Life in the Future Versus Life in the Present

functioning. I would like to elaborate here on some of the features of their thinking that I found particularly salient. People suffering from generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) live in a strange world. Actually, they do not live in the world very much at all. And perhaps it is not such a strange world after all, given that where they typically live and how they live are not all that different from what you and I periodically or perhaps often experience. Basic research indicates that most of the cognitive, physiological, affective, and behavioral consequences of chronic worry or GAD can be phasically induced in nonanxious individuals by having them worry about their topic of greatest concern (see Borkovec, 1994; Borkovec, Alcaine, & Behar, in press). GAD clients just live there more of the time because they perceive more threat (Mathews & MacLeod, 1994), and they have greater difficulty controlling their worrisome process (Borkovec, Shadick, & Hopkins, 1991). Whether I am a nonanxious person who worries at times or a client suffering from GAD, when I am worrying, I am mostly engaging in thought or talking to myself. This thinking, triggered by internal or external cues that signal danger, primarily concerns the future, and this future-oriented thinking involves the anxious anticipation of, and mental attempts to avoid, the many negative events that I think or that I imagine might happen based on the threatening meaning of the cues that initiated the worrying (Borkovec & Inz, 1990; Borkovec, Robinson, Pruzinsky, & DePree, 1983). In a worrisome state, I am detecting or interpreting threat in my environment all of the time and often outside of my awareness (Mathews & MacLeod, 1994). The consequence of any perception of threat is the activation of basic fight-orflight reactions motivating attempts to escape or avoid. Quite naturally under these circumstances, I feel compelled to figure out how to prevent these bad things from happening or how to prepare myself for the worst. Worrying is a device that I believe can function to do this (Borkovec & Roemer, 1995). I am facing problems posed by my worrying that are, however, largely insolvable. This is because, although fight-or-flight is being elicited by a large quantity of internally generated, anxious material, there is no place to run and no one to fight. The only resources left to me when I face a threatening situation that cannot be behaviorally avoided is to freeze (resulting in procrastination, increased muscle tone, sympathetic Address correspondence to Thomas D. Borkovec, Department of Psychology, Room 302, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802. E-mail: [email protected]. Life in the Future Versus Life in the Present