Keeping Your Head After Losing Your Job (19 page)

Finally, there is nothing better at times than a supportive and objective friend. You don’t want your partner to become the only source of support. Think about supportive, kind, understanding, and objective people, then see if you can share your experience with them. Don’t overload them with complaints, but edit what you say while balancing it with an honest expression of your thoughts and feelings. I always think that if you are going to talk about a problem with a friend, be ready to talk about a solution that you are willing to consider. My friends have talked to me about a lot of problems, and I feel honored to be helpful to them. That’s what friends are for.

9

STOP WORRYING: LIVE FOR NOW

Brian worries every day about whether he will get a job. “I get up in the morning, and I think, ‘I have nothing to do.’ I feel I am waiting for the ‘work day’ to end—so I can act like I am a normal person who has a job. I hide in my apartment. I worry about how long it will take me to get a job. When will this agony end? When will I be able to move on? It’s like I am waiting every hour of the day, every day. And I just don’t know when it will happen. I feel I am waiting to live my life again.” Karen feels the same way. But she also says, “I just can’t stand not knowing when I will get a job. I really feel I need to know right now. This uncertainty is killing me.” Both Brian and Karen are waiting for life to start again, worried about the future, unable to enjoy their present life. They feel as if they are killing time until they can get on with living. They are in purgatory, waiting to be released.

If you are like a lot of unemployed people, you are a worrier. What do we mean by “worry”? You can think about your worry as repetitive negative thoughts about the future. It’s not simply one thought, “Perhaps I won’t get a job,” it’s the same thought—or group of thoughts—repeated over and over. Your thoughts might sound like this: “When will I get a job? I wonder how long it’s going to take. What will I do until then? I can’t believe I’m in this situation. Will it take another month? Three months? A year? What if I never get a job? How am I going to live?”

These thoughts seem intrusive to you—they are unwanted, barging in on your mind at any time of the day or night. You try to respond to them, and answer them, but eventually you try to suppress them. You are struggling with these thoughts, thinking that you have to get rid of them. You think that because you don’t have the answer, you need to worry until you do. Because you are dealing with worries about the future you have less ability to concentrate, less energy and focus on solving problems today and less of an experience of your life in the present moment. When you sit down to read something, you find these thoughts impinging on you. “How can I read when I am so worried about the future?” You might even have these thoughts while reading this book: “I can’t concentrate on what he’s saying. I keep thinking about what might happen. How will this get me a job?”

Worrying: your fears about the future

In Chapter Five I described how rumination works. This is when you go over past events in your head, trying to make sense of what has happened. But you may also be deeply concerned about the future and worry about it in the same way. This chapter explains what you may be going through. Your worries about the future are perfectly natural, but you can also ask yourself if you are spending too much time with your worries and whether you are giving them too much importance. For example, you are spending too much time with your worries if you find yourself worried at all hours of the day and night, have difficulty sleeping because you are worried, can’t enjoy your present life because of worries, or if you get anxious or depressed when you are worrying. You may go to bed with your worries in your head and have difficulty falling asleep. You may wake in the middle of the night and think, “I need to know when I am going to get a job.” Brian had debilitating insomnia; he couldn’t sleep, beset with these worries almost every night. He couldn’t just surrender to sleep because he had to know what the future will be.

Your worries may be repetitive negative thoughts that keep coming back—the same thoughts over and over. You find yourself hijacked by these thoughts—as if you experience your worries as an intrusive visitor that you are required to spend time with. You think, “Will I ever get a job?” and then you can’t seem to just set this thought aside and do other things. You are pulled into the thought, residing in it, trying to answer it, and trying to make sure that you have covered every possibility of how things could turn out. You feel your worries are ordering you around—as if they appear and then you have to do something. You feel responsible to your worries: “I think I might not get a job, and then I think I have to make sure that I work out how I will absolutely get a job.” It’s as if your worries are like a fishing pole: the worry is the bait, you grab onto it, and the worry pulls you in all directions.

Your attempts at removing the worry

Sometimes you try to suppress these worries, saying to yourself, “I am not going to think about it.” But that doesn’t work for very long. Perhaps a few minutes pass by and then the worry pops up again. You think this means that your mind is out of control, you can never set this aside, never get away. You think, “I need to get these worries out of my head, stop worrying, I need to stop it immediately.” But this doesn’t work, which just convinces you that you are out of control and need to get more control. So you worry that you don’t have control of your thinking. You try yelling at yourself, perhaps silently in your head, “Stop this worry,” and that just makes you feel more frustrated.

What can you do?

In a similar way that we dealt with rumination, in this chapter we will look at how your worry makes sense to you, what you are trying to accomplish with your worry, and whether it is working. When you worry, you are living in the future—and it’s the most negative future that you can imagine. So understanding your motivation to worry—and whether it is really accomplishing anything—is essential. We will also look at the costs to you of worry—what it keeps you from doing or experiencing. Worry is an escape from the present moment. You can either worry or live your life now. We will also examine the benefits of accepting uncertainty and relinquishing some control—over the things you cannot know now or control now. Your worry about your job prospects may also have a sense of urgency—that you need to know
right now
.

Do you really have a choice when it comes to your worries about the future? Are there any really effective ways to set aside this nightmare of the future? The answer is “Yes!” There are things you can do that will allow you to live more in the moment and let the future take care of itself.

In contrast to the way you worked on problems with rumination about past events, we will examine alternative ways to think about time—especially the possibility of both stretching time and living in the present moment. There are alternatives to worrying about the future—and you can begin your new approach to your worry today—right now—by recognizing that you actually have a choice. You can spend time with your worries—locked in combat with your mind—or you can spend time living your life. We will see how this is possible. It’s a way of taking your life back, a way for you to live for the Now rather than suffering about what could happen in the future.

Let’s turn to what you think your worry will do for you.

1: How does your worry make sense to you?

Like a lot of worriers, you may treat your thoughts as if they are facts. Brian said, “I keep thinking I won’t get a job, so the more I think it, the more likely it seems that I won’t get a job.” Predictions are not facts. You can predict a lot of things—floods, winning the lottery, planes crashing, a beautiful or handsome movie star falling in love with you, levitating above the couch in your house, becoming a homeless person, turning into a vampire—but these predictions, no matter how often you make them, don’t always become facts. Don’t believe everything you think, don’t count on everything that you predict. Since almost everyone eventually gets a job—if they are willing to look, willing to give it some time and willing to be flexible—your worries about never getting a job are predictions that may never come true.

On the other hand, facts and thoughts are different. You can have the same negative prediction a thousand times but the job market doesn’t revolve around your mind. It has a reality of its own. Getting a job or not getting a job is different from worries about jobs. Thoughts are not facts.

Needing to know now

The problem is that you want the answer immediately. You demand it: “I just have to know!!!” Both Brian and Karen are like a lot of people who are out of work—they worry about the future; they think that if they don’t know right now about how things will turn out, they can’t enjoy their lives. They have a sense of urgency about knowing, and they seem to predict the worst. It’s hard being unemployed if you think you need to know right now, since your mind gets stuck on trying to work out what is going to happen. The more you think about it, the worse you feel. And the more you demand certainty right now, the more helpless and frustrated you feel.

You may think that worrying makes sense. After all, you don’t have a job and you don’t know when you will get one. So you probably think, “Of course I worry. What else am I supposed to do?” You may think, “I have to worry, I have no choice.” If you are a worrier about your future job and financial prospects you probably have a number of thoughts about your worry. Ask yourself if any of these seem to fit the way you think:

•
I can’t help myself from worrying.

•
My worry prepares me for the future.

•
I need to worry so I won’t be surprised.

•
My worry will motivate me to help myself and solve problems.

•
Worry is a sign of responsibility.

•
I pay attention to my thoughts.

•
I find my mind so busy I can’t concentrate or pay attention to other things.

•
It’s hard to remember all the things I need to remember.

Let’s take each of these thoughts and see if they are true:

“
I can’t help myself from worrying
”
implies that if a negative thought appears at the doorstep of your mind, then you have to engage with it, answer it, control it, or suppress it. Brian said, “I don’t understand what you mean by saying that I have a choice. When the worry comes to me, I don’t have any choice. It’s just there. I can’t escape from it.” This makes sense to a lot of worriers, but it’s actually not true.

I said to Brian: “Let’s say you are worried about getting a job and your wife walks in and tells you there is a call from your brother. Do you say to her, ‘Tell him to call back. I am busy worrying’?” Brian immediately realized that almost anything could interrupt his worry, including any distraction that he could imagine. “So if a phone call can interrupt your worry, then it means that you have a choice as to where you put your thinking.”

“
My worry prepares me for the future
”:
Does it really? Researchers have found that 85% of the things that we worry about never happen. And 79% of the time worriers say that they handle things better than they thought they would. You prepare yourself for a future that never happens and you underestimate your ability to cope with real problems when they do happen.

Shift your attention

I suggested that one of the ways of thinking about worry is that it all depends on where you want to place your attention. “Look around the office here and tell me how many objects are blue.” Brian looked around, described the color of some book covers and some paintings. “Now, you have immediately shifted your attention to other things in the room—and your worry came to a standstill. We call this “attention deployment,” which is simply another way of saying that you are able to shift your attention, and you probably remember that we did a similar exercise in Chapter Five to deal with rumination.

Make a time for worrying

Attention deployment is important because one of the techniques that you can use to put worry in its place is to delay the worry to another time during the day in the same way that you allocated a time for rumination in Chapter Five. For example, let’s say that you notice that you are worried at all hours of the day and night. The worry pops up and your mind is hijacked. But you don’t have to be hijacked at that moment. You can decide to worry at another time. You can set up a time—every day—to focus on your worry—I call this “worry time.” You can make an appointment with these worries. So if you find yourself worried at 10:00 in the morning or 12:00 at night, you can set it aside, write it down, and have an appointment at 4:30 in the afternoon.

This means that you can then direct your attention to something positive or neutral in the current moment. You can redirect your attention to listening to music, doing some chores, looking at the sky, taking a walk, playing with your dog or cat, or getting something done. Worry time is a very simple, very powerful technique. You might think, “I can’t set worry aside.” Try it for a week and see if you can. You might surprise yourself.

Brian used the worry-time approach. Initially, he said, “Are you kidding me? How can I set aside my worry?” I urged him to give it a try, experiment with worry time, see what he could do with it. He tried it. He would write down the worry when it occurred and set it aside until later. This helped him significantly with his insomnia. He could say, “I will get round to the worry tomorrow.”

Why you may feel it is right to worry

You may think that worry is a way to avoid surprise, get motivated, be prepared, or that it is a sign of your responsibility—“
I need to worry so I won’t be surprised
” and “
Worry is a sign of responsibility.
” It’s good to be prepared and good to be responsible, but is your worry the best way to accomplish these goals? Let’s take the issue of being prepared. Prepared for what? You might say, “Being out of work for a long time.” OK, that’s a good thing to be prepared for. But rather than worry about it—repetitive negative thoughts haunting you over and over—you might take some action to be prepared. This might include budgeting, acquiring new job skills, networking, exploring job options that are not as lucrative or that require your moving elsewhere. These are actions that are productive, need planning, and are practical. But worry is just a lot of useless repetitive negative thinking.

Let’s take another set of thoughts or experiences that you have about your worry—“
I pay attention to my thoughts
”, “
I find my mind so busy I can’t concentrate or pay attention to other things
”, “
It’s hard to remember all the things I need to remember
.” Your worries about future job prospects means that you are spending a lot of time scanning your thoughts, examining what is going on inside you (feelings, thoughts, images, memories), and trying to keep track of all this noise at all hours of the day. It’s like your mind is a radio station, lots of channels shifting back and forth, and lots of static.