Richard:
Hello, Therapy Natters fans. It's time for another episode. Wherein in two psychotherapists sit down and natter about something that you'd like us to natter about. Hopefully in just half for an hour, we can answer a question that might have been on your mind for a while. I'm Richard Nicholls and I'm joined by my colleague and friend Fiona Biddle. Hi, Fiona. Welcome to another episode.
Fiona:
Hi, Richard. Lovely to be here, as always. So we have a question today which is probably on most people's minds at the time that we are recording this. And I have to say hopefully for not much longer, but who knows? But there will always be things like this around. This is Gavin from Gloucester who says, How do I deal with the adverse emotions of the returning Cold war, which could go hot as we are recording this. The Ukrainian war is in full swing and we do not know, of course, what this could lead to. So as I said, who isn't, at some degree or another concerned? Of course, that's a human reaction. And when does that become too much to bear and when is it okay to experience I guess?
Richard:
Emotions are there for a reason and they're supposed to be giving us feedback and information about what's going on to give us a behavioural push into a certain direction. But there are some things that the emotions can't help with. Having a feeling that there's something wrong in the world isn't enough. When those things are outside of our control, we can't individually do anything about it. That's a hard thing to accept. I think for all of us, there's things we can do, but we can only do what we can do. We can't go back in time and go back in time and kill Hitler. I've seen enough. I've read enough time travel books about that. It never ends well. But what can we do? If the answer genuinely is nothing, then we have to accept our locus of control and accept that we can't do anything about it other than potentially send medical help, donate to charities. What more can we do?
Fiona:
Yes, we can't get on a plane or drive a car to Moscow and knock on the Kremlin door and say, can I speak to Mr. Putin, please, and go in and say, I don't think this is a good idea. Could you stop it, please? It's that we don't have control. So there are things that we can do to help, as you've said, there but it is outside of our control and so is the possibility of it coming closer to us. There's not much that we can do about that. I heard of one person saying that they were thinking of leaving wherever they were. I won't say where it was, but there's no way to know where any attacks would come anyway. So how do you leave?
Richard:
A few people over the last month or so have said to me, especially those that are in their forty’s and fifty’s who grew up in the 80’s they remember some of the things that we were told. I don't know how old Gavin from Gloucester is. More than likely he’s probably a similar age to me. Maybe not anybody can be struggling with these sorts of thoughts, but I don’t know whether you remember, Fiona, during the 80s, there was a lot of public announcements and advice given about how to handle nuclear fallout and what would happen if London was attacked by a nuclear device. You paint your windows white before it comes and hopefully you can reflect some of the blast and you hide under the stairs and things like that. And I think if we're honest, those announcements were just there to give us a little bit of peace of mind that it doesn't matter. It'll be okay if it happens. No, we need to accept that if something like that does happen, we die in a nuclear war, which is the stuff of so much fiction over the last 50 years that it creates this reality in our imagination. I think sometimes as if it's impending.
Fiona:
Yes, I do remember things. I mean, I'm quite a bit older than you, but I don't remember the specifics of what we were supposed to do. I don't remember painting windows.
Richard:
We were told it in school. This is a primary school.
Fiona:
I do remember that there were things, but I don't remember the details. But then you said about the sort of hiding did you say hiding under the table? Because I don't know.
Richard:
Yeah, under the table. Under the stairs.
Fiona:
That's what my father did in the Second World War. They slept in one room with a reinforced walls and windows ceiling, presumably, and they had the table really reinforced, but they all slept. It was just my father and his parents, but the three of them slept in this one room and they thought that that would be okay. Now it may have been if a bomb had been close ish, but now that's not going to work. It reminds me, I was listening to just a brief little clip on I don't know what it was on some Facebook or something with Ricky Gervais just yesterday where he was saying about how we have the life jackets on a plane with a whistle, as if the whistle is going to be of any help.
Richard:
To attract attention? Pheep! Pheep!
Fiona:
I think we do have to well, my feeling is that we have to get to the point where we can accept that. If it is, then it is.
Richard:
Yeah. And that's not easy for any of us, really, unless you can dig and delve through some sort of existential the meaning of life. Oh, I've done enough. It's perfectly okay if I did die today. No, we don't want that to happen. Nobody wants that.
Fiona:
Let's do an episode sometime on existential angst, shall we?
Richard:
Yeah. Because we're a species that has populated the planet because we've got a good imagination. It's because we've got the brain that can what if to itself. That's how we learn to throw a spear at a mongoose or whatever. I don't know why mongoose. I'm sure early humans weren't spearing mongooses oftenIs it mongooses?
Fiona
Mongeese?
Richard
It’s not mongoose? It flipping should be. I hope it is. Anyhoo! We're a species that has done well because we can use our imaginations and we can predict. We can look at where our mongoose or our duck or whatever it is we want to throw a stone at. We can guess where it's going to be in a couple of seconds time and throw the stone there so we don't throw the stone at the duck where it was before it flapped off. So we've got this great imagination that allows us to think, what if that happens? And then it gives us an emotional response. Without that emotional response, we are psychopaths, I suppose, because we can think about doing something and if it doesn't give you any emotional feedback, it's perfectly okay to do it. So we end up doing really cruel and spiteful things or dangerous things. The species that's done quite well all these millions of years later is the one that considered something, thought about it, felt a feeling about it, and then decided whether it was a good idea or not to carry on with that behaviour. But it comes at a cost because having this, I've got a good brain that goes, what if the benefits of that means we can make sensible decisions and we don't fall over cliffs? But it also means that anything that we can imagine creates a feeling. So when we imagine a nuclear war, we imagine the worst case scenario. It feels real to us. Our body picks up what our brain is doing and makes it feel real. Now then we have a problem because our brain over again millions of years. And this is something that evolutionary psychologists have been talking about for decades and decades. And although some evolutionary psychology stuff is a bit guff, I remember talking to a Professor, Sophie Scott. She was talking about some research that she'd found that was using evolutionary psychology to explain why men were better at surfing than women. I think it was, and it was to do with carrying spears and things like that. It's nonsense. It was just culture. Men are encouraged to do more surfing than women. Well, that's all it is. So some of it is a bit guff. But the fact that we have populated the planet means evolution is working. But here we are in the 21st century where I think that ability to use our imagination does set off the car alarm in our brain and gives us that physical feedback in our body that says the worst case scenario is horrible. But our brain has learned that scary things are to be remembered. We should only remember the scary things or the things that are scary we focus more upon, so we're going to remember them. The brain goes, oh, that's happened before. We need to make sure that doesn't happen again. So then the next time we have a little thought about the worst case scenario, it brings more of the feeling, greater feelings. The body is going, I thought we weren't going to do this again. We weren't going to have this experience again. And it's not a real experience. It's just in our imagination. And I think capturing our imagination is probably the only if somebody was to say, is there a trick to being able to overcome some of these sorts of worries, it is about using our brain for the right reasons.
Fiona:
Yes. It's thinking about our thinking and thinking about our feeling. I noticed that Gavin actually used the term adverse emotions. I sort of had a little smile. I wonder why he needed to put adverse in as though he's going to be feeling full of joy at the prospect of the Cold War. But that does actually lead to something that I think is quite important, which is we hinted at this in episode one, but we're coming to it now, which is about how emotions can be appropriate or inappropriate rather than necessarily positive or negative. So if somebody did say, oh, Yippee, the Cold War's back, isn't this wonderful? We've got all this exciting stuff and how lovely. Well, that sort of a little bit off, isn't it? So to feel fearful, to feel sad about what is going on in Ukraine, to feel angry about it, those are all appropriate responses in my model of the world.
Richard:
To not have them would mean we've got psychopathy, probably an unhealthy brain. It will pop in and go, oh well that's nothing.
Fiona:
So labelling your emotions as appropriate or inappropriate rather than positive or negative is really helpful. And that can actually make the so called negative ones, like being afraid or angry or sad or jealous, that's another one that can fit into that category. It can almost make them well, certainly it can make them okay. It can almost make them sort of pleasurable almost, because they're right. And it feels the right thing to do to be sad. If somebody kicks your cat and you go, oh, thank you. That was lovely. No, that's not appropriate. To feel angry. That's a good thing to feel. So you can feel happy to be angry. So that's a really important way to look at these things and to see that. Yeah, this is what it is. But then that leads onto a concept that I'll explain, if you'd like me to, which is about worry, because we can have the emotions, but then worry is a sort of prolonged emotional experience where we're ruminating around something and worry can be productive or not. So if you're going on holiday and you're worrying about whether the weather is going to be nice or not. Well, that might lead you to prepare and take an umbrella or make sure that if you're going camping that you've got a ground sheet and the things that you might need. So worrying about these things can be useful. But then continuing to worry about it, well, that's not going to do anything. So if you're worrying about something, you can have a little think as to whether there's any use to this and have a look at this as four different types of worthless worries. I'll say what they are, and then we'll have a little look at them. There's unimportant, unlikely, uncertain or uncontrollable worries. So let's look at those with regard to the Cold War, the situation with Russia and Ukraine, but also let's see if we can between us, Richard, come up with some other different scenarios. Unimportant? Well, in terms of the war, I don't think anybody could say that that's unimportant. This is affecting the whole world in some respects. It is definitely important. But there are things that people worry about that objectively could be said to be unimportant. So if I was to say to you that I'm worried about whether Liverpool are going to win the Premiership this year, you could say, well, that doesn't matter, does it? And the thing is I wouldn't be saying that to you because I think it's unimportant, too. But some people think that's important. Can you think of another example of an unimportant worry that people might have?
Richard:
Every time I think about a worry, the only things that come in are things that are important. Otherwise, why would I be worrying about it?
Fiona:
We know that people do worry about unimportant things.
Richard:
One of the biggest worries that I think people bring into therapy is a worry of what people think of them. But I guess that's one of the uncontrollable ones. But it's still to a degree unimportant. But we can definitely think about things that are unimportant and turn them into worries. Like you say, the correct football team winning the Premier League.
Fiona:
Or if I was wanting to travel to London and I was worrying about whether I was able to get the 9:05 or the 10:05, because I wasn't sure whether the traffic will get me there in time. But I haven't got a specific time that I need to be in London, but I could still worry about that. But it's unimportant.
Richard: Yes. And our body will come up with a reaction that says you're late, you're late, have some adrenaline because you're late. And actually, it's unimportant because there isn't a time constraint. Yeah, that's an unimportant worry.
Fiona:
The next one is unlikely. Well, let's hope that is the case in terms of whether we're going to get vaporised by a nuclear bomb. I think it probably is unlikely. So is it worth lying awake at night worrying about that scenario? I would say it is unlikely enough that there's no point in that worry and there's no action that you can take to prevent it.
Richard:
So worrying about it doesn't make any difference. Like Biggle’s philosophy. You heard a Biggle’s philosophy?
Fiona: I think I have, but remind me because it's not coming to me.
Richard: Let me find Biggle’s philosophy. I have spoke about it on my other podcast. Let me find it word for word, because it was from this hilarious Biggle’s book. It's the one where you meet. Um what was that character's name? The guy with a hunting Horn. Lord Bertie used to fly this plane with a hunting Horn, wearing a Monocle. Thank you, granddad. They were great books. But he's like, oh yeah, you'd like these books, Richard, this is my granddad. So Biggle’s philosophy. This is what WB Johns wrote about when Biggle’s was whether he should be worried or not about flying a plane. When you are flying, everything is all right or it is not all right. If it is all right, there is no need to worry. If it is not all right, one of two things will happen. Either you will crash or you will not crash. If you do not crash, there is no need to worry. If you do crash, one of two things is certain. Either you will be injured or you will not be injured. If you are not injured, there is no need to worry. If you are injured, one of two things is certain. Either you will recover or you will not recover. If you recover, there is no need to worry. If you don't recover, you can't worry. And I read that when I was a small child and thought I want to be Biggle’s to a degree. That carefree attitude.
Fiona:
It's a lovely sort of subdividing at each level and diminishing the point of the worry. And I suspect that made me think about the unlikely worries that parents will often have about their children. I know one of mine was recently flying to New York and I did have that worry about the plane. I don't worry when I'm by myself when I'm going on a plane, but I worried about it when Jack was going on a plane. But we know that it's very unlikely that anything is going to happen. But I think it is probably part of being a parent that you do those things. But knowing it is really helpful.
Richard:
Yes, because worrying about our children starts the moment they're born. And maybe it's a genetic trait. Maybe there are psychopath versions of our species millions of years ago that just didn't care about their young, so they didn't look after them. And that's not a very successful species. The species that does think I hope my baby is okay. I hope my baby is okay. I'm worried that they might not wake up if they fall asleep. Those sorts of thoughts are intrusive and horrible, but they're really useful for propagating the planet. So it's okay to accept these are the thoughts I'm having. I'm having these worries. It's normal. It's a healthy brain that is doing that. To think, after watching hours of footage over the last few, the last month or so about what's happening in Ukraine, to have no emotional reaction to that is, to a degree, a little unhealthy. I think. I think a healthy brain does worry about these sorts of things, but then it's what we do with those worries.
Fiona:
Yeah. The next one is the uncertain, and that's about whether something either will happen or it won’t. Like the Biggle’s thing. But the example that I've got written down somewhere else was about if you take an exam, so you've taken the exam and then you're worrying about what the results are, then you're worrying about it. Now you can do a little bit of preparation for what you would do if you haven't. Fine. Good. But otherwise there's no point in worrying because it either is or it isn't. And there's lots of those sorts of scenarios in the world. And in terms of the war situation, an awful lot of it is like that, because as we're recording, Russia will take Kyiv or not. And if they do, then it will remain so or not. But worrying about it doesn't change the outcome.
Richard:
It shows our values. I think that's quite useful. It shows who you are.
Fiona:
Yeah. And the final one is the uncontrollable. That reminds me of back 2003 when Clive Woodward was what was his title manager, whatever it was of the England Rugby team, and he was hot on controlling the controllables and forgetting about the uncontrollables. There's no point worrying about how good the opposition are in a sporting event. You worry about how good you are and what you can do to stop their interventions. Yeah, sure. But you can't change the opposition, so you only worry about the things you can control. And obviously, when it comes to the war, that's where we're really strong. But it's really important to recognise that all these things can interlink. A particular worry is not one of those four things or worthwhile. It can have a huge interlocking of different aspects. But going through the list, when you're lying awake at night worrying about something, whatever it is, war or anything, think about it. Think about whether it is actually important, whether it's likely, whether it's something that's certain or not, and whether you can control it, pulling that all apart, chances are it will help you to move on from that worry.
Richard:
It will. I've been an optimistic character forever, as far as I know. Sometimes I do wonder if it's a character that I started playing for a particular defence mechanism for some reason, and it just became a personality trait and becomes who I am, I don't mind. But being the optimist who is able to look at what would happen if things go well instead is a handy skill to have, and I've accidentally been practicing it for 20 years or, well, probably longer than that. To be fair, it's worth going there in our mind sometimes when our brain kicks off with the worst case scenario. But what about the best case scenario?
Fiona:
People often feel safe if they have gone through the worst case scenarios and that can be a reasonable thing. But don't just do that as you're saying there, Richard. Don't just do the what if and worst cases do look at the good scenarios as well. The good possible outcomes. I like personally to presume the best. Yeah. Get disappointed sometimes, but it feels a lot better to presume things are going to be okay.
Richard:
Yeah, I like that. Because, yes, we can prevent disappointment if we have really low expectations, but the pain of those really low expectations is greater than the disappointment would be. And I've seen that in my wife over the years. She just found it really handy to be a little bit pessimistic and to not have high expectations. She's found it very, very useful. And I wonder how far down that rabbit hole she’d have gone if she hadn't met me 26 years ago and I started to pull her out of it. And maybe, here's me doing some self analysis, maybe that's one of the reasons why I'm so optimistic over the last 26 years it’s to counteract her and oh this is all going to go wrong. We're probably going to miss the flight. We have to make sure we get there 4 hours in advance instead of two. That's not much of an exaggeration, whereas potentially I could be more carefree because, yeah, it's fine. It's just wandering to the airport and yeah, it's boarding, but we'll be fine. No, not anymore. We're not in the EU anymore. We've got to join the long queue. So it's probably a good idea that we do think about the worst case scenario so that we can plan. But I like to also think about being on the plane because I did catch the flight that we weren't stuck in traffic on the way to the airport and it all worked out well. And think about what's going to happen afterwards if things work out well and try and live there in my mind and create some positive feelings that there's something good coming around the corner.
Fiona:
But what you've got going on, there is a balance between you, haven't you? Whereas if it was just your way, you might well have missed flights.
Richard:
Yeah. Would have done, probably. Yeah.
Fiona:
So I get accused by my family of being too anxious before travel, but I don't feel I'm being too anxious at all. I think I'm just being prepared. So I've got a list that I print off before any trip that has everything written on it that I am going to need and I tick them off. But then I'm not worrying because it's all completely controlled, and I'm going on holiday next week. And as I'm saying this now, I'm sure I'm going to forget something because I've said I'm not going to forget something, but I won't because it's written down. So it's fine. Yeah. I like to have that balance once it's done. So that Worthwhile Worry, if you like, which I produced that list several years ago. I update it every so often, but it's there, so I don't need to worry. It's All Fine.
Richard:
I'm not sure whether it's the stuff that will be controllable or the stuff that will be uncontrollable, but it's certainly a good idea to deliberately worry at times. If we find that we have intrusive worries, if we set aside a time just for worry. 02:30, 03:00, 05:30 whenever it is. And you must worry for 15 minutes. Sit and do some worrying. It's much easier the rest of the say when it pops into your head that you really should be worried about this, you can tell yourself, Oh, I will, just not right now because I'm doing this. It's easier to push the thought away. And then when you go and sit down at half past 2 Or 03:00 Or whatever and try to worry, you might have got a better perspective.
Fiona:
Yes. 11:36, I suggest. But have that time put aside to do this process and also to write them down.
Richard:
Get Them Out.
Fiona:
If you write your worries down, whether that is in the form of a list of things that need to be done or just I'm worried about whojimaflip. And what they're going to do about so and so? Or this Person that I know has got a job interview and I'm worried about how they'll be if they don't get it. There's all sorts of things that we might worry about. Write them down. Then they don't have to be in your psychic RAM.
Richard:
I like it. I like it. Well, that's your homework for this week, Boys, Girls and everybody in-between. Go and write down your worries. So you don't have to think about them anymore. That's your homework. If we were to be setting any because we need to finish off Fiona. Have you seen the time?
Fiona: Oh, yes.
Richard:
It doesn't take long. 30 minutes just flies by. It feels like 5. So we shall love you and leave you. You're going on holiday next week. But there's still going to be an episode. We've still got content for you. Don't worry. Don't worry. There'll be one here every Wednesday. Until we get fed up of this, and that could be decades away. So we'll love you and leave you, and we'll be back next week, won't we?
Fiona:
Yes, absolutely. See You Then. Bye
Richard
Byee.