olives, dear – lift your shirt and find something good to read. 
Dr. Seligman was one of the pioneers in the cognitive therapy movement, and olivesmarch4th has given some good examples of how it works. Dr. Seligman looks specifically at the internal dialogue you tell yourself when something bad happens and rates it on three scales:
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Permanance - Do you see the bad event as something that will last forever, or something temporary. Your boss yells at you at work – Do you think “he’s in a bad mood today” or “He hates me”?
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Pervasiveness - Do you see the event as specific to the occasion, or applying to your entire life. You do badly on a test – Do you think “I didn’t study hard enough” or “I’m stupid”?
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Personalization - Do you see the event as being the result of your failure, or outside circumstances. You spill coffee all over the place – Do you think “The cup was too full” or “I’m a klutz”?
Switching from pessimism to optimism involves using the technique olives described – carefully observing your thoughts and countering them with evidence. “My boss gave me a good review last month, so he obviously doesn’t hate me. He’s probably just in a bad mood.” As she said, it also involves stopping the ruminating by calling timeouts – either by distracting yourself or by setting specific times to think about events.
There’s more to the theory, but that’s the basics.
Thanks, SpoilerVirgin. That really seems to be the heart of CBT, what with all of the cognitive distortions stuff. It’s pretty different from the stuff I’ve been talking about, with the exception that they both ask you to stop and give some thought to your thoughts – in real time. Does Seligman talk about journaling or otherwise writing stuff down? It seems to be that that’s a pretty powerful tool.
The idea of “acting with courage” sounds inane to me. Not that your way of looking at it is inane, just that, to me, it is essentially meaningless. I can’t even imagine what it might mean.
One of the great benefits to CBT is that there are functional, practical things you can do that help. Some methods may work better than others for each individual, but one does not have to already be able to do it to figure out what the instructions are supposed to mean.
What does it mean to act with courage in regards to worrying? Could you write it out in a step by step process without one of the steps being, don’t worry?
Emotional investment also plays a pivotal role in the essential misunderstanding between worriers and the laid-back.
As an example: from time-to-time, at work, I will come across something I don’t know how to handle. I will ask my boss how he would like me to handle it and he will respond, “Don’t worry about it.” He’s Mr. Laid-back and I’m a worry wart.
But if I really don’t worry about it and it turns out that he has to fix it later, then he might come to me saying, “You did this wrong and now I have to fix it!”
He will not be laid back if I answer, “Don’t worry about it.”
Sometimes, I catch myself getting emotionally involved inappropriately. It’s the situation where I think, “I’m stupid,” rather than “I made a mistake.”
But sometimes the laid-back person is really just not involved in whatever is worrying me and so they take the opportunity to point out that I shouldn’t worry. As soon as it directly affects them, their attitude is significantly different.
Apathetic is the opposite of position of the anxious person, and laid back to the point of apathetic worries me. I don’t worry all the time and I’m not apathetic. I have known one fully apathetic person and you couldn’t do anything with them. They would have stared at an oncoming train as it ran them down rather than jump or do something to save their ass.
Interacting with someone I’d have to choose them from best to worst in this order.
- Someone that has a balance in the middle
- The anxious person
- Nobody. At least they don’t curtail your accomplishing something on your time off.
- The apathetic laid back person
I have sometimes wondered if the laid back people I know aren’t just more people oriented.
If there are things that are worrying me, I often prefer to be alone.
Since I don’t mind being alone, there’s no reason to “get over it” in order to please others. My motto is: Worry. Be happy.
One of my favorite quotes from the Dalai Lamai
“If you can do something about it, you don’t need to worry. If you can’t do anything about it, then worrying will do no good.”
But the worriers in this thread should not worry about this.
I consider myself fairly laid back - or at least much more worry-free than some people I know, but at the same time, I wouldn’t consider myself very people-oriented.
From Q.E.D.'s cite:
I’m not sure having an engaging personality is the same or even related to being a people person…
Maybe it’s just that people prefer being around people who are more relaxed?
To expand on this, my favorite Buddha quote:
‘‘You will either live or you will die. Both are good.’’
I’ve heard that Learned Optimism is a great book. We actually own it, so I should probably read it.
tdn, lift my shirt? Wha?
Oh, and I was gonna add–I often describe myself as laid back. I never associated being a worrier with not being laid back. I will worry about things to death, but when bad stuff actually happens I’m generally pretty accepting. I’m a laid back worrier.
I had a whole long thing typed up that got swallowed by my computer, and I don’t feel like retyping it all right now. Long story short: I’m a serious, grade-A worrier. I learned it from my mother, who’s also crazy.
Mom, apparently, learned it from her father, which - combined with my sister’s freakish levels of calm - makes me think it’s learned, not genetic. Grandpa, apparently, was one of the most high-strung, neurotic people you can imagine…when he got home from WWII*. Before he went off to Europe, he was a fairly laid-back guy.
So…I don’t know what that says, other than that my theory is that, apparently, war can make people crazy for multiple generations.
*Where, apparently, at least some of his job consisted of picking up bodies and body parts from streets after bombings and battles. So it’s understandable.
Something about that leaves me feeling very contented.
I sometimes feel better when things are actually going wrong. It’s hard to worry about things going wrong when everything is FUBAR. 
Dr. Seligman does talk about writing stuff down, but not in the sort of “let me get my feelings out” way. You have to write things down in a specific way that will aid your thought process: Write down the problem that is bothering you (just the facts, without your emotional reaction). Then write down your explanations for the problem. Then write down the argument against your explanations, giving alternative explanations (as demonstrated in olive’s and my earlier posts). The idea, as olives said, is that ultimately the arguments will become automatic and you won’t need to write them down any more, when something bad happens you’ll just automatically jump to the more optimistic explanation.
The bottom line with cognitive therapy is that you don’t give undue weight to your feelings – they aren’t the engine driving the machine. Your feelings are the results of your thoughts, and if you change your thoughts, you can change your feelings. So instead of trying to be positive or have courage, you try to think more appropriately, and the optimism and courage will come.
Hey, this is kind of like my own personal quote that I use to help to get me through bad situations.
“Either it will work out okay, or we’ll all be dead in a ditch. In which case, we won’t really mind cause we’ll be dead. And anyway, we probably won’t end up dead in a ditch.”
I am very laid back. I used to worry a lot, but a lot of that was depression. Travel also helped me. I think traveling really widened my comfort and gave me confidence in my ability to deal with life. If I can handle finding food and shelter in a place where I have little money and can’t talk to anyone, I can probably handle most of the other things life throws at me. I think a lot of worry is just about the width of your comfort zone and your range of experience.
My wife is/was almost exactly the same as yours. Zoloft helps her quite a bit, OTOH, I don’t think she’s 100% comfortable with state of not worrying due to the Zoloft, because of this she tends to stop taking it once a year or so. The way she describes it, you’d think she was on lithium. She talks about being to even and not having any emotions at all. At some point after that the worry becomes too much for her and she goes back on it. (BTW both her mom and her mom’s mom are on anti-depressants).
I’m laid back and don’t sweat the small stuff, but now that I say that out loud, she tends to sweat the stuff that isn’t even happening. If someone giggles as she walks out of a room it’s because she’s fat and her butt is jiggling. She’s not fat, not even a little bit, and her butt isn’t jiggling, even when she’s was VERY sick with anorexia and weighed about 100 pounds she was still convinced that when she walked into a room and no one was talking it’s because they WERE talking about how fat she is.
I’m going to stop now because I think I’m starting to ramble. But as far as I’m concerend, the proper therapy and meds can probably help your wife (under the care of a doctor of course), but there’s a chance that she won’t like NOT worrying. Also, she still may not understand why you don’t worry about everything, just like you may never understand why she’s 100% convinced those people at the other end of the mall are laughing at her ugly shoes.
I had therapy that helped me with worrying, but not so much with the “who cares” mentality of depression. As a result I became too passive to do much worrying, but also lost most of my edge and juice in life.
This is what I do. Everyone thinks I don’t worry about anything because when bad stuff happens I’m pretty much very calm about it.
This is because I probably thought about the bad stuff happening already and about a million other bad things that didn’t.
Also, I keep my worries all in my head. I do the CBT stuff described up thread but I didn’t know there was a name for it.
I enjoy studying marketing and art of human persuasion. I think that has helped me a lot in terms of keeping a perspective on what other people are thinking. It has helped me learn that people are too self absorbed to care about anything anyone else does. The small number that do notice other people are more empathic because of it. They won’t mock you even if you do mess up somehow.
As I get older I have switched from a worrier to a laid back guy. I have learned to define terms and realize to worry about what you can control. If you can’t control it, prepare for it and then forget it.