Why Worrying is a Complete Waste of Your Time

American writer and humorist Mark Twain (1835-1910) once opined, “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”

Twain is widely praised as the “greatest humorist the United States has produced,” and there is profound wisdom in that humor.

Almost 200 years after Twain’s birth, clinical data now suggests his observations were correct. Researchers at Cornell University conducted a study that followed people over an extended period of time, and the results speak for themselves.

There are instances when worrying can be constructive. I call it “constructive anxiety.” For example, it can help you prepare for something important, like delivering a speech in front of a large audience. Moderate levels of worry can help mentally prepare you for stressful tasks. However, excessive worry drains your energy and instills fear, making it a potentially distracting emotion when used in excess.

Worrying excessively makes about as much sense as the Barbenheimer craze. (Buying movie tickets to see Barbie and Oppenheimer back-to-back.)

Excessive worry not only affects mental well-being but can also create significant physical issues. According to Harvard Medical School, these issues can include fatigue, difficulty sleeping or restlessness, trouble concentrating, irritability, and muscle tension.

According to Henry Ford Health, worry and anxiety differ in several ways. Anxiety tends to be general and can overpower the wise and conscious part of your brain. Once that happens, certain biochemicals are released, triggering the fight-or-flight response, inhibiting logic and reason.

Anxiety is the most common mental disorder, affecting nearly 30% of adults at some point in their lives.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that over 40 million adults in the U.S. (19.1%) have an anxiety disorder, and approximately 7% of children aged 3-17 experience anxiety-related issues annually. Most people develop symptoms before age 21.

While worry is more logical, specific, and grounded in reality, anxiety often involves catastrophic thinking. For instance, looking back on the pandemic, you probably had anxiety over the spread of the virus and the millions and millions of people that could die. Maybe you experienced anxiety about going out in public. However, I bet you worried about whether you would run out of toilet paper, or worse, Chardonnay. See the difference?

We also tend to conflate worry with problem-solving, as it often feels productive. We mistakenly think that the time spent worrying emotionally equips us to handle the future calamities that undoubtedly await us. It doesn’t.

Since it’s just you and me talking here, I’ll go ahead and admit that I consider myself a full-blown professional at worrying, the “Tom Brady of worrying,” so to speak. To me, worrying does feel like problem-solving, so why is that a bad thing?

Well, during the Cornell study, researchers discovered that 85% of the concerns participants worried about never actually happened. Wait, what? That’s right, tracking individuals over an extended period allowed researchers to analyze outcomes, revealing that only 15% of the things people worried about came to pass.

I’m sure Mark Twain was rolling over in his grave. He could have saved those nerds at Cornell a lot of time. That’s probably why he also said, “worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe.” The man did have a way with words, didn’t he?

But wait, there’s more to the study. The researchers at Cornell also determined that among the 15% of worries that did come to fruition, 79% of participants felt that things didn’t turn out as badly as expected. Moreover, they handled those situations even better than anticipated.

So, let’s do some eighth-grade math together: ((100%-85%) x (100%-79%))= 3%. This means that only 3% of what you worry about is as bad as you think.

Alrighty, let’s revisit what we’ve learned here. First, 85% of your worries will never materialize. Secondly, among the few that do, 79% will not turn out as badly as you think. Finally, only about 3% of what you worry about becomes as bad as you fear. So, basically we are wasting a lot of time and energy worrying about things that will never happen. Let’s all take Mark Twain’s advice and stop making payments on a debt we don’t owe.

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