Self-help authors love few things more than calling on the wisdom of great historical figures, and happily, great historical figures seem only too keen to oblige. A time traveller, arriving in 2008 from some prewar era, would be forgiven for thinking all Churchill did was sit around concocting quotes for future use in books on motivation. Or take that recurring bugbear Ben Franklin, with his fussy logbook system for living a virtuous life, and his observation that going to bed and getting up early makes you "healthy, wealthy and wise". "And an irritating little git," he might have added.
Maybe I'm guilty of schadenfreude, but it's far more invigorating to discover that some past icon was as insecure and fretful as the rest of us. So it was with Samuel Johnson: I'd always had him pegged as rather full of himself, perhaps just because writing the first English dictionary, to name one of countless accomplishments, seems like something you're entitled to be arrogant about. But he wasn't; he was one of history's great worriers.
"In reading his journals, diaries and prayers," writes psychologist Edward Hallowell, who uses Johnson's example in his work with clients suffering from "toxic worry" and anxiety, "we find ongoing, painful excoriations of himself, as well as repetitive, almost desperate resolutions to do better." This isn't a case of the "mad genius" whose disturbances seem somehow glamorous: Johnson's afflictions were unequivocally normal. He worried he was lazy. He called himself "a castle of indolence", though some of his symptoms - such as lying in bed, listening to a dripping tap - sound like depression. He read books called things like A Serious Call To A Devout And Holy Life, but threw them aside, blaming his own moral weakness. He understood that worry was a "disease of the imagination", forcing the worrier to experience, over and over, the emotional punch of a worst-case scenario he'd probably never end up facing. But still he worried.
The reason Hallowell's clients find this comforting isn't because it's fun to mock others, nor because of some confused idea that Johnsonian levels of brooding must indicate Johnsonian levels of creativity. It's because you couldn't hope for a better demonstration of the irrationality of worry than the fact that Johnson couldn't shake it. Worry is always absurd: future-based thinking that actually helps is planning, not worry. But it rarely feels that way; subconsciously, it feels productive, as if worrying may somehow render an unsafe situation secure.
You could see Johnson's plight as disheartening: if he was such a mess, what hope for the rest of us? But Hallowell hopes it'll jolt you into a sense of perspective. He serves as a reminder that the presence of a worry isn't a reliable indicator that something's wrong; and in the midst of negative emotions, staggering achievements can still be carried off - if you can't shake worry, at least don't worry about worrying.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
