Are You Worrying Yourself Sick?

Dr. Beverly Potter

WORRYWARTS SPEND A LOT OF TIME WORRYING, in fact, they can't not worry.  Like a mantra, fears are chanted repetitively in the worrywart's head, But unlike a mantra, which brings serenity and accompanying health benefits to the meditator, worrying generates anxiety and revves up your body. Once on the fear track, an anxious mind does not deviate.  It is hard to distract.  While this one-track-mindedness can mean survival in a real emergency, when there is no emergency, worrywarts lose perspective, confusing their fears with reality.

Living in a constant state of alarm stresses your body in the bad way. Your emotional mind reacts to imagined catastrophes as if they were real, sending signals to your body that there is a danger-a threat. Your body mobilizes to ready for the threat. Your emotional mind, noticing tension, triggers more anxiety and worry. A vicious cycle of escalating worry and anxiety is set into motion.

Emotional State and Disease
THERE IS IMPRESSIVE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE of the negative impact of chronic anxiety upon sickness and recovery. People who are chronically anxious, who suffer long periods of sadness and pessimism, who experience unremitting tension or incessant hostility, or who are cynical or suspicious have a dramatically greater risk of developing disease including asthma, arthritis, headaches, peptic ulcers and heart disease.

Your emotional state plays a significant role in your health and vulnerability to disease.  Intense negative emotions of any kind send regular surges of stress hormones through your body.  Chronic anger or agitation puts you at risk healthwise.  It doesn't matter whether these distressing emotions are expressed or held in.  The important factor in their deleterious impact is whether or not negative emotions are chronic.

Worrying Triggers Negative Emotions
WORRYWARTING STIRS UP NEGATIVE EMTIONS and then keeps reinforcing them over and over until you believe the broken record of fear, uncertainty and doubt. In addition to anger and hostility, most deleterious are feeling victimized, helplessness, out of control, and pressured for time. The emotional mind interprets situations that stir up these feelings as "threatening."  Faced with a threat your body mobilizes by releasing chemical stimulants-sodium lactate, adrenaline, cortisol-to prepare for fight-flight.  Blood pressure goes up, blood sugar level up, digestive system slows down, breathing becomes shallow, stomach muscles contract, the heart pounds. Non-essential functions shutdown, only those essential for survival are keep operating.  You are ready to take action, to confront a life threatening event.  But you are not facing a life threatening event-you are worrywarting, creating exaggerated images in your mind of disasters which your emotional brain responds to as if they were real.

Most people don't realize the tremendous impact that a thought, an image, or emotion can have upon the emotional brain, which in turn tells the body how to respond.  Positive stress, like the stress of competition when you feel confident in your ability, for example, contributes to heightened functioning and peak performance. But bad stress like chronic anxiety, frequent hostility, or often feeling helpless, for example, make you more vulnerable to negative life events such job loss, personal injury, trauma, which in turn generate even more stress.

Unrelenting stress compromises immune functioning and puts excessive demand on cardiovascular system. The more stress, the more likely you will catch cold or come down with the flu or another infectious disease.  Stress has been found to increase vulnerability to viral infections, speed metastasis of cancer, accelerate onset of diabetes, worsen asthma and exacerbate plaque formation. Stress is correlated with arteriosclerosis and suffering myocardial infarction.

Some stressors are more injurious than others. When the source of stress is ambiguous, undefined, or prolonged, or when several sources exist simultaneously, you do not return to a normal mental and physiological baseline as rapidly and you will continue to have a potentially damaging stress reaction.  This prolonged activation of your body's basic operating system is fundamental to the development of stress-related disorders.

Worrywarting, with its parading images of catastrophe, keeps you in a continuous state of alarm, which wears out the body and lowers resistance.  The anxiety generated by worrywarting keeps you in state of disequilibrium, increasing susceptibility to wide range of diseases and disorders. When the emotional brain responds to your worry thoughts by triggering the fight-flight response and you do not fight or flee, but restrain yourself instead, your emotional brain interprets your immobility as insufficient preparation and increases tension.  A high degree of alertness that must be maintained without relief, such as that required of air traffic controller, for example, is extremely stressful and linked to health problems. Similarly the hyperviligence that accompanies chronic worry is tremendously stressful.

Are You A Worrywart? Take the Worrywart Quiz to find out.

From The Worrywarts Companion: Twenty-One Ways to Soothe Yourself and Worry Smart, McGraw-hill, 2008.