Understanding Worry

Worry, which can be defined as mental and emotional distress, upset, and agitation, of varying degrees, about something impending or anticipated that may not even occur, is both universal and mostly fruitless. It can result from a conscious or subconscious thought and its duration can span from a few minutes to a few days. It hijacks a person’s present-time peace and serenity, creating an unsettledness, yet it will do little to change what might take place. It can be equated with uncertainty, but the only certainty is that it will never succeed in changing future events, whether for the better or worse.

“Worry is like a rocking chair,” according to Al-Anon’s Hope to Today text (Al-Anon Family Group Headquarters, Inc., 2002, p. 98). “It gives me something to do, but it gets me nowhere.”

It both erodes the quality of current time and wastes it, and usually works against, as opposed to for, the person who engages in it.

“I suppose that if I reclaimed all the minutes, hours, and days, I’ve sacrificed to worry and fear, I’d add years to my life,” according to another Al-Anon text, Courage to Change (Al-Anon Family Group Headquarters, Inc., 1992, p. 10). “When I succumb to worry, I open a Pandora’s box of terrifying pictures, paranoid voices, and relentless self-criticism. The more I pay attention to this mental static, the more I lose my foothold on reality.”

Why, then, do so many self-generate this useless, unpleasant state?

“Anxiety researchers define worry as a sequence of repetitive thoughts and mental images focused on threatening issues that have certain (but possible negative) outcomes,” according to Bethany Pace in “Understanding Why We Worry May Help Us Stop Doing it” article (Internet, April 29, 2020). “To put it another way, worry is like talking to yourself about something that makes you anxious and often imagining all the ways it can go wrong.”

So, what purpose can this serve?

“While many of us are intuitively aware that worry makes us anxious and upset, research shows that we still tend to lean on worry when facing problems in our lives” Pace continues (ibid). “One reason for this is that we may worry as way to feel emotionally prepared for negative outcomes.”

This situation is further fostered by the brain’s default mode network, which seeks to use itself during idle and lonely times, even when problems are not foreseen as being particularly prevalent. It ruminates and rehearses something that has occurred in the past and worries about something that may occur in the future. A person can even use it to worry when he has nothing to worry about, since he cannot imagine smooth patches in his life.

Those who categorize themselves as particularly anxious, insecure, or reactive and lack the needed inner resources or self-confidence to deal with even mundane circumstances will be more worry-prone than those who are not.

“None of this fretting serves any purpose,” continues Al-Anon’s Hope to Today (op. cit. p. 178). “Even if I could anticipate all potential problems and have solutions in mind, my worry won’t protect me from something that may never happen.”

And, since worry exists entirely within the mind and usually consists of snippets of past, negative events, it cannot know what has not yet occurred, although it deceivingly convinces the worrier otherwise, and the actual events, if they do ultimately take place, never remotely approximate the anticipated ones.

Creating a person’s own prison and punishment, this unpleasant state always works against him. If, for example, he is anxious about beginning a new job the following day, he may believe that worrying will prepare him to be more effective when he walks into his workplace. But it is more likely to produce a fitful night’s sleep, leaving him stressed, drained, and jittery when he does. Just when he wishes to put his best foot forward, he puts his worst one forward.

Aside from deluding a person into believing that this emotion will better prepare him for something, many often associate it with their ability to problem-solve.

“Regarding this problem-solving myth…we found that people who had worried about their problem generated slightly less effective solutions that did those who had engaged in objective thinking,” Pace advises (op. cit.).

Another objective of worrying is a reduction in emotional impact. If, for example, a person has caused an error or done some infraction at his place of employment, he may anticipate disciplinary action or even termination once it has been identified. Instead of experiencing it as a sudden emotional jolt, he primes himself by means of anticipatory anxiety—very much the way a car traveling at 50 mph is more equipped to take evasive action than if it had to accelerate from zero.

The less control a person has over an event or the outcome, the more powerless he may feel and the more he will worry about it.

Finally, some equate the amount of worrying they do with the amount of caring it shows. But there needs to be greater understanding of—and therefore distinction between—the two.

“We need to distinguish between caring about a situation—including doing everything in our power to help it turn out well—and worrying needlessly and fruitlessly about it,” advises Dr. Seth J. Gillihan in his “Five Reason We Worry and Five Ways to Worry Less” article (Internet).

Aside from generating negative feelings, removing a person from the present, and creating physiological effects, such as stress, worry distorts reality.

“Worry and fear can alter our perceptions until we lose all sense of reality, twisting neutral situations into nightmares,” according to an Al-Anon member’s share in Courage to Change (op. cit. p. 150).

Because worry is a mostly useless emotion that does little to prepare a person for what may never happen and exists entirely within his head, its many remedies entail a refocus outside of it.

First and foremost, the person must become aware of what can become a habitual, automatic, almost-subconscious state and identify previous patterns and what, if any, their triggers, causes, and antecedents were.

Secondly, he must realize that his worry is created by his heightened central nervous system.

Thirdly, he must accept the fact that life, because it is not static, perfect, or permanent, can be synonymous with uncertainty, despite what he may do to avoid this aspect of it. He has most likely faced these uncertainties before, he will probably do so again, and so, too, do all others.

Significant relief can be realized if he is able to pinpoint past situations that approximate the current, worry-creating ones. If he can, he can identify their replay, conclude that he tolerated, endured, and even survived them then, and chip away, through reasoning, the obstacles they impose now.

He can minimize his emotional responses to them with slogans, such as “How important is it,” “Take one day at a time,” and “This, too, shall pass.”

While he may be more victim to his entrapping emotions than to the anticipated events, even if they do occur, he must realize that he cannot change or affect their outcome, but he can extricate himself from his anxiety by meditation, refocusing his attention on some meaningful project or activity, and exercising or just going for a walk.

Finally, connecting with the Higher Power of his understanding through prayer can melt his fears and give him strength. Turing his concerns over to Him can relieve him of his burden, eliminating his need to carry it alone. Fear and faith, it has often been said, cannot occupy the same space.

Worry, in the end, is something negative a person does to himself—not something positive he can do to change a circumstance he anticipates.

Robert G. Waldvogel has earned the Interdisciplinary Certificate in Behavioral Health for Late Adolescence and the Emerging Adult and a Postgraduate Certificate in the Fundamentals of Cognitive Behavioral Treatment at Adelphi University’s School of Social Work. He has led Twelve-Step support groups on Long Island for the past decade, and created the Adult Child Recovery-through-Writing, and the Strengthening Our Spirituality Programs taught at the Thrive Recovery Community and Outreach Center in Westbury. He is a frequent contributor to Wisdom Magazine.