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art
1903 Posts |
 Posted - 07/01/2007 : 12:18:05
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| I'm pretty sure we're hard wired to worry and ruminate as well. I can't prove it, but I'm nearly convinced it's so. Again, you can readily see how cautiousness and a propensity towards worry would tend to be selected for over time. THese tendencies might seem maladaptive in a world where we no longer have to worry about being attacked by a lion evry time we step out the door, but the brain we're operating with in the 21st century is nearly identical to the human brain of tens of thousands of years ago... |
Edited by - art on 07/01/2007 12:19:02 |
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Dave
USA
1864 Posts |
Posted - 07/02/2007 : 09:08:38
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quote:
Originally posted by art
I'm pretty sure we're hard wired to worry and ruminate as well.
Yes. TMS is hard wired in all of us!  |
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art
1903 Posts |
Posted - 07/02/2007 : 10:25:15
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quote:
Originally posted by Dave
quote:
Originally posted by art
I'm pretty sure we're hard wired to worry and ruminate as well.
Yes. TMS is hard wired in all of us!
I'd say it's more the desire to be right that's hard wired into us. 
In fact, instead of TMS being hard-wired, I'd be more willing to conjecture that TMS is a cultural artifact, more likely in societies that particularly frown on those emotions the repression of which forms the basis of TMS theory. I'm shooting from the hip here I admit, as I've no expertise in either cultural anthropolgy or for that matter, the finer points of TMS. Still, wouldn't it make sense to suppose that TMS is more prevalent in repressive cultures such as we have here in the U.S as well as the U.K, and less prevalent in more laid back populations such as might be found, say, in the tropics?
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Edited by - art on 07/02/2007 10:27:24 |
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armchairlinguist
USA
1397 Posts |
Posted - 07/03/2007 : 08:58:19
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Well, I was going to leave my previous post unrestored after it got deleted somehow, but it's still relevant here, I think. Hopefully this one will stay.
I had written that for me, anxiety has certainly been a tough manifestation of TMS to deal with. I think this is in part because of what art says -- it seems like something that's normal to do. Everyone worries, right? I think that's true to some extent, but it's more like what Dave said. Most people worry when there's cause, take some sort of action about it, and then allow the worry to rest. I do believe that circular, pointless worry is TMS.
When I am able to stop the worry cycle and look at the feelings around the situation I'm worrying about, I usually find that there's something there that I am trying to avoid. It's not about the generalized TMS rage necessarily, but maybe about being angry with a friend, parent, or coworker about the situation, or feeling fearful about living up to expectations. It's odd that worry can cover for fear, but I think that it can. The experiences for me are very different. Worry is fear under "control", put into logical units. Fear is much more raw and terrifying. Why I feel such fear about situations in which I'm not facing a black bear in the woods is always fruitful for emotional introspection. 
When I actually go into these feelings, the worry itself tends to dissipate to manageable levels. It doesn't usually go away totally, which I feel is because it's simply become habitual over time. But at any rate my experience leads me to believe strongly that this kind of chronic worry over things is a TMS distraction.
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Wherever you go, there you are. |
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art
1903 Posts |
Posted - 07/03/2007 : 13:49:46
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That's all quite well said. I agree that worry is an attenuated or less directly apprehended form of fear. I also agree that the circular, obsessive, never-get-any-where worry and rumination is possibly, some of the time anyway, some sort of TMS analogue. In any event, they do seem to go together on this forum, that's for sure.
I am however always leery of those grand, "unifying" ways of looking at the world. I have a pokr buddy who's a chiropractor. To hear him tell it, virtually anything can be traced to subluxations, hence practically all the ills of the world can be adjusted away. |
Edited by - art on 07/08/2007 11:26:31 |
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weatherman
USA
184 Posts |
Posted - 07/04/2007 : 00:57:37
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quote:
Originally posted by art
I am however always leery of those grand, "unifying" ways of looking at the world. I have a pokr buddy who's a chiropractor. To hear him tell it, virtually anything can be traced to sublaxations, hence practically all the ills of the world can be adjusted away.
Reminds me of the saying that, when the only tool you have is a hammer every problem begins to look like a nail.
But I do have to say that while TMS doesn't account for everything it seems to explain the cause of more ills than anything else I've encountered, at least for me personally.
Weatherman
Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement. |
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Stryder
686 Posts |
Posted - 07/05/2007 : 16:01:21
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weatherman said: Reminds me of the saying that, when the only tool you have is a hammer every problem begins to look like a nail.
I usually use screws instead of nails in most cases since nails make it hard to take something apart to fix. That's my perfectionsim showing again if you hadn't noticed.
art said: I'd say it's more the desire to be right that's hard wired into us.
Makes sense since in our primitive time being wrong could kill you from the natural dangers. Maybe TMS is like allergies. Your body has nothing to fight off so your immune system gets board and fights off simple normal things like pollen and dust. In today's world we are basically safe, so being right all the time may be an over reaction to not being in danger (since we are hard wired to be right).
Take care, -Stryder |
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Wavy Soul
USA
779 Posts |
Posted - 07/06/2007 : 04:13:57
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quote:
Again, you can readily see how cautiousness and a propensity towards worry would tend to be selected for over time. THese tendencies might seem maladaptive in a world where we no longer have to worry about being attacked by a lion evry time we step out the door,
Hi Art, and co...
Actually, I think that fearlessness may be selected FOR. The belief that fear protects you is just another belief, in my not so humble opinion.
There was a study about entrepreneurs in Psychology Today that said (statistical survey not anecdotal) that the successful ones were those who were "unrealistic" in their enthusiasm.
ten thousand generations of being the rightest produced... moi!
xx
Love is the answer, whatever the question |
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art
1903 Posts |
Posted - 07/06/2007 : 06:49:15
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Hey Wavy,
The very fact that courage is so prized in every human culture that I know of, especially the willingness to face death, is proof of the fear based model of the human mind. It wouldn't be so prized, so singular, so remarkable otherwise. It's the rare man who goes to the gallows, or throw himself into desperate battle, with a calm serenity. Such a man distinguishes himself as nearly a breed apart. He is to be honored, revered, even perhaps, a lttle feared.
I agree of course that reasonable courage is an adaptive quality, and to a certain extent will be passed on yes, but its very meaning has to be understood in the broader context of a kind of "overcoming" of that which comes most naturally.
Animals without fear would last about as long as animals without the capacity to feel pain. IN other words, not very long...
That's my story and for now, I'm sticking to it... |
Edited by - art on 07/06/2007 06:54:35 |
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JohnD
USA
371 Posts |
Posted - 07/06/2007 : 15:46:53
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| I don't agree that worry is hardwired in us.....I think some of us have a genetic disposition for worry but it is re-inforced every step along the way (parents, teachers, coaches etc..) - conditioning if you will. I'm sure that if we were more conscious about the way we treated each other and the children in this society that worry would be greatly reduced....and not necessarily replaced by great courage but more with a calm acceptance |
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art
1903 Posts |
Posted - 07/06/2007 : 18:19:26
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| I've never met a human being who doesn't worry. |
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floorten
United Kingdom
120 Posts |
Posted - 07/08/2007 : 14:38:32
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Worry is the malfunction of a mind which isn't aware of its own natural connection to Source and instead is trapped in ego delusions of being constantly at war with reality.
We may never know if we are "hardwired" to worry. What can be known and experienced is that with deep presence it is possible to live a life virtually free of worry. There have been many people who have demonstrated this over the centuries. They are commonly characterised as being "enlightened", which only means they have learnt how to wholly accept reality and worry about no part of it.
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"What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves."
Robert Anton Wilson |
Edited by - floorten on 07/08/2007 14:48:36 |
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floorten
United Kingdom
120 Posts |
Posted - 07/08/2007 : 14:44:35
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Worrying brings nothing in terms of evolutionary benefit. This whole argument that we worry because our ancestors were scared of lions is just so much nonsense IMHO.
Caution and alertness would be an evolutionary benefit. Worry would more likely be a hinderance as it impedes rational and appropriate response by absorbing too much attention.
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"What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves."
Robert Anton Wilson |
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art
1903 Posts |
Posted - 07/08/2007 : 15:30:52
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quote:
Worry is the malfunction of a mind which isn't aware of its own natural connection to Source and instead is trapped in ego delusions of being constantly at war with reality.
HUh?
You've lost me I'm afraid. If you've personally evolved beyond feeling the need to worry, I congratulate you. It's quite a feat, given how ingrained it is in the human psyche.
However, next time you're stricken with a serious illness, or someone in your family is, or your job is in danger, or your house becomes infested with termites, let us know how you do on the worry front.
My father is in his mid-eighties now and increasingly frail. He shouldn't drive, but continues to. He should be using a cane, if not a walker, but refuses to do that as well. Last time he was here he almost took a header off our front steps. Are you telling me it's not in some sense completely natural and human to worry about him?
If you maintain it's not, then fine. End of discussion. If on the other hand you agree that there is in fact a very human tendency to worry about our loved ones, for just one example, then you have to ask yourself where this tendency comes from. Since I don't believe in "intelligent design" I'm left with evolution as a means to explain it.
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Edited by - art on 07/08/2007 17:24:20 |
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floorten
United Kingdom
120 Posts |
Posted - 07/09/2007 : 04:51:35
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I've been worrying a lot less recently for sure, now I've realised what's at the root of worrying. I never said I've stopped worrying, but there are grey areas, and I'm certainly moving towards less worry now, so yes, perhaps congratulations are in order ;-)
Regarding any external situation which causes you to worry, the answer is always the same, though the difficulty of staying present and not worrying may increase proportionally to how serious you believe your situation to be.
Worrying will not add one single minute to a cancer-threatened life, pay off a single cent of debt to the bailiffs knocking on your door, or kill a single termite with its bitterness. Once you truly appreciate the truth of this, and see worryness for what it is - an insane ego mind structure which is intent on renewing itself through conflict and believes that its own negativity has the power to magically change the world - the worrying will gradually abate. Maybe even one day to the point where you are almost always at peace.
"Natural" isn't really the issue. We can call anything which occurs a lot in humans natural. It may be natural to worry about your father, but it can't be productive and it can't help him or you. A better question is always "is this helping?". If not, you are free to choose a different thought, though I quite appreciate this is VERY difficult to do initially.
Another good question is "does this feel good?". Seriously - worrying feels awful, right? For me it's really reason enough to change those worrying thoughts just because of how BAD they feel each time I think them.
Regarding the whole evolution thing, I see worry and fear as quite different mechanisms. Fear is a productive response to something we can do something about in the here and now. Worry is a non-productive imagination about things we are powerless to change here and now. I see fear having a large role in evolution, but worry having a very negligible one.
Worry, in my mind, has come about with the change of lifestyles in modern times which require us to be less and less present in our day to day lives. There are ever fewer physical tasks demanding our presence, ever fewer real dangers to bring us back into sharp consciousness. In the absence of these demands on the mind, it goes a bit loopy, creating its own negative dramas and then trying to solve them again purely by mind power. In this sense, I see worry more as a negative side effect of past evolutional mechanisms than something that has a role to play today.
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"What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves."
Robert Anton Wilson |
Edited by - floorten on 07/09/2007 04:57:40 |
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art
1903 Posts |
Posted - 07/09/2007 : 05:42:47
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I never said or implied that I thought worry was good, at least in excess. At the same time, surely you can see how in human beings, the one animal with an imagination, hence the ability to project himself forward in time, worry is the mechanism that motivates him to forestall dangers and solve problems...
Your breezy dismisal ("just so much nonsense") of the usefulness of worry in a primitive world totally misses the point. Say caveman Bill is lying in his cave, sawing wood to beat the band despite the lions he saw lurking about earlier. But caveman Joe, (my great, great, great great, great great great great grandfather) is lying in the same cave, his eyes wide open. He's filled with worry and fear, both for himself and his family. Sometime in the long cold night of tossing and turning he comes up with a plan to elude the lions..
Now which caveman is more likely to survive, and in that survival pass on the tendency to worry?
Worry and fear are different aspects of the same emotion. Fear is more visceral, more direct. It's the same thing that all animals feel. Worry is what happens when that fear is filtered through the evolved human brain. Worry is an exercise of the intellect and of the imagination. It is uniquely human in my opinion and not nearly so easily dismissed as you seem to think.
A human being without the capacity for worry is in my view a strange human being indeed. |
Edited by - art on 07/09/2007 06:08:15 |
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Wavy Soul
USA
779 Posts |
Posted - 07/09/2007 : 06:14:30
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quote:
I've been worrying a lot less recently for sure, now I've realised what's at the root of worrying. I never said I've stopped worrying, but there are grey areas, and I'm certainly moving towards less worry now, so yes, perhaps congratulations are in order ;-)
I'm worried about you guys, Art and Floorten!
Seriously though, I am with you Floorten on what you are saying. And in my own experience, especially very, very recently, I have been accelerating into an ongoing presence and connectedness that has removed a huge amount of worry habit.
There is a cognitive shift that can be made into a new way of thinking. Some famous, popular guides on this are Abraham teachings ("does this thought feel good?") and Byron Katie ("is it really true?"). Anyone who hasn't explored this possibility actively might want to try it (my current fave is the late, great Joel Goldsmith's work btw). After all, TMS work is all about changing our thinking.
The reason I said that I'm worried about you guys (even though I'm not), is that if this cognitive shift isn't accompanied by compassion and humility, or if it isn't perceived as so being, it can make others defensive and feel made wrong. Being okay with reality as it is in this moment means, perhaps MOST importantly, being okay with the way others are believing, feeling, creating, experiencing it.
I had a very rough experience with Byron Katie (whom I greatly admire nonetheless). I didn't study with her except in one seminar, but she is a friend of a friend and knew my story. When I had just recently lost my ex partner (to betrayal, not death, but in fact this might feel worse), and couldn't stop crying on and off for days, intensely grieving, she came up to me and said "sadness is a tantrum against reality."
She was right, but... throughout my whole process of loss I had, through long practice (though not specifically through her work) been questioning and releasing all my thoughts. But when challenged with a limbically primeval experience like loss of the intimate one, my whole being and nervous system was erupting in a grief process that clear thinking only partially alleviated. In retrospect, it felt as though she wasn't okay with the current reality of my sadness and was making it wrong. Of course, this is just one of my thoughts...
My point is that when we are making the shift from worry (a kind of thinking addiction, for sure) into enlightened safety, we need to do it without "stinking of enlightenment." Because the covert belief that "some people are getting it and others are not" is just a way to cover up the greatest fear or worry of them all, something like "I'm not okay." One way to feel more okay is to make others less okay.
I want to say that I totally get the point of view that "it's human to worry," AND the point of view that says "it's just a crazy Western habit." This extraordinary enlightened largesse makes me better than either of you.
;-)
Actually what I'm really saying is what I've said often here - the real growth happens in a kind of spiral between changing our thinking and feeling our feelings just as they are and it's messy. It isn't all "top-down" (i.e. thoughts creating feelings). There are some limbic codings which seem to emerge bottom-up. Baby monkeys separated from their moms freak out and get depressed or die. That limbic stuff is DEEP and not all susceptible to mental control. A lot of spiritual teachers I know have obvious TMS accompanying their "enlightened mental clarity," because they don't know they have a reservoir of rage.
And... it IS a reservoir (i.e. finite), not a river, even though daily life will always be potentially enraging. But when we clear up a lot of the backlog, things sure do seem less worrying...
xxx
Love is the answer, whatever the question |
Edited by - Wavy Soul on 07/09/2007 06:18:56 |
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art
1903 Posts |
Posted - 07/09/2007 : 08:23:44
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All very interesting. Love you Wavy, but you've gone beyond me I'm afraid. I'll try not to let it worry me however....
I don't want to be a skeptic, but my take on worry is that it's so ingrained, so fundamental, so human, that unless you're some sort of highly trained Buddhist monk, during times of stress it will always tend to rise to the fore.
As they say, nothing concentrates the mind like a (in this case) figurative hanging.
That the non-worriers among us are so rare, speaks volumes it seems to me as to it's central place in the human psyche, but then again, it seems you've signed on to that..I think
Ever get the feeling that forum discussion is akin to trying to put socks on an octupus?
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Edited by - art on 07/09/2007 09:14:37 |
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Hilary
United Kingdom
191 Posts |
Posted - 07/09/2007 : 11:04:04
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Very interesting discussion.
I think what you say, Wavy, is absolutely spot-on. I saw BK this weekend. I'm a big fan of hers, and have absolutely found that her system can work to help me let go of thoughts that worry me and start to feel a sense of distance from my own thoughts.
At the same time though, there's a problem that people who are already prone to perfectionist thinking can end up becoming obsessed with ONE way of doing things, and then feeling that they're not getting this (whatever it is) right if they're not doing it all the time and getting the "right" results. The "this" could be Sarno, BK, Eckart Tolle, psychotherapy, meditation...whatever.
I guess what I'm saying is that everything has to be handled with a little lightness of touch. And knowing when to use which tool, as much as possible. Otherwise the perfectionist cycle can set in all over again and before you know it you're worried that you're worried that you're worried. And on and on.
ETA: This is fab:
the real growth happens in a kind of spiral between changing our thinking and feeling our feelings just as they are and it's messy. |
Edited by - Hilary on 07/09/2007 11:09:53 |
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miehnesor
USA
430 Posts |
Posted - 07/09/2007 : 12:07:56
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quote:
Originally posted by Wavy Soul
Actually what I'm really saying is what I've said often here - the real growth happens in a kind of spiral between changing our thinking and feeling our feelings just as they are and it's messy. It isn't all "top-down" (i.e. thoughts creating feelings). There are some limbic codings which seem to emerge bottom-up. Baby monkeys separated from their moms freak out and get depressed or die. That limbic stuff is DEEP and not all susceptible to mental control. A lot of spiritual teachers I know have obvious TMS accompanying their "enlightened mental clarity," because they don't know they have a reservoir of rage.
And... it IS a reservoir (i.e. finite), not a river, even though daily life will always be potentially enraging. But when we clear up a lot of the backlog, things sure do seem less worrying...
Wavy- I really like what you have said here and believe it wholeheartedly. The deeper the stuff inside is the less conscious control we have of it. Also the analogy of a reservoir and not a river is very appropriate. Feeling our feelings can slowly empty the reservoir.
The concept of "bottom up" healing has been the basis of my ongoing recovery. |
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Dave or anyone -- The 100% Thing
