When a worry keeps coming back, write down what it actually says. Beside it, write what you are assuming. In the third column, give an answer you can believe. In this episode I use one question in a team meeting to show how the three columns work, and when to put the pen down.
What did the thought actually say?
You need someone to clarify a deadline. What stops you asking is a prediction: everyone will think you are incompetent. Write that sentence down as it came to you. If you tidy it up first, you will end up answering a much more reasonable thought than the one that kept you quiet.
David Burns uses the middle column to name a thinking error. In my version, the question is simply: what am I assuming? In this meeting you are predicting what your colleagues will think, then turning one question about a deadline into a verdict on your ability. Those are two assumptions you can check.
Give an answer you would believe in the meeting
Maybe somebody will think it is a daft question. You cannot promise yourself otherwise. What you do know is that you need the answer to do your work. You could ask which deadline applies. That leaves room for the awkward possibility and gives you something useful to do.
Once you have written a fair answer, stop. If you keep rewriting it until you feel better, you can spend the whole meeting on the worksheet and still go home without the deadline. A change in mood is not the test.
Read Seneca and other Stoics on anxiety for the distinction between a fear and the evidence for it. The dichotomy of control explains why asking the question is yours to choose and your colleagues’ response is not.
Sources: Seneca’s Letter 13 and David Burns’s Feeling Good. The Ramirez and Beilock study examined writing before a test. The Jamison and Scogin trial studied a self-help book with minimal contact. Neither tested this adaptation of the worksheet. The course opening mentioned in the transcript refers to the date of recording.
Full transcript
Lightly edited for readability.
You're in a meeting, there's a question you need to ask. Perhaps it's a reasonable question. And you actually need the answer to do your job properly. And then a thought turns up. If I ask this, everyone will think I'm incompetent. Last week I said the trick is to separate the feeling from the instruction. Have the sensation, turn down the plan. And that works for a lot of things. But this isn't a plan. It's an argument. And it's a good one. It sounds like common sense. You turn it down and it's back 30 seconds later. Slightly rephrased, slightly more convincing. So you sit on the question, the meeting ends, and then you spend the drive home replaying it.
This episode is about what to do with this kind of thought. Why thinking about it doesn't work.
The instinct is to think your way out of it, talk yourself down, out-argue the negative or difficult thought. The trouble is that the thought is happening in your head, and your plan for dealing with it is also happening in your head. It's in the same room, same lighting, same tired brain at the end of the day. The anxious thought kind of has an advantage, it's more charged. And that's why the tool I want to give you today is a written tool, pen and paper. Not because writing is somehow magic, but because writing forces you to slow down. It turns the thought into a structured object, something sitting on a page in front of you rather than something you're inside of. When it's in your head, the thought is identical to you. When it's on paper, it's a sentence, and sentences can be checked.
There's a lovely study on this published in Science 2011. Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock at the University of Chicago had students spend 10 minutes writing about their worries right before a real exam. Those students did better than the ones who didn't, and the most anxious students gained the most. Writing about something unrelated didn't help. It was getting the worry itself onto the page that mattered.
The tool is called the triple column technique, and it comes from David Burns, the psychiatrist who wrote Feeling Good in 1980. In one trial, people with depression who simply worked through that book did better than people on a waiting list and they kept their gains. So this isn't a fancy journaling idea, it has a lot of evidence behind it. I've changed one thing, and I need to be clear about it. Burns asks you to label the thinking error in the middle column using a list of distortions, whereas I'm asking you to write what you're assuming instead. So it's the same job but less jargon, and you don't need to look at another list to figure out what the distortions are. It's just what are you assuming is a way to simplify the process.
In the last episode, I mentioned that the founders of cognitive therapy read the Stoics, and this is what the lineage looks like in real time. It's Epictetus' idea that it's about our opinions about things that trouble us, turned into a worksheet, which is cognitive therapy. And there's a line in Seneca, I think, that describes the middle column pretty much perfectly. It's from the same letter I quoted again in last week’s episode, letter 13. He says, We magnify our sorrow or we imagine it, or we get ahead of it. So what Seneca is saying here is magnify, imagine, get ahead of it. Remember those three things. They'll come back in a minute. And then Seneca does something that sounds very modern. He tells Lucilius to test the fear. Is this actually happening now or is it a story about later? And if it's later, he says, remember that many things can happen in between. Then the best bit, he tells him to weigh his hopes and his fears carefully, almost equally. Two thousand years before anyone drew a column on a worksheet.
So how does this work, right? Well, we're gonna pick a small everyday worry, not the biggest thing in your life, just something ordinary, the meeting before that you have a question to ask is a good example. And first, before any columns, write a line about what happened and how you felt. So, team meeting, needed to ask about a deadline, felt my face go hot, said nothing. Keep it clean. Then split the page into three columns. Column one, the thought exactly as it arrived, in your own words. Don't tidy it up, don't make it sound more reasonable than it was. If it sounds a bit silly or over the top, or something you wouldn't want to show others, that means you're doing it right. So the thought could be something like if I ask this question, everyone will think I'm incompetent. It could even be meaner and harsher than that. Write it the way it actually sounded in your head, even if it's embarrassing when you look at it when it's written down. And that's kind of the point.
Column two, what you're assuming. This is where Seneca now comes in. Am I getting ahead of it? Yes. I'm predicting how other people will react before I've said a single word. Am I magnifying it? Yes. I've turned one question into a verdict on my entire ability. Am I imagining it? Well, I don't actually know what everyone thinks. I've never asked them. I'm filling in the blank with the worst version. You're not arguing with the thought here, you're just describing it, like a referee, not a lawyer.
And column three, and now we look at column three, a response that takes the evidence seriously. I don't know how everyone will react. I need this information to do work properly. I can ask a specific question. That's it. Notice what the answer is not. It is not everyone will be really impressed with me. It is not meant to be a pep talk. Okay? This is a wise, balanced, sage-like, accurate version of how things probably are when they're free of distortions.
And now this is the mistake that everyone makes. Column three. People tend to write a motivational poster here. I'm capable and confident and my ideas matter. And their brain reads it and goes, No, you're not. And now the anxious thought has won the argument on paper in your own handwriting. And Burns was clear about this. The answer in column three has to be something you actually believe. If you don't believe it, it won't hold. So leave room for the awkward bit. Someone might think it's a daft question. You might stumble over it. The response doesn't have to promise you a good outcome. It only has to be more accurate than the thought was. Accuracy is a much lower bar than confidence, and it's one you can actually clear on a bad day.
No change is an honest answer. When you've finished, check in. Has your view of the situation shifted? Your mood. Sometimes it has, sometimes it shifted a little, and sometimes nothing. That's fine. No change is an honest answer.
What you mustn't do is keep rewriting until you feel calm. Because that's not the technique anymore. That's checking. And checking is one of the things that keeps anxiety going. You've just swapped going over it in your head for now going over it on paper. Write it once, well enough, and then just leave it. And remember what we said last week. If the aim is to feel calm, every moment you don't is a failure. The aim here is to see the thought clearly once. Then you put the pen down and you go and ask the question. Or you don't this time and you write about that one tomorrow. Okay?
So one honest boundary. This is for ordinary everyday worries. The meeting, the email, you haven't sent the thing, someone said that you keep replaying. If you've got thoughts that keep coming back and they're really distressing you, or something's been sitting on you for weeks and it's stopping you from living your life, that's not a worksheet job, right? So please talk to your GP. Make the calls, do the research, get in touch with someone. There's a lot of free anonymous helplines as well. Okay? Not a cop-out. You can do these exercises as well as having professional support.
What you've been listening to in this talk is a slightly altered version that I've remade, but it's heavily based on lesson 5.4 in my course, Stoic Anxiety Mastery, and that course is open right now. It's in there with a written template alongside the guided practices and the other exercises in an order you can follow. If that's useful to you, it's at stoicanxiety.com. And if it isn't, the three columns are yours to practise with anyway. All you need is a pen.
So this week, pick one small worry, write the thought, write what you're assuming, write something more accurate, then put the pen down. Next time, the hardest part of all not knowing what to do, but remembering to do it when the moment actually arrives. Thanks for listening, guys.
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