) You might begin by reflecting on what “resilience” means and how you define it. I would encourage you to begin implementing behavioural changes sooner rather than later, though. These initial changes can be viewed as low-stakes experiments. Your foundation will be continual self-observation, noticing whether your thoughts and actions align with emotional resilience or lead you in the opposite direction. There’s potentially no point implementing specific changes if you’re underming yourself in countless other ways at other times throughout the day.

For instance, if you repeatedly tell yourself “This is awful and I can’t cope!”, throughout the day, it will be an uphill struggle to improve unless you do something to prevent these thoughts from directly undermining your resilience. First, just notice as they happen that they are in conflict with the value you place on emotional resilience. Then literally speak to them and say something like: “You are just a thought and not the whole story.” Don’t struggle to change these thoughts, just realize that they’re unhelpful and shift to viewing them from a more detached perspective, as abstractions, or representations of external events — as Korzybski put it, tell yourself that they are merely the map and not the terrain. This is essentially what we call “cognitive distancing” or “verbal defusion” in modern CBT. The goal is to firmly grasp that your troubling thought is just a thought and not a fact, so that you gain more psychological flexibility. Think of this mindfulness practice itself as an example of emotional resilience — directly linking, in your mind, the exercise to your core values.

At the end of the day, rate yourself 0-10 for emotional resilience. Perhaps also consider how many minutes you spent developing or exhibiting your emotional resilience. Then ask yourself what specifically you did well, and give yourself praise and encouragement, to reinforce your progress. Next, ask yourself if you did anything that was contrary to emotional resilience, or exhibited an unhealthy emotional vulnerability instead. Consider how you can address that problem and change your behaviour next time. Finally, ask yourself what additional activities you could have engaged in that would have exhibited or helped you to develop emotional resilience.

Activities that align with your values might include researching, practising, or exhibiting traits such as emotional resilience, and other virtues. You might, for instance, decide on researching self-help techniques, by reading a book, doing a course, or applying strategies such as relaxation techniques in practice. You would begin testing these activities out tomorrow, if possible, and evaluate your progress at the end of the day. In reality, many people find that they can improve their character by making smaller changes, such as facing their fears one at a time or tolerating discomfort for a bit longer than normal. Small changes often lead to big improvements, especially over the longer-term.

It has been my experience that gradually, over time, clients tend to shift from thinking of their values in terms of very specific activities to different perspective, which sees virtually any activity as an opportunity to exercise the virtue they’re working on. For example, facing your fears systematically, and employing relaxation skills and coping statements, might be a typical self-help approach to developing resilience. However, eventually, you may find you can brush your teeth like a resilient individual, or change your baby’s diapers, or eat cornflakes, or wait patiently in a dentist’s office, with emotional resilience. Even doing nothing while contemplating a virtue may be a way of strengthening your connection with it.

Conclusion

Never allow sleep to close your eyelids, after you went to bed,
Until you have examined all your actions of the day by your reason.
In what have I done wrong? What have I done? What have I omitted that I ought to have done?
If in this examination you find that you have done wrong, reprove yourself severely for it;
And if you have done any good, rejoice.
Practise thoroughly all these things; meditate on them well; you ought to love them with all your heart.
It is those that will put you in the way of divine virtue. — The Golden Verses

(I would change the “reprove yourself severely” part; Seneca makes it clear that we should undertake this exercise with compassion, as if advising a friend.)

The approach described in this article isn’t intended as a substitute for therapy or self-help but potentially as a generic framework that may allow you to make more systematic use of individual techniques and behavioural changes. Think of it as a yoga or way of life. If you’re interested in ancient philosophy, you’ll find this a very useful way to turn your reading into a practice.

And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. — Shakespeare, Hamlet

Worrying is a common problem. It can often be understood as a failed attempt at problem-solving. (As can worry’s more past-oriented cousin, rumination.) In many cases, people find it much easier to manage their worrying if they’re able to distinguish more clearly between helpful and unhelpful, good and bad, or healthy and unhealthy ways of thinking about problems. I sometimes call this the difference between good and bad forms of worrying or you could say it’s the difference between worrying and rational problem-solving — for our purposes, it amounts to more or less the same thing.

In this article, I’ve made some rough notes on the many differences that researchers, clinicians, and clients, have highlighted between worrying and rational problem-solving. If you want to tell apart good and bad forms of worrying, you will need to reflect on this question for yourself. The effort to notice the difference, in the real world, is crucial. You won’t get much benefit from simply being told the answers, unless you use the list of typical differences below, for instance, as a guide for self-observation. However, in some cases, it may be sufficient simply to spot one key difference that helps you to distinguish helpful from unhelpful ways of thinking. I typically ask clients to draw two columns, and list the key characteristics of good versus bad ways of thinking about problems, which they can observe in their own thinking. Here are some of the most common things that people tend to mention…

Quick Guide

Here’s a cheat sheet with a summary of a few key points.

• Emotional State: Anxious versus normal

• Self-Talk: Frantic versus calm and relaxed

• Attention: Hypothetical (future) worst-case scenario versus grounded in reality and the here and now

• Cognitive Biases: Catastrophic “What if?” thinking versus decatastrophizing “So what if?” thinking — problem seen as a threat rather than as an opportunity or challenge

• Control: Dwelling on problems (outcomes) that aren’t directly under your control versus focusing on your real locus of control (actions)

• Process: Circular, vague, and problem/question oriented versus linear, specific, and solution/answer oriented

• Social: Isolated thinking and interpersonal venting versus constructive social problem-solving and collaborative solution implementation

The article goes into these in much more detail below, and also adds many other observations.

Physiology

One of the most obvious differences, which people tend to notice first, is that morbid worrying is typically accompanied by anxiety whereas rational problem-solving is not, or at least it’s accompanied by less anxiety, and it is experienced as more manageable. Anxious arousal may be associated with various cognitive biases mentioned below. You can think of the difference in terms of two distinct “modes”, as they’re called in cognitive therapy — the normal mode versus the “threat mode” or “anxiety mode”. These are as different as being drunk versus being sober. You wouldn’t operate heavy machinery when drunk; you’d wait until you had sobered up. In the same way, you may want to postpone trying to solve complex interpersonal problems until your anxiety has abated, and you are thinking more clearly. When your brain is in the “threat mode”, associated with the fight-or-flight response, it functions differently. Problem-solving is naturally impaired and your judgment is clouded by a battery of cognitive biases, most notably catastrophizing, as we shall see below.

Worrying, paradoxically, does not always trigger the usual physiological markers of anxiety, such as significantly increased heart rate and blood pressure, or these may be present but somewhat muted compared, for example, to phobic anxiety. People report high levels of subjective anxiety but, surprisingly, their heart rate and other physiological symptoms of nervous arousal may not reflect this. One notable exception is muscular tension, which is often pronounced during episodes of worrying, especially frowning and tension in the neck and shoulders, but also sometimes in other parts of the body. The nervous arousal and muscular tension may be associated with changes in breathing, such as more rapid and shallow breathing with fewer pauses. Changes in breathing, in turn, usually lead to changes in the sound of your voice. That is, if you were to speak, you might sound worried to other people.

Paralinguistics

Almost as if they’re experiencing an internal (“covert”) version of the increased muscular tension and change in speech, worried people tend to report that their inner dialogue sounds more frantic. Their internal conversations may be more rushed. The tone of voice in their heads may be higher pitch or otherwise sound more anxious. That may go hand-in-hand with more dramatic (“histrionic”) use of language. We focus on the worst-case scenario. We might curse and use other forms of strongly emotive language, which are normally designed to provoke an emotional response from others but have a similar effect internally — when we think using anxious language we make ourselves feel more emotion. Non-anxious thinking, such as rational problem-solving, may be associated with a calmer more relaxed internal voice, slightly slower rate of speech, and less evocative, more neutral and objective use of language.

Linguistics (Rhetoric)

Worrying can be viewed as a form of rhetoric. Rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, has evolved over thousands of years as a means of using language to influence other people, often by evoking emotions such as fear and anger. Politicians and advertisers use rhetoric every day to manipulate their audiences. However, you also use rhetoric internally, in your own thoughts, in a way that evokes your own emotions. Most of the time we don’t think about our own use of language in this way but we’re continually exploiting language, unintentionally, to influence our own emotions. Swearing, exaggerating (hyperbole), generalization, selective thinking, and other features of language can contaminate our inner monologue when we’re worrying, and bias our thinking. Worrying tends to be characterized by certain verbal patterns. For instance, it often consists of a higher ratio of questions than rational problem-solving. These are often vague and lead to circular thinking, e.g., “What if this happens, what if that happens, how will I cope?” Rational problem-solving tends to use more specific questions and to proceed to try out different answers (solutions) in a more linear fashion, rather than going around in circles.

Look out for other linguistic markers of anxiety and worry. For instance, expressions of shock, surprise, and confusion are typical in anxiety but less common in rational problem-solving. You may say “WTF? I can’t believe this, how is this possible, why would anyone do this, how am I supposed to cope?” Notice that these phrases, which are often (but not always) framed as questions, tend to imply a sense of helplessness, and an inability to cope. When you sound surprised, it’s as though you’re telling yourself you have no idea how to respond, and so problem-solving tends to be derailed. When you’re thinking rationally, though, you’ll tend to view even severe problems in a more matter-of-fact way, with less surprise, and more confidence in your ability to arrive at a practical solution, or a way of coping.

Verbal Fusion

Arguably the most important factor. Worrying is typically associated with very high levels of verbal fusion (aka “cognitive fusion”). That means that we become more immersed in the content of our thoughts, as if we’re lost in thought, as if reading a novel or watching a movie, and totally engrossed in the content. Fusion and belief are closely-related but not identical. We can become highly immersed in thoughts that we know are not true or, conversely, remain detached from ones that we believe to be true. I like to compare verbal fusion to self-hypnosis. Worrying can be understood as resembling a sort of morbid or negative self-hypnosis. Our anxious thoughts dominate our mind and temporarily exclude other competing perspectives. We develop a sort of “tunnel vision” for the worst-case scenario and our catastrophic thinking. By contrast, rational problem-solving is often associated with verbal defusion (low levels of fusion) in which we retain more awareness of our thinking processes and are to observe them with greater objectivity and detachment. Rational problem-solving involves more “metacognitive awareness”, the term psychologists use to refer to our ability to think about our thinking — as if we’re watching ourselves as we think through the problem. For instance, that allows us to change the direction of our thinking of we’re not arriving at a solution, or to suspend it completely and “come back to it later” if we observe that our thinking is becoming circular and unproductive. When people are highly fused with their thoughts they lose that ability to manage the process. Their worried thoughts control them, rather than the other way around.

Focus of Attention

Worrying tends to be preoccupied with threat appraisal, or “what could go wrong”, whereas rational problem-solving is more oriented toward finding solutions. That often means that worrying is excessively (or even exclusively) future-oriented whereas rational-problem solving keeps at least one foot, as it were, in the present moment, where we have control and can take action. People who worry often seem distracted or lost in thought, right? That’s a sign that their attention is focused elsewhere. They’re not grounded in the present moment, nor are they mindful of their own actions. Instead, their attention has become narrowed in scope and rigidly absorbed in the content of their thoughts, they particularly tend to focus their attention more than normal on the worst-case scenario. By contrast, in rational problem-solving you will often retain more self-awareness, and may continue to be aware of the present moment and your surroundings.

Worry, like anxious thought in general, tends to be focused on the future, such as thoughts about something bad happening. You could say worry is preoccupied with the realm of hypothetical future problems, or the imminent consequences of real problems. It’s not grounded in the present moment, although that’s where your thinking takes place. Shifting attention back to the present moment has long been observed to be antagonistic to worrying. Grounding your attention in the here and now can snap you out of the trance of worry, as it were. Of course, you may still have real problems to solve but doing so with at least partial attention to the here and now, dividing your attention somewhat between the present and the future, can prevent you from becoming too lost in thought, and allows you to retain more control over your thought processes. It also tends to mean that you’re remain more aware of the passage of time, whereas, as we’ll see, losing track of time is often a key marker for worrying.

Cognitive Biases

When your brain is in “threat mode”, your body is tense, and your fight-or-flight response is activated, various cognitive “schemas”, or deep-seated beliefs and attitudes, will tend to be activated. Your thinking will be profoundly biased in this state of mind, on several different levels. This is obvious when you observe other people who are highly worried — they’re clearly not thinking straight, right? When you worry, though, you’re probably less able to notice how biased your thinking has become. We all tend to have a pronounced blind-spot for our own cognitive biases, especially during episodes of intense worrying.

Catastrophizing is the most obvious cognitive bias in worrying, and, indeed, in most anxiety. Catastrophic thoughts tend to exaggerate the probability and severity of a perceived threat, and also to underestimate your coping ability. It’s as though you’re repeatedly thinking: “Something awful is about to happen and I have no idea how I’m going to handle it!” You can also describe this as the activation of schemas associated with vulnerability and helplessness — deep feelings of being overwhelmed unable to cope are triggered. Rational problem-solving judges threats more objectively, which usually means appraising their probability and/or severity in more realistic terms, and your coping ability in more positive terms. A simple way of putting this is that rational problem-solvers often view problems more as challenges or opportunities than as threats. Arnold Lazarus, one of the pioneers of behavior therapy, used to say that decatastrophizing is about turning “What if?” thinking into “So what if?” thinking.

We can also understand catastrophizing as a tendency to focus excessively on the worst-case scenario. By contrast, rational problem-solving may acknowledge the worst-case scenario, and attempt to manage severe risks, even if they’re unlikely to happen, but then it will usually shift focus on to preparing for the most likely scenario, rather than remaining stuck on the worst that could happen. Once you begin to focus on the worst-case scenario, because it typically activates the threat mode, it can capture your attention and prevent you from being able to focus more realistically on the most-likely outcome, if you’re not careful. So it takes a certain degree of self-awareness (metacognitive awareness) to prevent thoughts about severe threats from turning into morbid worrying.

Many other cognitive biases tend to be associated with worrying. For instance, there’s often pronounced selective thinking, which focuses on signs of danger, and ignores or dismisses potential evidence of safety, or your ability to cope. As we’ll see, selective thinking can also be used to explain the typical pattern of mental imagery found in worrying. When we worry, we’re not telling ourselves the whole story. We also tend to to make unfounded assumptions when worrying, such as jumping to conclusions prematurely about what will happen in the future (“fortune telling”) or what other people may think or feel (“mind reading”). Worrying is also characterized by overgeneralization, such as thinking that bad things “always” happen or that things “never” work out in a good way. Rational problem-solving, of course, tends to exhibit fewer of these errors. It’s not necessarily that these errors are completely absent, when we’re thinking more clearly, but rather that we notice them and realize that they’re distortions — we are able to see through them.

Mental Imagery

Worrying tends to be highly verbal and cognitive compared to other forms of anxiety. It’s often therefore more vague and abstract, which may be partly why it is circular. We ask vague questions and fail to come up with answers: What if this happens, what if that happens, how will I cope? Rational problem-solving tends to be more specific — actually it moves more systematically between abstract and concrete levels of thinking. Because it is more specific, rational problem-solving is often more visually oriented. In our mind’s eye, when problem-solving, we picture specific problems, in specific situations, and imagine specific ways of coping, and their likely consequences. Mental imagery in worrying tends to focus specifically on the most anxiety-provoking aspect of a problem, such as the worst moments of the worst-case scenario. We get stuck on repeat, going over and over that clip from different perspectives. You may also notice that threats are perceived as escalating very quickly when you worry about them, which contributes to the feeling of being overwhelmed. By contrast, when thinking rationally, we may picture threats escalating more slowly, which gives us more opportunity to imagine taking preventative action. We may also move past the worst moments and picture the aftermath, and how we would cope with the consequences, recover, and move on. Imagine asking yourself: “So what if the worst happens? What would probably happen next? And then what would probably happen? And then what?” If necessary, focus specifically on how you would cope if you were acting wisely, or in accord with your core values, even if the worst did happen.

Worrying is like a horror movie about our own lives where we constantly replay a “jump scare” moment, rather than allowing the movie to continue to a conclusion where the threat is eventually resolved. Think of the visual aspect of worrying as if it is a movie that you are editing. Why would you choose to visualise the problem in the least helpful and most anxiety-provoking way possible? Edit your inner movie, instead, in a way that allows you to see the lead-up to the problem, the peak, and then how you would cope, and move forward in life. In fact, many people find that simply reminding themselves to keep moving the mental imagery forward is sufficient to derail worries and turn them into rational problem-solving instead.

Control

Unproductive worrying tends to focus on aspects of a problem that are not under your direct control. That’s one of the reasons that it tends to be circular and ro go on for long periods, without arriving at a practical conclusion. By contrast, productive worrying tends to focus on your locus of control. Excessive focus on aspects of the problem over which we have little or not control fuels the sense of futility, frustration and helplessness that tends to accompany worrying. People who worry often complain of feeling “overwhelmed” by problems and this is probably related to their poor appraisal of their own coping ability and sense of helplessness. In fact, often the only means of coping of which a worrier can think is to continue worrying.

Another striking feature of unhealthy worrying is that it tends to be strongly associated with low appraisals of control over the process of worrying itself. In other words, the more unhealthy your worry, the more you are likely to believe that it is uncontrollable or spiralling out of control. People who see their worry as under their control are more likely to think about problems in a rational and constructive way. It comes as a surprise to many people to discover that worrying generally consists of voluntary thought processes. To be more precise, worry is often instigated by an automatic anxious thought, which is not under our control. It may just pop into your mind spontaneously or be triggered by something you notice in your environment. What happens next, however, largely consists of voluntary thinking, taking the form of a sort of conversation you have with yourself, that constitutes the work of worrying. Turning unhealthy into healthy worrying typically depends on the realization that, even if the initial catastrophic thought is automatic, the subsequent process of worrying is largely, or at least potentially, under your voluntary control.

Avoidance

Worrying is invariably contaminated with avoidance. Most obviously, it often leads to procrastination, delays, and avoidance of tackling problems, by implementing solutions, or sometimes even attempts to avoid thinking about certain problems. People who worry often vacillate between two extremes, either dwelling too much on problems, by worrying about them unproductively for hours, or trying to avoid thinking about them altogether, because they have come to feel overwhelming and unbearable. Tom Borkovec, one of the leading researchers on the psychology of worry, introduced the influential “cognitive avoidance” theory of worry. Based on various scientific findings, this maintains that, paradoxically, worrying about a problem, although it feels like a way of confronting it, actually functions as a subtle form of avoidance. When we worry, we often dupe ourselves into thinking that we are facing our fears, and problem-solving, when, in fact, we’re skirting around the issues, skipping from one aspect to another haphazardly, and sneakily distracting ourselves from the real work of solving the problem. It’s fake problem-solving, in a sense, whereby we create the appearance, in our minds, that we’re doing something constructive, when, in reality, we’re just procrastinating internally, by thinking about things in a vague and unhelpful way, that maintains chronic anxiety without ever resolving the issues causing it.

Rational-problem solving, on the other hand, does not avoid problems or procrastinate about them. It tackles them systematically and in a timely manner, without dwelling on them excessively. It focuses on the true cause of our problem, in a pragmatic way, and thinks through potential solutions, testing them out in our mind, and planning how to put them into practice and evaluate them. Rational-problem solving, therefore, does not get stuck at the “analysis” stage but proceeds to actually implement solutions. Anxiety causes us to revert to dichotomous “all-or-nothing” thinking, which leads to perfectionism — we must get the perfect solution before we can do anything. That invariably leads to paralysis. True problem-solving usually involves an experimental attitude, and a willingness to engage in trial-and-error learning. Rational problem-solving typically arrives at “good enough” solutions, and then tests them out in practice, adapting them, and improving them, until the problem is solved. Worrying is scared to do that, and goes round in circles, stuck in “pen and paper” thinking, chasing after a perfect solution, which it never finds. It gets stuck in a rut, and goes round in circles, because excessive focus on the worst-case scenario has made us too afraid to test out “good enough” solutions in practice, and that fear inevitably leads to ongoing avoidance and procrastination.

Perfectionism, and fear of failure, are related to “intolerance of uncertainty”, another trait that researchers have linked with worry and procrastination. Learning to accept a degree of uncertainty, and take manageable risks, is essential for rational problem-solving. We can’t usually wait for absolute certainty before taking action. That means we must learn to tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity, within reason.

Duration

Healthy problem-solving tends to take less time, partly because it’s less circular and you’re more able to pause, set it aside, if you observe that you’re not arriving at a conclusion. Unhealthy worrying can go on for hours. You might find yourself still awake at 3 or 4am lying in bed worrying about some problem. One of the most striking markers of unhealthy worrying is that we tend to lose track of time. When thinking about things rationally we tend to remain more aware of the passage of time, because we’re less fused with the content of our thoughts.

Conclusion

Finally, I would add that worrying tends to be overly-preoccupied with external outcomes, which are by their nature located in the future, and are not entirely under our control. Placing too much emphasis on that sort of outcome orientation naturally fuels our anxiety. Rational problem-solving, by contrast, often pays more attention to our core values, particularly insofar as they relate to character traits, such as wisdom, integrity, fairness, compassion, endurance, self-discipline, and so on. Those qualities exist in the present moment, and naturally orient our awareness more toward mindfulness grounded in the here and now, bringing many of the benefits already mentioned above. Ask yourself, for instance, whether worrying about your problems is that’s aligned with your core values and the type of person you want to be. How would you approach solving your problems, then, if you were acting in accord with your core values?

For an added bonus, you may also notice that there are pronounced interpersonal differences between worrying and problem-solving. Worrying tends to be primarily a solitary pursuit, although when overwhelmed we may seek to reduce anxiety by venting or seeking reassurance from others — both subtle avoidance strategies. By contrast, rational problem-solving, although it can be solitary, is more likely to engage in healthy interpersonal behaviour, such as consulting experts, eliciting practical support from other people, brainstorming ideas together, and so on. Two heads are better than one, as the saying goes, so good problem-solvers tend to be adept at making use of social support and appropriate input from other people.

These are just some of the most obvious differences between bad worrying and good worrying, or, if you prefer, between worrying and rational problem-solving. It’s important that you observe your own behaviour and try to clearly differentiate between the signs of unhealthy and healthy thinking about problems in your own case. You may spot some of these stereotypical differences but perhaps not all of them apply to you. You may well notice other signs, closely related to these, or perhaps completely unique to your own thinking and behaviour.