The Inverted Machine: Addiction to Worry

People even think it is right to worry about everything, about the past and the future, about themselves, about others, and so on. This is simply nothing but a serious negative illness, difficult to cure, for once a person has become nothing but an inverted machine for worrying, all sorts of wrong connections have been established and everything works in the wrong way, and since the only thing we enjoy is worrying, to deprive us of this, were it possible, would be to destroy our chief interest.

In this connection, you will remember one of the Work sayings—that you are asked above all to do one thing, to give up your particular form of suffering. This sounds easy. Try it. The reason why it is so difficult is because to do so is to destroy whole systems of 'I's in yourself that enjoy making you suffer and that you think you are.

Maurice Nicoll, “Psychological Talk" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 137)