ABSTRACT
A woman sits alone on a park bench, talking to herself. What is it we are listening to? Is she a madwoman? Is she simply thinking aloud? The author asks her how she sees it. In this chapter, we are introduced to the concept of worry and how it is interlinked with counterfactual thinking. Studies in which people are asked what they are thinking about tend to indicate that our thoughts are not connected to the place or situation in which we find ourselves. We think about the past, about everything the future may bring, and in particular, everything that could go wrong. Evolutionary psychologists tend to argue that this anxiety was once useful, but the author argues that there is a difference between fear, worry and anxiety and that the latter two have remained of little use. Yet why is it so hard to stop worrying once we start? Through Tolstoy and his youthful competition not to think about a polar bear – as well as more recent experiments in the area – we learn about the impossibility of deliberately avoiding thinking a certain thought.
