Worrying Isn't Helpful

A very natural emotion to feel, which is a derivative of fear, is a sense of worry. You might be worried for someone else’s safety, worried that things won’t go according to plan and create problems, or worried about the news you’re going to hear that is uncertain or might have serious implications.  

Whatever the case: Worrying isn’t helpful. It doesn’t offer any value. In fact it usually creates more problems.

Fear is meant to be an indicator and create awareness for the risk that something presents. Ultimately, fear is meant to inform your decision making and how you choose to navigate a situation. The problem is, when you’re feeling afraid you’re in a compromised emotional space. You can’t be purely objective about something because your state of mind is biased. This leaves you more vulnerable to misinterpreting or misunderstanding what you want to do because you’re being influenced by your emotions. But nonetheless, fear is a meaningful datapoint because it’s adding something meaningful to your decision making matrix.

Worry is different though. Worry is just a chronic, underlying fear that continues to linger after a decision has been made. It takes up your energy and attention but doesn’t lead to anything productive. Is you staying up all night going to actually help someone get home safe? Is you worrying about a medical diagnosis going to change the results of a test? Worrying doesn’t influence the result but it hijacks your experience.

When you notice yourself worrying, the better thing to do is to remind yourself of the choices you’ve made. Choosing not to intervene and tell your friend it’s dangerous to drive alone at night. Choosing to seek two medical opinions and make decisions on your healthcare once you have more information. Are there more things that could be done for these situations? Sure, and leveraging your ongoing fear to take action in those ways is valuable. But worrying for the sake of worrying isn’t productive.

In the case where you’ve made your decisions and have chosen that you don’t want to take further action, the antidote to worry is acceptance. To find agency and ownership in the situation because you’ve gotten involved to the extent that you’ve wanted to.

A personal example of this is: If I’m on an airplane and we start to hit some turbulence, it could be scary. But rather than worrying about the plane’s safety, I run through an internal checklist.

Do I want to say anything to the flight attendant? No.

Do I want to take over the plane myself so that I’m in control of my fate? No.

Is there anything I can contribute to influence the result of if the plane makes it or not? No.

At that point, I accept my fate. And I no longer feel nervous, anxious, or worried because it’s an emotion that doesn’t serve any purpose, and I get grounded in the ways I’m choosing to show up in the situation.

Now that’s not to say that there’s something wrong with you if you worry. Again, it’s a very natural thing to do. But what I wanted to offer today is a perspective around it so that you can process your worry and use your attention and energy in ways that are more valuable.