David A. Carbonell’s The Worry Trick: How Your Brain Tricks You into Expecting the Worst and What You Can Do About It is a powerful guide for those struggling with chronic worry and anxiety. Drawing from his expertise as a clinical psychologist specializing in anxiety disorders, Carbonell explores how worry isn’t just an emotional problem—it’s a deceptive trick the brain plays to keep us “safe” while actually making us more anxious. This article unpacks the key insights and methods from The Worry Trick, offering a comprehensive understanding of how to recognize, challenge, and ultimately dismantle the habits of worry.
How Worry Becomes a Trap
Worry is often mistaken for a helpful mental strategy—something we do to solve problems or prepare for potential threats. Carbonell identifies this misunderstanding as the core of what he calls “the worry trick.” According to him, worry acts like a false alarm: it presents hypothetical dangers as if they were real and imminent. This is especially true for people who suffer from Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), health anxiety, panic disorder, or obsessive-compulsive tendencies.
When we experience anxiety, the brain enters a state of high alert. The fight-or-flight response is activated, flooding our system with adrenaline and cortisol. Carbonell explains that worry functions as a mental attempt to regain control—by imagining worst-case scenarios and preparing for them. But this only intensifies the anxiety because it reinforces the idea that there really is something dangerous or urgent that must be handled.
In essence, worry becomes a loop: we worry to feel safer, but the very act of worrying makes us feel worse. The more we engage with the anxious thoughts—analyzing them, debating them, trying to “solve” them—the more entrenched they become. The worry trick is that it feels useful, but it’s actually harmful.
Why Fighting Worry Makes It Worse
One of the most counterintuitive lessons in The Worry Trick is that resisting worry—trying to suppress or argue with it—actually gives it more power. Carbonell refers to this as the paradox of anxiety: the more you try to control your thoughts, the more out of control you feel. This is rooted in what psychologists call “experiential avoidance,” where people try to eliminate unpleasant feelings by avoiding them.
Carbonell uses the metaphor of Chinese finger traps: the harder you pull to escape, the tighter it gets. Similarly, trying to fight anxiety by rationalizing with it, avoiding situations, or constantly seeking reassurance only strengthens the anxiety habit. The mind interprets this resistance as confirmation that the fear must be valid.
Instead, Carbonell advocates for a practice of acceptance and mindfulness. When worry arises, rather than engaging with it or pushing it away, we can learn to observe it without judgment. Recognizing worry as a mental habit—rather than a useful signal—begins to loosen its grip. Mindfulnesss techniques and acceptance-based strategies like those in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) play a central role in this transformation.
Shifting from Problem-Solving to Presence
Carbonell makes a vital distinction between productive and unproductive worry. Productive worry leads to immediate action or resolution (e.g., preparing for a job interview or paying a bill). Unproductive worry, on the other hand, is speculative and unsolvable (e.g., “What if I lose my job?” or “What if I get sick?”).
Worriers often confuse the two, treating all thoughts with equal urgency. The key shift, according to Carbonell, is moving from a problem-solving mode to a presence-based mode. This means stepping out of the anxious thinking loop and grounding oneself in the here and now. Instead of trying to “think your way out” of anxiety, you train yourself to “feel your way through” it—without needing to fix or solve anything in that moment.
This is where techniques such as breathing exercises, grounding techniques, and cognitive defusion come in. Cognitive defusion—taken from ACT—means learning to see your thoughts as just thoughts, not facts. For instance, instead of saying “I might die if I fly,” you might say, “I’m having the thought that I might die if I fly.” This subtle shift distances you from the thought and reduces its power.
By turning down the volume on worry and tuning into the present, you interrupt the worry trick and begin to retrain your brain to respond to anxiety differently.
Building a New Relationship with Anxiety
Perhaps the most transformative idea in The Worry Trick is that you don’t need to eliminate anxiety to live a peaceful, fulfilling life. Instead, you need to change your relationship with it. Carbonell encourages readers to think of anxiety not as an enemy to defeat, but as a misguided friend trying to help.
He introduces the concept of “treating anxiety as a background process,” much like a noisy air conditioner—present, but not something you have to focus on or fix. This reframing reduces anxiety’s centrality in your daily life. You stop building your behavior around avoiding it and start moving toward what matters to you, even if anxiety tags along.
Exposure and acceptance are key tools here. By intentionally facing the situations you fear—without trying to control how you feel—you teach your brain that discomfort is tolerable and temporary. This is the essence of long-term change. Over time, your brain learns that you can survive worry and even function well in its presence.
Carbonell also emphasizes the importance of humor and self-compassion. Laughing at your worry—not in a mocking way, but in a gentle, lighthearted manner—can shrink it down to size. So can treating yourself with the same kindness you would offer a friend facing the same struggles.
Final Thoughts
The Worry Trick offers a fresh, empowering take on anxiety that challenges conventional strategies of logic and control. By revealing how worry masquerades as helpful and by offering tools for acceptance, mindfulness, and presence, Carbonell equips readers to step out of the anxiety spiral. His approach is not about eliminating worry altogether, but about reclaiming your life from its grip.
For anyone caught in the cycle of worry, this book serves as both a mirror and a roadmap: it shows you how anxiety deceives you, and it lights the path toward resilience, peace, and psychological freedom.
