The Worry Trick

Have you ever noticed that the harder you try to stop worrying, the more worried you become? In Outsmart Your Anxious Brain, clinical psychologist David A. Carbonell argues that anxiety plays a sneaky game with your mind—it tricks you into treating discomfort like danger. The book’s central insight is that what feels intuitive in anxious moments, such as trying to calm down or fight the fear, is actually the very thing that keeps you stuck. Carbonell challenges you to do something completely counterintuitive: stop resisting anxiety and start working with it instead of against it.

Carbonell draws on decades of clinical experience to reveal the psychology behind chronic anxiety. Through humorous examples, empathetic explanations, and practical exercises, he shows how panic, worry, obsessive thoughts, and phobias are all symptoms of the same underlying trick. What unites them, he explains, is a pattern of mistaking harmless internal experiences for catastrophic threats and then reacting as though you’re in danger.

The Core Paradox of Anxiety

According to Carbonell, anxiety is a counterintuitive problem because your natural instincts—to avoid, escape, or control—make it worse. He compares this to chasing a runaway puppy: if you chase it, it runs faster, but if you turn away, it comes back to you. Similarly, if you resist anxiety, it grows stronger. Anxiety is not an external enemy to be fought but an internal discomfort to be experienced and understood. The more you resist, the more power you give it. The harder you try to avoid anxiety, the more persistently it stays with you.

This is why people with chronic anxiety often feel trapped in a loop: they anticipate future anxiety, fear its symptoms, and do everything in their power to prevent it—only to become more anxious. Carbonell reframes anxiety not as a danger to eliminate but as a false alarm your brain mistakenly treats as life-threatening.

The Rule of Opposites

A key concept introduced early in the book is what Carbonell calls the Rule of Opposites. He urges you to recognize that your first reaction to anxiety is usually 180 degrees wrong. Your gut says, “fight or flee,” but the right move is to relax, stay, and allow. If you feel you must take a deep breath, the wiser move is actually to exhale. If you want to escape a crowded room, it’s more helpful to stay and ride the wave. If your instinct says to distract yourself, the opposite—observing your fear calmly—will bring relief faster.

Carbonell illustrates this through stories of real clients, like Eleanor, who was terrified of fainting while driving at night, and Owen, whose panic attacks were fueled by struggling to breathe. Both learned to let their anxiety happen instead of resisting it, discovering in the process that fear eventually fades when you stop fighting it. His message is simple but radical: recovery comes not from control, but from acceptance and willingness.

Why We Get Fooled by Anxiety

Carbonell explains that anxiety keeps you hooked with what he calls “safety behaviors.” These are the rituals, support people, or objects that give short-term comfort but maintain long-term fear. Avoidance, reassurance-seeking, and mental checking are all examples. They make you believe you’re safer, but they also tell your brain that danger really exists. Over time, you learn only that you can’t handle things without your safety behavior—and that’s the real trap.

In addition, Carbonell identifies thought patterns—like “what-if” thinking—that pull you into endless cycles of worry. Each “What if I panic?” or “What if something goes wrong?” becomes bait on a hook. The trick, he argues, is not to stop thinking these thoughts but to recognize them as mental noise. Learning to notice the hook before biting it is how you break free from anxiety’s vicious loop.

Ten Simple Ways to Beat the Worry Trick

In the rest of the book, Carbonell translates these insights into ten practical steps for retraining your anxious brain. These range from specific behavioral exercises—like belly breathing and exposure practice—to mental approaches such as humoring your worries, observing instead of distracting, and accepting feelings while controlling actions. Each technique builds the same skill: resisting the urge to control anxiety and instead responding in ways that promote calm and confidence over time.

What makes Carbonell’s book stand out is his warmth and humor. He frequently uses metaphors—the runaway puppy, the rope-a-dope of boxing, the “attic of your mind”—to make complex psychological ideas intuitive. Much like Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness teachings or Claire Weekes’s classic “float through fear” method, Carbonell’s message is grounded in acceptance and self-compassion rather than control or perfection.

Why This Matters

We live in what Carbonell calls the “age of anxiety,” where our brains confuse discomfort with threat faster than ever. The modern world rewards doing, escaping, and fixing—but anxiety recovery requires the exact opposite. The wisdom of this book lies in its paradox: peace begins when you stop trying to be peaceful. By doing the opposite of what fear demands, you outsmart the tricks of your anxious brain and reclaim your life piece by piece. The rest of Carbonell’s guide shows you exactly how.

Anxiety isn’t simply a surge of fear—it’s the result of a relationship you develop with fear. Carbonell calls this relationship the worry trick: a pattern of treating discomfort as danger and responding with avoidance, control, or escape. When you see anxiety as something to eliminate, you unknowingly fuel it. The reason this trick is so powerful is that it hijacks your protective instincts—fight, flight, or freeze—and redirects them toward internal sensations rather than real threats.

How Safety Behaviors Keep You Trapped

Safety behaviors—like carrying a bottle of water everywhere, texting a friend for reassurance, or avoiding crowded places—offer short-term comfort but long-term consequences. They confirm your brain’s false assumption that you’re only safe with the object, person, or ritual. Over time, you teach your mind that safety is external, not internal. Susan, one of Carbonell’s examples, feared fainting during panic attacks. She avoided many public spaces and relied on a friend to escort her anywhere crowded. Although she never fainted, she believed her survival depended on her friend’s presence. As a result, she reinforced the very dependency that made her world smaller.

Carbonell uses similar stories—a woman who carried expired medication for years, a man unable to drive without a cell phone, others who used “lucky shirts” or comfort objects—to illustrate how safety habits masquerade as protection but ultimately increase vulnerability. Emotionally, each safety behavior says, “I can’t handle this on my own,” when the truth is, you can.

The Paradox of Avoidance

Avoidance is perhaps the most common and dangerous safety behavior. When you skip a flight to avoid panic or leave a party early to keep calm, anxiety rewards you with relief—but that relief is short-lived and costly. Over time, your anxiety grows stronger because you never let your brain learn the truth: that the feared outcome doesn’t occur. This trade—short-term comfort for long-term freedom—is the “bad bargain” Carbonell warns against.

He advises replacing avoidance with what he calls practice—consciously approaching avoided experiences in small, deliberate steps. Like exercising a muscle, gradual practice helps retrain your brain to experience discomfort without interpreting it as danger. Exposure in this sense isn’t about enduring pain but about unlearning false alarms.

Unmasking Misattributions and Control Myths

Our minds also deceive us through misattribution. After surviving a stressful moment, we might credit external factors—luck, a friend’s presence, timing—rather than recognizing our inner resilience. Carbonell warns that this thinking strengthens anxiety’s illusion of power. Similarly, he debunks the idea that control means control over feelings. Real control, he insists, isn’t measured by how calm you feel but by what you do despite your feelings. A driver having a panic attack who still drives safely is fully in control, regardless of his trembling hands.

By exposing how these safety behaviors and illusions of control sustain fear, Carbonell frees you to see anxiety for what it is: discomfort dressed up as danger. Recognizing and reducing these behaviors is the first step in truly outsmarting your anxious brain.

At the heart of Carbonell’s method is a simple but profound concept: The Rule of Opposites. Every anxious instinct, he says, is likely wrong. When your gut urges you to run, grab, tense, or escape, the helpful response is almost always to stay, relax, and observe. This ‘reverse compass’ works because anxiety activates your brain’s survival system, which evolved to detect predators—not panic attacks or anxious thoughts. Modern anxiety stems not from lions in the grass but from alarms misfiring in the mind.

Why Your Instincts Are Wrong

The human brain prefers false alarms over missed dangers. It would rather mislabel discomfort as danger than risk ignoring a real threat. That bias kept our ancestors alive—but in modern life, it turns ordinary stress into chronic anxiety. When your brain screams “danger” during a presentation or in an airplane, you’re not malfunctioning; you’re misinterpreting an overprotective signal. The trick is learning not to obey that signal automatically.

Micro-Opposites in Action

Carbonell encourages testing the Rule of Opposites with tiny, manageable experiments he calls “micro-opposites.” A fearful driver gripping the steering wheel can begin by relaxing one pinky finger. A nervous public speaker can consciously pause between sentences instead of rushing. A person afraid of turbulence can stop clenching the armrest. Small acts of release weaken anxiety’s grip and remind the body that it’s safe enough to loosen control.

The author’s own story on the Golden Gate Bridge illustrates this vividly. Paralyzed by fear of heights, he found himself shuffling slowly, heels dragging to feel grounded. Remembering his own rule, he did the opposite—he hopped. That single exaggerated motion broke the tension, made him laugh, and proved he could coexist with fear without obedience to it. Opposites often feel ridiculous at first—that’s how you know they’re working.

Using Observation to Redirect Panic

In moments of high anxiety, Carbonell suggests redirecting awareness from internal panic to external observation. He offers questions to ground you: “What are my hands doing? My shoulders? What colors and sounds surround me?” The act of observing restores perspective—moving you from a victim’s posture to a scientist’s curiosity. Observation is the gateway to every opposite response: relaxing instead of tensing, staying instead of fleeing, breathing out instead of gasping in.

By embracing this counterinstinctive lens, you reclaim agency from fear. The Rule of Opposites becomes both a psychological compass and a life philosophy—guiding you to behave as if you’re safe until your body learns that you are.

Panic attacks often begin with one terrifying sensation: shortness of breath. Most people instinctively try to inhale deeply, but that’s precisely where they go wrong. Carbonell flips the script with another application of the Rule of Opposites: instead of taking a deep breath, he teaches you to give one away. The correct solution to panic breathing, he emphasizes, starts with an exhale.

The Belly Breathing Reset

Owen, one of Carbonell’s clients, suffered from recurring panic episodes triggered by shallow, gasping breaths. The harder he tried to “take a deep breath,” the more suffocated he felt, leading to full-blown panic attacks. Using belly breathing—expanding the stomach gently as you inhale and letting it fall as you exhale—Owen learned to breathe like a baby rather than a soldier. He practiced sighing out, pausing, then slowly inhaling through the nose by pushing his belly forward. Over time, his chest softened, his breathing slowed, and panic lost its power.

Carbonell explains that most anxious breathers use their chest muscles, not their diaphragm. They puff and gulp oxygen like swimmers, overventilating and triggering dizziness and chest tightness—the same symptoms they fear. Belly breathing reverses this feedback loop by grounding respiration where it belongs. He recommends practicing one minute of belly breathing every hour—integrating it into phone calls, walking, or meetings—until it becomes second nature.

Dispelling the Fear of Fainting

One of the most common panic fears is fainting. Carbonell reassures readers that fainting during a panic attack is nearly impossible because panic raises blood pressure, while fainting requires a dramatic drop. Unless you have rare conditions like POTS or a blood-injury phobia, you’re physiologically incapable of passing out in that moment. Recognizing this fact alone can drastically reduce panic’s intensity.

He reminds readers that even if your breath feels labored, it’s not dangerous—it’s merely uncomfortable. Belly breathing doesn’t save you from disaster; it simply helps you stay long enough to discover that there is no disaster. Once your body learns this truth through repetition, panic loses its credibility.

Breathing, in Carbonell’s model, becomes less a soothing activity and more a statement of trust: you can coexist with fear without fixing it. Exhaling instead of gasping is a small but radical act of courage—and a literal embodiment of faith in your own resilience.

In one of the book’s most practical chapters, Carbonell draws a firm line between protecting yourself and practicing courage. When you feel afraid, your instinct is to shield yourself from discomfort by avoiding feared situations or bringing safety aids. But recovery depends on facing, not fencing out, your fear. The chapter’s mantra is simple: practice, don’t protect. You don’t wait to feel calm before acting; you act while still afraid, teaching your brain new lessons through experience.

Retraining the Brain’s Alarm System

Carbonell introduces an important neuropsychological insight: fear learns through exposure. The amygdala—the brain’s threat center—can’t be reasoned with verbally; it learns only by evidence. You can retrain it by entering feared situations, experiencing the expected anxiety spike, and seeing that nothing terrible happens. Every successful repetition rewrites the amygdala’s map from “danger = bad” to “discomfort = temporary.” This rewiring doesn’t happen by suppressing fear but by allowing it. It’s the only language the brain’s threat system understands.

Think of it like retraining a misinformed guard dog. The dog keeps barking at mail carriers until it’s repeatedly shown they aren’t intruders. Avoidance keeps the false alarm alive; exposure teaches accuracy.

The AWARE Technique

To guide you through exposure, Carbonell shares the five-step AWARE method:

• Accept – Allow the fear without trying to push it away.
• Watch – Observe your symptoms and thoughts objectively.
• Act – Continue your activity; focus on manageable actions rather than stopping the anxiety.
• Repeat – Expect fear to return; repeat the steps without judgment.
• End – Remember the episode always ends; the end is built in.

This method, much like mindfulness-based therapies, helps decouple your behavior from your emotions. Your goal is not to stop fear but to let it arrive, stay, and leave of its own accord. Every time you sit through anxiety instead of escaping it, you train your mind to trust that you can handle uncertainty.

As Carbonell emphasizes, “Every anxiety episode ends no matter what you do.” The question isn’t how fast it ends, but how skillfully you can wait for it to end.

Worry is anxiety’s clever disguise. It convinces you that thinking more will prevent disaster, but in reality, it keeps you locked in rumination. Carbonell reframes worry as a habit of thought—a repetitive act much like nail-biting. The cue for this habit often begins with two magic words: “What if?” Recognizing that phrase, he says, is like seeing the fisherman’s hook beneath the worm.

Catching the Bait

One of Carbonell’s clever techniques is the “Tic Tac method.” He tells clients to carry mints and eat one every time they notice a “what if” thought. The point isn’t counting candies—it’s building awareness. Each time you notice the bait, you regain the power to choose whether to bite. This transforms worry from an unconscious spiral into a conscious event you can observe.

He also introduces the “Two-Part Test” for realistic worries: Does the problem exist now in the world outside your head? And can you do anything about it now? If the answer to both is yes, act. If not, it’s a thought symptom, not a problem. By this measure, most worries fail the test—and can be safely humored rather than solved.

Turning Worry into Comedy

Humor, Carbonell proposes, is the antidote to worry’s seriousness. Instead of arguing with your anxious thoughts, play with them. Write them as haikus or limericks. Sing them to a ridiculous tune or repeat them aloud twenty-five times until they sound absurd. He calls this “paradoxical repetition.” One man, terrified of getting fired, repeated his catastrophic what-if until it turned into nonsense. By the twentieth repetition, he was laughing. The thought lost its sting.

Other exercises include “Worry in a Foreign Language,” “Walk in Worry Shoes,” and setting timed “Worry Appointments” twice daily to confine rumination. The message is universal: you can’t stop thoughts, but you can change your relationship to them. When you laugh at worry, it loses authority.

In blending humor with acceptance, Carbonell echoes mindfulness pioneers and cognitive theorists alike: don’t fix thoughts—observe, exaggerate, and welcome them. Worry can’t coexist with playfulness for long.

Most people facing anxiety instinctively try to distract themselves—scrolling their phones, repeating affirmations, or forcing happy thoughts. Carbonell warns that deliberate distraction backfires because every effort to stop thinking about fear reminds you of it. As he puts it, “Thought stopping works as well as banning books—it makes you think about them more.” The better alternative is to adopt the calm curiosity of an observer.

The Power of Observation

When you switch from resisting symptoms to recording them, anxiety begins to lose its grip. Carbonell introduces two practical tools: the Panic Journal and the Worry Journal. In them, you track what you’re feeling, thinking, and doing during anxious episodes. Ironically, this “note-taking during panic” often reduces fear because it converts you from a victim to a researcher. Instead of being consumed by panic, you analyze it in real time—turning emotional chaos into data.

By documenting episodes, you build evidence of recovery: every panic ends, none causes harm, and your body naturally stabilizes. Over time, the act of observing builds emotional distance, much like mindfulness meditation or acceptance-based therapy (ACT).

Shifting from Victim to Observer

Carbonell distinguishes between two postures: the victim—who resists and fears the sensations—and the observer—who studies them without judgment. The more time you spend observing, the less available you are to panic. He even suggests creating a “Symptom Inventory” to count physical sensations, scary thoughts, and behaviors during exposure exercises. Turning fear into a series of observed phenomena reframes the experience from catastrophe to curiosity.

As one client put it, “I felt like I became the scientist of my own panic.” This shift, Carbonell writes, is where true healing begins. Observation doesn’t suppress anxiety—it allows your brain to relearn that internal sensations are safe to experience.

The paradox is clear: when you stop running from anxiety and start taking notes, you win by refusing to play its game.

For many people with anxiety, safety takes the form of something—or someone—close by. A trusted spouse who tags along. A bottle of water in your bag. A cell phone you can’t leave home without. Carbonell calls these support people and support objects—temporary comforts that keep you stuck. They make anxiety seem manageable, but only because they shrink your world to what you can handle with protection nearby.

How Dependence Develops

Cynthia, a client terrified of shopping alone, always brought her husband to the grocery store. With him beside her, she felt secure. Over time, though, her confidence diminished—she couldn’t even shop with him outside arm’s reach. The same dynamic applies to people who carry Xanax bottles they never open, constantly call a “safe” friend, or travel only with emotional support animals. These habits teach your brain that you survive thanks to external aids, not your own resilience.

True recovery requires unlearning that dependence. The opposite of relying on support is reclaiming your agency—bit by bit. You might begin by arriving at the store separately, then shopping in different aisles, then visiting alone. Like removing training wheels, each step expands freedom and proves capability.

Objects That Pretend to Protect

Support objects—from water bottles to lucky charms—offer comfort but perpetuate fear. Carrying them says, “I’m not safe without this.” Carbonell likens the trade to borrowing from a loan shark: instant relief now, steep anxiety later. Leaving them behind, though uncomfortable at first, is essential exposure work. He advises creating an inventory of support items, noting both the short-term benefits and long-term costs, then systematically leaving them at home.

By gradually letting go of props and partners that reinforce helplessness, you replace the illusion of safety with genuine self-reliance. As confidence grows, anxiety’s power diminishes—because you finally prove to yourself that you are the safety you’ve been searching for.

Another of Carbonell’s transformative principles is distinguishing between what you can control and what you can’t. You can control what you do—how you breathe, where you go, whether you speak—but you can’t directly control how you feel. Trying to control feelings is the very act that fans their flames. This mindset shift reorients your entire approach: stop judging days as “good” or “bad” based on how you felt, and start measuring them by what you did despite how you felt.

Feeling Follows Doing

Carbonell uses the analogy of learning to ride a bike. Confidence comes after nervous practice, not before. You rode poorly first, improved, and eventually felt capable. The same learning process applies to driving, flying, or public speaking—confidence grows from doing, not waiting. People often get this backward and assume they must feel brave to act, trapping themselves in endless preparation.

He recommends focusing on controllable actions rather than emotional states. Notice when you’re in your “attic of thoughts”—internally rearranging fears—and redirect attention externally, to the “dining room” of present action. Every time you act without emotional permission, you reinforce courage.

The Myth of Total Control

Many anxious people struggle with “control issues,” but Carbonell reframes them compassionately. The problem isn’t being a control freak—it’s trying to control the wrong things. A fearful flyer scans the sky, weather reports, or pilot’s expressions, exerting control over what’s beyond reach. Meanwhile, a fearful speaker abdicates control over what they do control—their pace, posture, and tone—because they’re trying to suppress nervousness instead. The solution is to embrace the role you’re actually in: passenger, presenter, or participant, not omnipotent overseer.

Control your actions and allow feelings to come and go. Anxiety lessens not when you command it to stop but when you prove it doesn’t need to stop to let life move forward.

The culmination of Carbonell’s approach is also its most courageous principle: feel the fear and let it pass. Exposure is the cornerstone of lasting recovery, but only if done correctly. Many people attempt exposure by entering feared situations while trying not to feel afraid—listening to music, using distraction, or self-soothing the entire time. True exposure, Carbonell stresses, is the opposite: you must let yourself feel anxious without rushing to make it stop. Fear itself is the medicine.

What Real Exposure Does

Exposure retrains your brain’s emotional memory. By intentionally encountering what scares you and staying until anxiety fades naturally, you show your amygdala that its alarm was false. Every repetition weakens the association between discomfort and danger. Carbonell compares this to taking fearful flyers on round-trip flights with no destination: “We’re not going to Detroit for business—we’re going to get afraid.” The goal isn’t to avoid fear but to invite it and survive it on purpose.

He urges you to start small and systematic, breaking fears into gradations—short flights before long ones, quiet streets before highways. Practice without safety behaviors and debrief afterward by noting what did not happen. Over time, panic collapses under the weight of your own evidence.

Exposure Is Practice, Not a Test

An important mindset distinction is that exposure is practice, not a pass–fail test. Every session, even one filled with fear, is a success because it reinforces courage. Anxiety thrives on performance pressure; practice neutralizes it. The goal is never to eliminate anxiety but to lose your fear of it—a state Carbonell calls “fearless fear.”

Once you learn to let anxiety pass without resistance, you unlock the paradoxical secret at the heart of this book: calm emerges naturally when you stop trying to be calm. The fear itself becomes the lens through which freedom is found.