Worry Can Lead To Solutions -- Or To More Problems Creative Worrying, Psychologists Say, Can Solve Problems. But Don`t Let Those Anxieties Take Over Your Life.

September 29, 1985|By Susan Stobaugh, Special to the News/Sun-Sentinel

AIDS is today`s hot new worry, and in the furor, honest concern has been replaced by frivolous fretting. A Paris newspaper recently reported that Bo Derek will require all future male co-stars to be tested for AIDS before laying their mitts (or any other part of their body) on her. Douglas Powell, psychologist at Harvard University Mental Health Services, has seen patients obsessed about mosquito bites because they`re afraid the insects might carry AIDS.

People worry about many things. Men worry about baldness. Women worry about their weight. New parents worry about crib death. Spouses worry that their mates, when late, have been killed in car crashes. Everyone worries about nuclear war and cancer. And let`s not forget the less cosmic worries: Will it rain on my barbecue; will I be able to meet my mortgage payment this month; will that package get lost in the mail?

It sure seems as if a lot of worrying is going on these days, but mental health specialists don`t think that`s necessarily all bad. ``If you`re entering a busy expressway, it would be foolish not to worry,`` says Chicago psychiatrist Dr. Richard Glass. ``There are times when anxiety is normal and not to have it would be dangerous.``

Washington, D.C.,-area psychologist Ginger Hamilton agrees: ``Worrying is perfectly healthy if it causes you to find a solution to your problem. But it`s unhealthy when it becomes an object in itself and interferes with your ability to resolve your problems.``

Take cancer, for example. Women have been lectured into oblivion about the need to conduct a breast exam every month. But most women would ignore the lecture if they weren`t concerned (read: worried) about their health. They also probably wouldn`t exercise and have routine mammograms after age 35. Thus worry, in this case, has a positive effect.

Hamilton adds: ``A little healthy worrying is just one indication of being a grown-up. People who don`t worry at all have placed responsibility for their actions elsewhere.`` She cites as an example the many women of a generation ago who never worried about family finances because they believed that their husbands took care of everything.

So now we all have permission to worry about our problems and even are encouraged to do so if their solution is under our control. But, let`s face it, a lot of needless, unhealthy fretting goes on over matters we can`t control. That`s the kind of worry we ought to worry about. As Dr. Harold Pruett, a Los Angeles psychiatrist, puts it, ``The trouble with worrying is that it often detracts from taking charge and finding problem-solving strategies.``

Take the cancer example. If worrying makes women perform monthly breast exams, great. But if worrying about cancer is a pervasive undercurrent in their lives, this stress, some medical studies say, may promote cancer.

Or how about the example of rain on the barbecue? If worrying about whether it`s going to rain leads us to come up with a contingency plan, so much the better. However, if it just gets us worked up to such a frenzy that we`re in hysterics by the time the first guest arrives (on a beautiful summer`s eve), then the worrying is part of the problem and not part of the solution. That`s the point at which worrying ``creates a negative reality,`` according to T.D. Barkovec of Penn State University`s department of psychology and the specialist viewed by the American Psychological Association as the nation`s leading expert on worry.

Why do we torture ourselves with unhealthy worrying? To some degree, it`s part of the normal process of growing up. ``At some point in our lives,`` says Harvard`s Powell, ``we all recognize that our parents are going to die and leave us alone and that other bad things will happen to us. It`s natural to worry about that.``

Natural, maybe, but not necessarily healthy, especially when carried to extremes. Powell sees patients who worry that they`re not as successful as some of their peers or that they`ll never live up to the expectations their fourth-grade reading teacher had of them. (You remember -- she was the one who told you you were the best reader she had ever had.) Others worry that their current relationship, though great, won`t last. Or that they`ve closed off their options by choosing to go to law school.

But there are worse kinds of worrying, such as the kind Powell refers to as ``defensive worrying,`` used as a mechanism for avoiding reality. You worry so much about whether your report at work will be the most brilliant ever presented that, in the end, you never finish the report. Or you`re so busy worrying about your health that you don`t have time to face what`s really wrong with your life.

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