The chat on Thursday

Here's an example. On Friday afternoon your manager stops at your desk and says, "Can we have a quick chat on Thursday? Nothing urgent." Then she goes to a meeting and you go home for the weekend.

By Sunday evening you've had the chat about thirty times. In most versions it's about the report that went out late in March. In some it's redundancy, because there was that email about costs. You've worked out what you'd say, and what she'd say back, and how your voice would sound. You've got as far as telling your partner you've lost your job, and working out how long the savings would last. You were at your nephew's birthday on Saturday, and you couldn't now say what was in the sandwiches.

On Thursday she asks whether you'd mind covering for someone in the Leeds office for two days in June.

If that's familiar, you'll also know what came next. There was a wave of relief, and you felt a bit foolish for an hour. Then, by Thursday evening, something else had moved into the space. It might have been the noise the boiler has started making, or your daughter driving back on the motorway late on Sunday. The worry about the chat had gone, and the worrying carried on with a new subject.

That last detail is the one I'd like you to keep hold of. If worrying were caused by the things you worry about, it would stop when they were settled. It doesn't. It moves on to something else. That's the first sign that we're dealing with a habit and not with a series of unrelated emergencies.

So I want to split two things that usually travel under one name.

The first is the concern. Your manager might be unhappy with you, the boiler might be on its way out, and motorways at night do carry some risk. Concerns like these are often quite reasonable, and a person with none would be careless. This book has no quarrel with your concerns.

The second is the worrying, which is what you do with a concern once you've got it. You run the scene, then run it again with a small change, then follow it three steps further into a future that depends on three things all going wrong. It's done mostly in words, as a conversation with yourself, and it usually opens with "what if". It doesn't reach an end, only a pause when something interrupts it.

A concern is a fact about your situation, whereas worrying is an activity that takes time and attention, like any other. It can be done for five minutes or for five days over exactly the same concern. How much of it you do has very little to do with how serious the concern is, and I'd guess you've noticed that yourself. You've probably lost a weekend to something trivial, and you've probably been oddly calm about something serious.

From here on I'll call one spell of this, from the first "what if" to the point where something breaks it off, a round. The Sunday evening in the example was one long round, made up of many shorter ones.

I should say what I'm not claiming. I don't think you're weak or irrational. Worrying is an ordinary human activity, and the people who do a lot of it are often the conscientious ones who get things done. I'm also not saying the future is safe, because it isn't, and some of what you fear will happen to you, as it does to everyone. My claim is only about the rounds. I think they give you much less than they seem to, that they cost more than you've counted, and that the useful part of them can be had in a few minutes with a pen.

Before the next chapter, do one small thing. Write down three things you're worried about at the moment. Write each as a prediction that could turn out true or false, with a date. "My manager will criticise my work on Thursday" is a prediction. "What if work goes badly" isn't, because nothing could ever prove it wrong. Put the piece of paper somewhere you'll find it again. We'll come back to it.