"I've always been a worrier"

"I'm a born worrier. My mum was the same, and her mum. It's just how I'm made."

Part of this is true and I'll say so plainly. People differ in temperament from early in life, and some are more easily alarmed than others. Anxiety problems run in families, and studies of twins put roughly a third of the difference between people down to genes. Children also pick up a good deal from watching an anxious parent. If you come from a line of worriers, you probably do have a more sensitive alarm than most. I can't change that, and you shouldn't expect this book to turn you into someone who never gives tomorrow a thought.

But "I'm a worrier" combines two things. One is the alarm, meaning how easily the first "what if" goes off. The other is what you do in the minutes and hours after it goes off. The first may well be temperament. The second is an activity, and it looks very much like a learned one.

Look at the features it has. It's mostly made of words, which means you're producing it. A startle reflex doesn't work that way. It has favourite times, usually in bed, in the car, in the shower, and in any gap with nothing else in it. It has favourite subjects. You worry about your children's health and not at all about your own pension, or the other way round, and your sister worries about the opposite things. A trait you were born with wouldn't pick and choose like that. Most telling of all, it can be interrupted. When the phone rings with something absorbing, the round stops, and it doesn't always start again. So it turns out to depend on the time of day, on the subject, and on whether anything else has your attention.

Anything with those features can be reshaped by practice, and there's evidence that worry can. In 2013 Sarah Kate McGowan and Evelyn Behar took 53 people who worried a great deal and randomly gave half of them a simple routine for two weeks. They were to confine their worrying to one thirty-minute period a day, at a set time and place, and postpone any worry that turned up outside it. The other half were told to let their worry run without avoiding it. After two weeks the first group had larger drops in worry, anxiety and insomnia. It was a small, short study and the authors call it preliminary. The idea itself goes back to 1983, when Borkovec first tested it. Chapter 11 uses it.

That result would be strange if worrying were simply how some people are made, because you can't give a fixed trait an appointment and have it turn up on time. It appears you can with a habit.

One more piece of research belongs here, because it explains why the usual advice has failed you. People have told you to stop thinking about it, and you've tried, and it got worse. In 1987 Daniel Wegner asked volunteers not to think of a white bear for five minutes, and to ring a bell if they did. They couldn't manage it. Afterwards, when they were allowed to think of it, they thought about it more than people who'd never been asked to suppress it. A later analysis of many such studies found that the rebound is real, though small to moderate, and that it varies with the kind of thought.

So if you've tried to push worries out of your mind and failed, you didn't fail through lack of willpower. You were using a method that doesn't work well for anybody. Nothing in the next chapter asks you to suppress a thought. It asks you to do one of two things with it, and neither of them is to push it away.

You may always have the sensitive alarm. I'd even say it has its uses, since people with sensitive alarms notice the expiring passport and the odd noise from the boiler before anyone else does. The aim is to keep the alarm and drop the hours of ringing that follow it.