Worrying isn't the friend you think it is

Post-COVID, we now have inflation, surging energy prices, and a cost of living crisis. In summary, there is a lot to worry about.

But while expressing concern over what the future may hold for us, it turns out there is a fine balance between caution and worry.

Worry is defined as an expectation that an event will turn out poorly in the future, and a thought process that involves identifying and focusing on a potential upcoming threat. The vast majority of people worry from time to time, but the frequency and severity of these worries exist on a spectrum.

Some people’s worries are infrequent, less persistent and more realistic, and cause them a fairly low amount of distress. For others, worries are uncontrollable, relentless, unrealistic and emotionally overwhelming. At this extreme, such worries can form part of debilitating anxiety disorders.

People who worry a lot (whether or not they have an anxiety disorder) tend to believe that worrying is useful – despite the distress, exhaustion, and frustration it can cause. They hold what psychologists call ‘positive worry beliefs’. If I worry, then I won’t be surprised is often a response to being labeled a ‘worrier’.

Worry can help you effectively prepare for and prevent future challenges, increases motivation for upcoming tasks, and help solve problems that may arise.

Those who have higher levels of worry tend to agree that holding these beliefs more strongly is a good thing. But is that right? Is worry actually helpful?

A little worry goes a long way

In some respects, yes. Worry helps the mind scan for potential future problems and threats, then uses unpleasant, anxious feelings to fuel preparation for and prevention of those problems. When the threat is realistic, this can be helpful.

For example, when living through a pandemic, some worry is beneficial. Catching COVID for example is a reasonable worry that would drive behaviours like wearing a mask and avoiding public places. But worry has consequences.

To start, the things that people worry about rarely actually happen. Compared with infrequent worriers, frequent worriers predict that negative events are more likely to occur, come up with more reasons why they would occur, and predict that the outcomes would be more harmful. According to research, these predictions are very often proven false.

In a recent study, Michelle Newman and Lucas LaFreniere, two psychology professors from Skidmore College in New York, examined how often worries come true for people with generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) – a disorder characterised by high levels of excessive, uncontrollable worry.

In the study, participants were asked to record their worries for 10 days. Newman and LaFreniere found that 91.4 per cent of all worries didn’t come true. In fact, for individual participants, the most common percentage for worries that didn’t come true was 100 per cent.

Furthermore, those who had the most worries that did come true tended to worry about doing poorly on exams. Other studies have shown that such worrying actively interferes with academic performance.

Worry a problem worse

What about problem-solving? Can worry help us there? Unfortunately not.

In one experiment, participants who were instructed to worry about a current personal problem generated fewer effective solutions compared with those who were told to think objectively about their problem.

In fact, participants who were told to worry didn’t even outperform participants who were told to just sit there breathing. Those in the worry group reported the most anxiety after trying to generate solutions and, across all groups, participants who worried more said they also had less intention to actually carry out possible solutions.

All in all, this and other research suggest that worry is not the aid to problem-solving that many people might think. More specifically: worry might help people anticipate possible problems, but it isn’t helpful for solving those problems. After you initially come up with all the ways that events could go sour, worry’s benefits go straight downhill. Even so, worry repeats again and again in the mind. Thus, worry often far outlasts its minimal usefulness, going on and on after identifying a problem. Fortunately, there is a way through it.

Worry-free

Worrying isn’t new, and as a result, there are a ton of resources and therapeutic approaches for reducing your worry. Some, such as mindfulness practices and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), focus on accepting worries and not struggling against them.

These practices involve noticing your worries in a nonjudgmental way, and refraining from analysing, resisting or acting on them. Worries are observed as though from a distance: you let the tumbleweed of worry roll by without getting tangled up in it. I’ve dropped some more resources below.

Whatever method you use, it might be time to ‘break up’ with worry. Worry is like having a bad boyfriend or girlfriend. It lies, makes you feel bad when you’re around it, and never lives up to your expectations.

Despite all that, you keep going back to it over and over for reasons that aren’t worth the trouble. And, just like clinging to a worthless lover, it might help to realise that worry’s pains eclipse its gains. Breaking up with worry isn’t easy, but many people benefit from doing so. I highly recommend leaving this costly life strategy behind.

Dump worry while you still can.

Ok, where can I learn more?

• Anxiety resources - A really good resource on techniques for coping with worry and anxiety from Anxiety UK.
• Stop giving a f*ck - A great TED talk from Harvard grad and author of the best-selling book of the same name explores how focusing on the things that matter can help act as an antidote to excessive worry.
• Unwinding Anxiety - an amazing book that prevents a highlights reel of all the neuroscience into anxiety, followed by a smorgasbord of techniques for how to combat it.