I have recently been reading Dale Carnegie’s How to stop worrying and start living, which has made me confront something I would rather not admit: I am a rather accomplished worrier. If worrying were an Olympic discipline, I suspect I would have brought home a medal by now, preferably after spending the night before the competition worrying about whether I was prepared enough to win it.
I worry about things that might happen, things that have already happened, things that may go wrong and even things that have absolutely no intention of happening whatsoever. My mind is wonderfully inventive in this respect, capable of turning a perfectly pleasant Tuesday into a dress rehearsal for a disaster that exists entirely in my imagination.
And then I came across this idea: worrying is one of the most effective ways to rob ourselves of joy without actually changing anything about the future.
We can be sitting in the sunshine, enjoying a good meal, celebrating a small achievement or spending time with someone we love, while a part of our mind is already somewhere else, inspecting potential problems. We may have earned the right to feel proud, but instead we are busy identifying what could go wrong next. We may be living through a beautiful moment, but we are too occupied with protecting ourselves from an imaginary future to notice it.
Perhaps this is what makes worry such a sneaky joy killer. It rarely announces itself as the enemy of happiness. It arrives dressed as responsibility, preparation or simply being a sensible adult. Surely thinking about every possible problem means we are taking life seriously?!?
Sometimes we are. But sometimes we are just worrying.
Why worry makes us look & feel older
Charles Darwin famously called unnecessary mental agitation worrying, and the phrase wibber-jibbers captures exactly the sort of ridiculous inner commotion I have in mind: all that mental fluttering, fretting and fussing that leaves us exhausted without necessarily bringing us any closer to a solution. Whether we call it the wibber-jibbers or an overactive imagination, the consequences are real.
Our brains evolved to detect danger, not to ensure that we spend every afternoon feeling delighted with our lives. When we perceive a threat, the brain’s alarm systems, including the amygdala and wider stress-response networks, help prepare the body to act. Our heart rate may rise, muscles tense, attention narrows and stress hormones help mobilise energy. This is useful when we need to react to something genuinely dangerous, but less useful when the threat is an unanswered email, an uncertain future or a conversation from three years ago that our brain has decided to reopen at 2 am.
When worrying becomes habitual, we can repeatedly activate stress responses without giving ourselves much opportunity to recover. Persistent stress and poor sleep can affect our energy, mood, concentration and physical wellbeing; over time, they may also contribute to changes in skin health and the visible signs of ageing. Add a tense jaw, furrowed brows, tired eyes and the particular facial expression of someone mentally preparing for six different disasters, and it is easy to see why chronic worrying can make us look older, too.
But there is another cost that interests me even more: worry changes what we pay attention to. When our brains are busy scanning for what might go wrong, they have fewer resources available for noticing what is going right. We can become so accustomed to anticipating the next problem that pleasure feels almost irresponsible, as though enjoying ourselves before everything is sorted would somehow tempt fate.
And of course, everything will never be sorted. There will always be another uncertainty, another bill, another decision and another person whose behaviour we cannot control.
Research on repetitive negative thinking supports the concern that persistent worry and rumination are associated with psychological distress, while studies of interventions suggest that these thinking patterns can be reduced.
A little less worry, a little more joy
Positive psychology offers a useful perspective here, because it is not about pretending that life is wonderful when it is plainly difficult. It is about understanding how we can cultivate wellbeing alongside the inevitable challenges of being human.
One of its important insights is that we need to give positive experiences our attention if we want to benefit from them. A compliment can pass straight through us because we are already thinking about our next mistake. We can finish a difficult project and immediately focus on what we could have done better, barely allowing ourselves to feel proud. We can have a lovely evening and spend the journey home analysing one awkward sentence we said.
In each case, the good thing happened, but we barely let ourselves experience it.
Psychologists have studied practices such as gratitude, mindfulness and savouring — deliberately attending to and appreciating positive experiences. These approaches can help us recognise what is good in our lives without denying what is difficult. We do not need to manufacture happiness; sometimes we just need to stop overlooking it.
I find the idea of savouring particularly appealing. It might mean pausing for a moment after completing something challenging and acknowledging, I did that, and I am proud of myself. It might mean enjoying the first sip of coffee without mentally organising the rest of the day, or allowing a conversation to be pleasant without dissecting it afterwards.
These are small acts, but they ask something difficult of a habitual worrier: to remain present when nothing requires immediate fixing.
Concern is useful. Worry is not always.
There is an important distinction here, and one that Dale Carnegie explores in How to stop worrying and start living: concern can lead to action, whereas worry can leave us circling the same problem without moving forwards.
If I am concerned about my finances, I can review my spending, make a plan and decide what to change. If I spend three hours imagining every possible financial disaster, I may finish the evening more exhausted but no better prepared.
Psychologist Kate Sweeny and her colleagues have explored the less obvious benefits of worry, including how it can motivate preparation and encourage people to take precautions. The goal, therefore, is not to eliminate every worried thought, but to recognise when it has stopped being useful.
When a worry appears, I am trying to ask myself three questions:
Is there something I can do about this now? If so, I can take a practical step rather than rehearse the problem repeatedly.
Is this a real problem or a possible future scenario? There is a difference between preparing for a challenge and living through it a hundred times in my imagination.
What is happening in my life right now that deserves my attention? Perhaps something is going well, someone is being kind, or I have accomplished something worth celebrating.
That last question might be the most important one for me. It reminds me that my attention is a limited resource, and I would rather spend more of it on living than on mentally rehearsing how life might go wrong.
Let us not worry our lives away
I suspect that many of us who worry a lot are not trying to be miserable. We are trying to be prepared. We believe that if we anticipate enough problems, we might spare ourselves disappointment, embarrassment, loss or pain. Worry can even feel like a form of control, particularly when so much of life is beyond our control.
But anticipating a difficult experience is not the same as being able to prevent it, and worrying about a good moment does not make that moment any safer. We cannot guarantee that the people we love will stay, that our plans will work out or that tomorrow will be kind to us. We can, however, choose not to spend every perfectly ordinary day preparing ourselves for the worst.
I would like to become a little better at celebrating before moving on to the next challenge, at enjoying something without immediately searching for its flaws, and at allowing myself to feel proud without adding a mental footnote about everything I still need to improve.
Perhaps growing older with grace has something to do with this, too. Not with looking perpetually youthful or maintaining an eternally positive attitude, but with learning where to spend our precious attention. We cannot stop time, and we cannot remove every difficulty from our lives, but we can try not to add unnecessary suffering to the experience.
So, the next time my inner worrier starts shaking the cage, listing possible disasters and demanding that I prepare for all of them immediately, I might thank it for trying to protect me, ask whether it has anything useful to contribute, and then invite it to sit down for a while.
There is a life happening here, after all. There are things I have worked hard for, moments I will never get back, people I care about and small, beautiful experiences that deserve to be noticed. I do not want to become so busy worrying about my life that I forget to enjoy the fact that I am living it. And if I can manage that a little more often, perhaps the wibber-jibbers will finally lose their job as the directors of my days.
