paranoia

Merriam Webster: Paranoia, noun. para·​noia | \ ˌper-ə-ˈnȯi-ə  , ˌpa-rə- \

a tendency on the part of an individual or group toward excessive or irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of others

I have some issues with paranoia. Not in the clinical sense, I don’t think. Merriam Webster also defines paranoia as “mental illness characterized by systematized delusions of persecution or grandeur,” which I don’t think quite described what I have. I don’t think the paranoia is it’s own thing, or the result of any single mental health issue. It stems a little bit from everything I deal with – The cptsd, the adhd, the generalized anxiety, the imposter syndrome, the rejection sensitivity, and a lot of bad past experiences.

I think there’s a lot of grey area between what I want to call “paranoia” and what would really just be defined as anxiety, but I feel like this is a different beast than the generalized anxiety.

There is a principal in animal training, and I presume people behavior too, but I’m an animal trainer so that’s where I know it from; Intermittent reinforcement. Broken down to a simple concept, it’s that rewarding a behavior *sometimes* can actually be more reinforcing than rewarding a behavior *every time.* There’s a lot of variables and conditions here, but it’s a solid concept.

You can see this principal in action when you consider the act of gambling. A small reward given every time gets boring quickly, people lose interest. A large reward very sporadically is what keeps people coming back, even if the total reward ends up being less than what you’ve put in to the system.

I used the word “reward” above because that’s the easiest way to explain it, but that isn’t an accurate word to use when getting in to the details of behavior. It’s more accurate to say “if a behavior is reinforced intermittently, the behavior may become stronger than if it’s reinforced consistently.” Reinforced doesn’t always mean a reward in the traditional sense. For instance, if a bear is charging at me, and I scream at the bear, and the bear runs, the behavior of “scream at a bear” has been reinforced. It doesn’t mean someone handed me some treats.

It can get even messier, too. A flavor of superstitious behavior (a real term) is a perceived result (I made that one up. There might be a real name for it, I have no idea.) Sometimes, a behavior serves no purpose, but the brain says “Oh, it DID serve a purpose, the only reason the bad thing DIDN’T HAPPEN was because of that behavior.” For instance, if you imagine a bear is just out of sight, and you scream “I KNOW YOU’RE THERE, BEAR” and then no bear attacks – Well, the behavior of “scream at bear” has been reinforced – Even if there never really was a bear.

Anyhow, the point of that little behavior sidebar is to say; I know where my paranoia has been reinforced, and I can pretty easily see all the roots and branches and understand why it keeps propagating. It starts that first time your trust is violated in some way. Someone lets you down. And when that happens a few times, you start identifying the signs. And then when you start to see one of those signs, you start paying attention, waiting to see if things are going to break bad again.

And if only once, you see a sign, and things break bad, suddenly the 5, 10, 20, 100 times you saw a sign and nothing bad happened are pointless. The paranoia increases. Your alertness to those signs increases. The behavior of paranoia has been reinforced, because you were right that once. Intermittent reinforcement.

I could spend a few hours typing up all the times I recall that paranoia being reinforced, but that’s not really what I wanted to write. But a few big instances of thinking something was up and being right is enough to cement this behavior. And in my case, unfortunately I think, those cases were all “someone is out to get me” cases. Someone trying to fuck me over, someone trying to make a fool of me, dumb kids playing dumb pranks through bosses trying to get me fired.

And likewise, being aware of the potential for someone being out to get you, you start altering your behavior to shut down their attempts. Even if nobody was ever out to get you, the fact that you altered a behavior and nothing bad happened means you feel it was effective. The behavior has been reinforced, due to that perceived result.

Anyhow, the point is, I have some issues with paranoia.

It affects every moment of my life. Sometimes in small, little ways. Sometimes in big ways. As I was doing my morning check of the camera system at work to make sure nobody had moved the cameras, I began to think of all the little ways the paranoia eats at me.

So we’ll use today as an example. Today is an extremely average day, nothing unusual or out of the ordinary has happened.

I live on the third floor of a three-unit apartment, and we all share a creaky staircase. While I was checking on the kittens, I heard footsteps. I immediately turned my music off and waited quietly incase they were coming upstairs. I assumed someone was upset with me, or wanted something from me, and immediately went in to ‘pretend I’m not home’ mode.

Nobody came upstairs of course.

After a little bit I went about my business. When I stepped outside my apartment door I saw through the window the garage door was open. I figured either the landlord is outside working, or someone broke in to the garage and stole my stuff. If they already stole my stuff, no point in rushing. If the landlord is down there, he’s probably hoping to run in to me since he knows it’s about the time I leave for work. He probably wants to talk to me about something I’m doing wrong, or ask me for something. I’m running early though, so I’ll hang out in my apartment a bit longer and hope he leaves.

He wasn’t there, of course. And nobody broke in to the garage, either. Someone (probably me) just didn’t latch it properly.

I leave for work. I enjoy driving, but hate traffic, because I assume everyone has a personal vendetta against me. I exit the highway and pull in to a double right turn lane. I pull in to the outer lane, as it’s the lane I need to be in. There is a car in the right lane. I think “They definitely need to be in the left lane, they just picked the curb lane in hopes of making a right on red. They’re probably going to pull straight in to my lane when the light turns green. Or they’ll floor it and try and get ahead of me.”

Well, they did pull in to my lane, causing me to have to veer over and honk. So there’s the paranoia reinforced.

A little bit later, a truck pulls out in front of me at a light. My light was green. He made a right on red. I am logically sure my light was green, but I become convinced that maybe the light was broken, maybe we BOTH had greens? Maybe he had a red but didn’t notice? Who knows why, but he definitely is mad at me now either way. He must think I blew the light. So now, even though I was driving considerably faster than him, I hang way back to avoid potential eye contact just in case he’s going to yell at me or flip me off or something.

I stop at the gas station to get some bottled water. The truck is there. I pull back out, and park at my work two doors down and walk over so he doesn’t see my car.

I spend the entire time at the gas station being extremely aware of everyone, staying out of everyone’s way, in case some mysterious truck driver is going to recognize me.

That obviously doesn’t happen. Nothing interesting happens.

I get to work, settle in at my desk, and I do my morning ritual. I don’t do anything I shouldn’t be doing at work, I hate that logic of “If you don’t have anything to hide, you won’t mind if I…” I’m not afraid of being caught doing something wrong. I’m afraid of the idea of someone HOPING to catch me doing something wrong. The idea that someone has it out for me. So I start my morning ritual, which is pulling up the camera system (only myself, the two owners, and one other employee have access to it) to check if any of the cameras have moved. Primarily, the ones on my floor, and most specifically the one that points at the shipping desk. My desk is slightly off from any of the cameras since they are focused on doors / windows / exits. There’s also one above the shipping desk so that if someone claims something wasn’t packed right etc, I can check the footage and see how it was packed. I check to make sure nobody has moved that camera to point at my desk instead while I was gone. Sometimes I check this several times a day.

I also check the time clock, to make sure all my punch times are correct and nothing has changed.

And as I was doing these morning rituals, I thought to myself how ridiculous it all was. How, in the two hours I’d been out of bed, my paranoia had already had such an impact on my day. My anxiety meds do a LOT to help with the level of paranoia, and the impact that paranoia has, but it does nothing to stop the initial concerns. And unfortunately, just often enough something will reinforce that concern.

I’m not including all of the paranoia thoughts I have that didn’t lead to actions. I always have a constant dialog of wondering why people didn’t answer messages, wondering what the meaning behind someone’s words was, so on and so fourth, from events today, days ago, weeks ago. Some of that is anxiety. Some of that is paranoia. It depends on the context.

I’m not sure this is a behavior I’ll ever be able to fix. It’s low on my list, my grand list of mental health things to work on is roughly organized from what I perceive will be easiest to what I perceive to be hardest to reduce or eliminate, with a little bit of weight of how much they impact my life altering the order slightly. Paranoia is low on my list right now, because I feel it will both be very difficult to address due to a strong history of reinforcement, and does not have a severe impact on my well-being (vs some of my other struggles.)

But it’s still worth writing about.