Warrior or worrier?
I have learnt from patients and my own experience that you often have to be both at the same time - and it can be downright confusing.
I have so many patients with anxiety. And whatever the reason one of their biggest stresses is often having to “act as if”.
I don’t think I am predisposed to worrying or anxiety, but having grown up in a home with two parents who made worrying a favoured pastime, it’s hard for me not to occasionally model their behaviours.
It’s safe to say that people who like to worry can spin a narrative on things easily, by catastrophising, whereas the optimistic glass half-full folk do the opposite. If you’re one or the other you’ll almost certainly recognise it in yourself. Generic factors, life experiences and learned attitudes to risk all play a part.
I remember going to a wedding in Wembley over 20 years ago and a fellow guest’s then husband, who was full of beans, (forget glass half full, this guy was ‘glass spilling over the brim’), decided he wasn’t paying for on-street parking.
Wembley has always been notorious for parking fees and fines, so there was no way was I going to take that risk - I’d worry too much about getting a ticket.
His reasoning was suspect. It must have been 29 degrees that day in the height of summer. “Well the traffic wardens are all gonna be in their gardens having a barbecue or on their way to Brighton or Poole surely? They’re not gonna be out here working in weather like this!”
Hmmm… I wasn’t so sure. I was definitely more worrier than warrior in that situation but it was of little consequence. The stakes were low.
But recently I started to think about instances where one needs both - where you end up straddling both warrior and worrier.
I’ve had this several times in my life and I used to find it really stressful.
When my dad died, a few of his friends said to me “Be strong for your mum…”. On the inside I was grieving hard, but outside there was a need to step up to a new level of “warrior”. Plus the people imparting this advice had all been through it. But it felt it was a hard task as everyone’s grief is different. They were not the words I wanted to hear at the time
Grief is one thing but another family related instance of warrior and worrier many come across is faking that you’re not scared in front of your children. This isn’t anything to do with masking vulnerability, more an attempt to not stick your own maladaptive learned behaviours on your children. Walking calmly past the barking dog, not overreacting to the big spider in the bathtub and being calm when they’re ill themselves and you’re worried about them, all require some duality of thinking and acting as if, or playing it cool.
In the world of behavioural psychology “acting as if” is used specifically for anxiety as kind of therapeutic override mechanism. Then there’s flooding therapy where one exposes themselves to an anxiety trigger. A friend had this when someone pushed him on to a tube train to get over his travel phobia. It worked for him thankfully.
But each day being warrior and worrier simultaneously is actually quite common. Think of it as a slow motion version of fight or flight but that you’re able to choose a response.
My personal way of handling this? Usually I go by instinct in these situations, but if a threshold is exceeded (fear, anger, uncertainty or plain old worry) then I do this:
I observe my thoughts and feelings at the time so I literally get out of my head (something called metacognition) and acknowledge that I am feeling stressed or uncomfortable. This alone is so helpful.
I take a few seconds to compose myself.
Then I ‘act as if’, and if stuck I think about people I know who are particularly calm and rational in certain settings - usually different people for each one. “What would my friend X do in this situation?”
The truth is that emotional regulation can take a fair bit of work.
Many a time I’ve been with someone who was silently having a mini panic attack, so paralysed with anxiety, not playing it cool, only for them to disclose how awful they felt afterwards.
Warrior and worrier are like yin and yang. There would be no balance if we were always one and not the other, and the challenge is achieving that very balance itself, without burning out.
As for Wembley, it turned out my friend’s husband was right. He got away with no parking ticket and a big smile, but I know I made the right decision at the time for me.