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For many people worrying is a distressing activity. The distress it causes stems from a number of factors. As I discuss in my recent book on anxiety, worrying can often seem uncontrollable: we can’t stop it starting, it seems to make our worries worse rather than better, and we can’t seem to switch it off[1].
So for many people, why doesn’t worry have an off switch? Let’s start with an interesting example. Who would you most trust to do an important task properly that requires a lot of attention to detail? Someone in a happy, positive mood, or someone in a negative mood who’s stressed, sad, or just plain angry?
Well, it depends on the nature of the task. People in a positive mood are better at creative tasks, while people in negative moods perform better on analytical tasks. For example, psychologist Jeffery Melton at Indiana University gave a group of 60 undergraduate students a series of logistical syllogisms to solve (puzzles of the kind “If all A are B, and some B are C, how many of A are C?”). Before tackling these puzzles, half the participants were made happy and amused by reading Far Side cartoons or listening to a tape of comedian Rodney Dangerfield, the other half acted as a control condition and read only a boring set of adjectives. Positive mood participants performed significantly worse on the syllogisms than the control participants, they took less time on the task, used fewer diagrams to help them solve the problems, and gave riskier ‘all’ or ‘none’ answers[2].
This isn’t simply about positive mood impairing analytical performance. Negative mood itself actually facilitates performance on tasks with an analytical element that requires systematic processing of individual elements in order to solve the problem. Joseph Forgas and Rebekah East from the University of New South Wales divided 117 student participants into three groups. Those in the positive mood group watched an excerpt from a British comedy series, those in the neutral mood group watched a nature documentary, and those in the negative mood group watched an edited excerpt from a film about dying of cancer. They were then asked to watch deceptive or truthful interviews with individuals who denied committing a theft. Those in the negative mood group were the most accurate in detecting deceptive communications, and those in the positive group were most trusting and gullible[3]. The general view seems to be that this kind of effect occurs because negative mood makes us process information in a more detailed, systematic way, whereas positive mood tends to make us take shortcuts in our analytical thinking by using ‘heuristics’ and stereotypes. A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows us to solve problems and make judgments quickly. For example, imagine you’ve just met a little old lady in the street who’s asked you to lend her some money. If you’re in a negative mood, you’re more likely to systematically analyze as much information about her as you can before deciding to trust her. However, if you’re in a positive mood, you’re more likely to use a heuristic. For instance, she may remind you of your grandmother, so you might immediately assume she’s kind, gentle and trustworthy. The heuristic allows you to take an analytical shortcut and make a decision quickly – but it may be the wrong decision!
What’s all this got to do with worry? Well, quite a lot. Most chronic or pathological worrying occurs while we’re in a negative mood. We may be stressed, anxious, sad, tired, in pain … or even hung over! That negative mood has a lot to answer for. It contributes to perseverant worrying in a number of different ways and helps to make our worry seem uncontrollable. First, as we’ve already noted, negative mood activates a systematic form of information processing which simply isn’t going to allow you to use shortcuts to come to conclusions about your worry. You’re going to have to go through everything - fact by fact, scenario by scenario, catastrophic outcome by catastrophic outcome! To support this view of worrying as a form of systematic information processing, the two appear to share similar functional brain characteristics. Systematic processing appears to be supported by functionally distinct brain processes located in the left frontal lobes, and studies have reported evidence that increases in worrying are also associated with increased left hemisphere activation. This is consistent with systematic processing and worrisome thought both being predominantly left hemisphere activities involved in the systematic, verbal processing of information[4].
Secondly, negative mood states are associated with increased performance standards – they make you more determined to achieve your goals successfully. Walter Scott and Daniel Cervone from the University of Wyoming divided undergraduate students into either a negative or a neutral mood condition by asking them to listen to an audiotape – in the negative condition they were instructed to imagine a scenario in which their best friend was dying of cancer, in the neutral scenario they were instructed to imagine visualizing their room at home. After this, all participants were asked to complete an irrelevant task in which they had to rate the meanings of presented words. But the real purpose of the study was contained in a questionnaire consisting of four items that had participants rate the minimum standard of performance with which they would be satisfied across a range of tasks (e.g. “given your GPA for this semester, what is the minimal level of performance you’d have to get this semester to be satisfied with how you’d done?”). As expected, the negative mood group had a higher minimal standard of performance than the neutral group.
This has a number of consequences for worriers who are in a negative mood. Once your criteria for successful worrying have been raised by your negative mood, this will extend the length of the worry bout until you feel satisfied that those more stringent criteria have been met. Sadly, these more stringent criteria for successful worrying are often never met, leading to ever more lengthy bouts of worrying in order to try and reach the unreachable. This is negative mood instilling the worry process with a hefty dose of perfectionism by raising minimum standards for successful worrying – and we know that perfectionism is very closely linked to both chronic worrying and GAD symptoms[5].
All of these effects of negative mood, of course, occur out of conscious awareness – otherwise we might be able to simply tell ourselves to stop worrying and that would be the end of it! But chronic worriers practice their art a lot. So much that most of the cognitive processes involved in worrying occur automatically, and once a threat or challenge is identified, these prime well-rehearsed and habitual goal-directed worrying in an automatic fashion[6].
Finally, negative mood has one last and unexpected card to play in generating perseverative worry that feels uncontrollable. The aim of most worrying is to cover all eventualities and find solutions that’ll deal with our upcoming problems. But how do we decide if we’ve achieved this goal? This can be the real killer because chronic worriers tend to have poor problem-solving confidence, so this makes it hard to find objective, evidence-based reasons to believe we’ve achieved our problem-solving goals. So what happens when people find it hard to find objective reasons to make a decision? – Yes, you guessed it, they default to their current mood! Positive mood suggests we’ve achieved our goals, negative mood suggests we haven’t (even if the reasons for us experiencing those moods have nothing to do with our worry). Since chronic worriers regularly undertake their worrying in negative mood, this mood state is effectively telling them “no you haven’t achieved your worry goals yet – so keep on worrying!” Be clear - this is not a conscious process! We regularly make decisions about the success of an activity based on our current mood, and we do it automatically, and worrying is no exception to this. We all worry in a negative mood – often with the purpose of alleviating those negative feelings of anxiety and stress – but our negative mood keeps insisting we haven’t achieved that goal so we need to keep fretting away. It’s a vicious cycle that’s difficult to break out of, it perpetuates our worrying, and it takes the whole process out of our conscious control.
So, what can you do to try and prevent your worrying taking you over in this way? Since your negative mood plays such an important role in making you worry for longer, finding ways to raise your mood will be important. Usually such methods are relatively simple and often easily implemented wherever you might be and whatever you’re doing, and some examples can be found here[7].
[1]Davey GCL (2018) The Anxiety Epidemic. Robinsons
[2]Melton RJ (1995) The role of positive affect in syllogism performance. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 788-794.
[3]Forgas JP & East R (2008) On being happy and gullible: Mood effects on skepticism and the detection of deception. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 1362-1367.
[4]Dash SR, Meeten F & Davey GCL (2013) Systematic information processing style and perseverative worry. Clinical Psychology Review, 33, 1041-1056.
[5]Pratt P, Tallis F, Eysenck M (1997). Information-processing, storage characteristics and worry. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 35(11), 1015–1023.
[6]Davey GCL & Meeten F (2016) The perseverative worry bout: A review of cognitive, affective and motivational factors that contribute to worry perseveration. Biological Psychology, 121, 233-243.
[7]Davey GCL (2018) The Anxiety Epidemic. Robinsons.
