In Praise of Worry
Dear Belladonna Rogers,
I’m a worrier. My husband says worrying does no good, wastes time, and won’t help. Is he right?
Worried in Wyoming
Dear Worried,
No.
While too much worry creates stress, which is hazardous to your health, too little worry can be just as dangerous. The anthem of the International Association of Worriers — which doesn’t exist, but one day might — could be the popular song by Randy Newman in the YouTube clip above.
We all worry. The difference is not between worriers and non-worriers but between people who acknowledge they worry and those who don’t. The second group may think they’re not worrying, but they’re unaware that they are. To err is human, as is to worry. Those who say they’re not worried show their inner turmoil in many ways, from hair-pulling to beard-tugging, to drinking in excess, to sleeping or eating too little or too much.
Neurotic worry, or obsessive, repetitive thinking about a problem is counterproductive. But wisely directed worry can solve problems and lead to vastly improved outcomes.
People who claim not to worry enjoy mocking those who recognize they do, calling them worrywarts, fussbudgets, fusspots, handwringers, and Nervous Nellies.
Even the otherwise judicious Roman rhetorician, Marcus Annaeus Seneca, said, “There is nothing so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it in expecting evil before it arrives?” Right. Guess he never had to prepare for a hurricane, a blizzard, a flood, or a child’s college tuition payments.
Echoing Seneca, some people prefer to be what they consider “tough,” “mature,” “realistic,” or “stoic,” boasting, “I never worry because it serves no purpose. If something is out of my hands, there’s no point in my worrying about it.” Both assertions are inaccurate but the second sentence is more so. Rarely are situations completely beyond our ability to improve their outcomes. Believing that something is out of our hands doesn’t make it so: we can make an enormous difference for the better through actions we take after some beneficial worry.
But no situation will bend to our efforts to improve it if we believe “nothing can be done” and “it’s out of my hands.” Those responses aren’t merely dismissive of the benefits of worry, they’re hostile to the notion that worry can produce positive consequences. Such passive attitudes are far more detrimental to your health and happiness than is worrying.
Worrying constructively can change the outcome of the troubling situation for the better. The productive worrier is often thinking about what options are available in difficult circumstances, choices that could make the source of worry less threatening — less worrisome.
Case in point: after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Sigmund Freud’s daughter, the gifted psychoanalyst Anna Freud, was deeply and justifiably worried about her father’s safety. Both she and her 82-year-old father had been questioned at Gestapo Headquarters in Vienna, a terrifying experience that could have led to an immediate deportation order to transport them to a death camp. By worrying and using her worrying to come up with a successful escape to London, Anna Freud was able to save her mother and her father, as well as herself from certain death in concentration camps, which was the tragic fate of all of Sigmund Freud’s four older sisters.
Great advice. My father, an air force pilot, was taught to always have a potential landing spot identified in case an engine failed. That is, to be a ‘worrier’.
His car driving lessons for me and my sisters included us having to answer “what would you do if …” as we were driving along; something which has stuck with me all these years: I’m never completely relaxed while driving on public roads, which I suppose is the way it should be.
Worrying in a lot of professional fields actually leads to better policies and better execution of backup plans. Being on a submarine for as long as I was, I can’t even count how many times we held drills where the reactor failed, the torpedo tubes flooded, hydraulic fluid starts spraying everywhere, a fire breaks out in the galley (kitchen), loss of our communication masts, etc. ad infinitum. If we did not train (or worry, as it were) on these casualties, then we would have sunk to the bottom the first time the ship took on flooding, the crew would have died from either the fire itself or from smoke inhalation, etc.
Worrying by itself is somewhat useless. If you are worrying about something and never go past the “thinking about it” stage, then invariably all you do is add to your stress levels. However, if you move past the “thinking about it” stage on to “doing something about it” then you have the potential to change not just your viewpoint and outcome, but possibly the viewpoint and outcome of other similar people.
But there’s something in excess of productive worry that we sometimes call “borrowing trouble.” If you’re waiting for the results of a medical exam, for instance, you can’t change it one way or the other by worrying about it. All you can do is make yourself miserable in what may be the last hours of your life before you receive a devastating diagnosis. If there’s nothing productive to be done immediately about a possible future event that’s just one of many, it’s best to take the Dominical advice that “sufficient to the day are the evils thereof.” Think about the problem long enough to come up with some prudent things to do about the possibility, then let it go. Action is a great treatment for formless, debilitating anxiety.
By coincidence, over the last couple of weeks I’ve read several good books about anxiety and fear: “Extreme Fear,” by Jeff Wise; “Nerve,” by Taylor Clark (especially good); and “Deep Survival,” by Laurence Gonzales. “Nerve” talks about the job of your amygdala in alerting you that something may be wrong and you may need to take action. Your neocortex is in charge of telling the amygdala that you see why it’s upset, but the situation is not what it thinks (that rustling in the leaves is not a saber-toothed tiger). The author likens the neocortex to a small, skilled jockey and the amygdala to a large, powerful horse. He has lots of interesting things to say about phobias, too, and about living constructively with fear instead of trying to suppress it. About debilitating anxiety, he mostly says that the trick is to quit looking inward and focus on what you can or should do.
i think this is a matter or syntax
i associate worry as an unproductive byproduct of helplessness
this is different from having concerns and addressing said concerns with some preparedness
*of syntax— sry
I’m a hard-wired worrier – always have been, even as a child. I realized it at a pretty young age and try to act in ways to reassure the worry thing I’ve got, but it can be quite irritating at times too. I’ll be sitting around worrying – why am I worried? Everything is fine, everything is done, so what is it? Then I come to the conclusion that I’m worried that I have nothing to worry about. At that point I can give it a rest and go out and enjoy myself.
PS – That Roman guy was a moron. Anticipating trouble (and trouble comes in many forms) and preparing for it is SANE, not wretched. Eventually you KNOW something is going break or fail. Someone is going to get hurt or die. And Mother Nature is a PMS addled, child abusing (humanity) b!tch!
Now you got me wondering whether I worry too much. Or, maybe not enough? Why did I read this article? WHY?
Dear Worried in Wyoming,
Who packs the luggage for trips? I’m betting you. You have to think ahead a great deal.
Amongst grownups, those are two truly different approaches to life:
” It’s cold. I might get pneumonia and go to the hospital and die” sounds like the cousin of ” It’s cold. I better get a cardigan and a scarf.” They sound similar, but they aren’t. One is pessimistic and fatalistic- ‘It’s cold and I am a helpless person utterly dependent on the goodwill of basically malignant others.” The cardigan and scarf version? ” It’s cold, and I have the foresight — and planning– and resourcefulness to handle this particular uncomfortable event. If it goes poorly, I still have myself. I’ll find a positive.There’s enough of me that I can help the truly helpless and needy, as well.”
Wisdom, of course, is struggling through to realizing either our competence in the face of opportunities, or our helplessness in the face of Ananke- Necessity- the only divinity that all the Greek gods acknowledged as supreme. Death is a priestess of Ananke.
Ex: Christmas last year, the spouse bought an electronic game system, and a miniature, child-sized, game table with a wonky little bitty pool table and that odd ? foozball? topper. He wanted the kids to be able to invite their friends over to play. It worked. There are fields of boys at our house, some days after-school, when before they’d been isolated with each other. We were very pleased- they have nice friends, I like having a house full of happy boys. My poor MIL walked in the door, saw the bitty, little pool table, gasped, pulled me aside, and asked why I was steering my children into being pool-hall hustlers and wasting their life away.
I, of course, sounded like an insensitive jack-*** to her when I laughed, b/c it was so bizarre. Then I had to walk her through: one friend’s dad had a full-size table in the living-room, this table was small, and frankly, they weren’t good enough to aspire, and, well, in pool halls, people smoke, and I’ve got smoke-free kids. They aren’t going to go drive to the wrong side of town to loiter in smoke-filled, dangerous, nasty places full of people they don’t understand, or like. There are two nice enough pool halls in town, an hour’s drive away from us, and they charge $20-ish per hour to rent a table. These two places throw out pool hall hustlers, b/c that’s illegal, and they are good businesses who don’t want to get shut down by the police. And, furthermore, we’re not an industrial area slum that has bars with pool tables every other block. So they aren’t going to get any practice.
And, yes, that is the summary of three hours of explaining that my husband had a good idea for a toy for my kids. His mother worries. We don’t. At least in her book, we are witless hares careening toward folly.
She completely missed what I worry about: the pernicious effects of watching television from waking to sleep. She didn’t worry about the addicting effects of video games. She didn’t think to worry about de-sensitization from violence from, oh, watching the news, or violent video games, or the corruption of morals from soap operas on impressionable young minds.
My worrying is Very Effective.
90% of the things I worry about, never happen.
As someone who was affectionately teased by a friend with the nickname “Wort,” I can really relate to this article. For me it’s just all about thinking, and I’ve always done rather a lot of it.
I have a febrile brain. I call it riding my six wild horses. But it is far more of a joy than a curse. A long-ago reviewer in Time magazine once described Robin Williams as presenting “the spectacle of a brain on constant spin cycle.” That about covers it. I consider him and his even greater predecessor, Jonathon Winters, “my people.” It’s all about the associative links, and how fast they travel. I once tried explaining to someone that everything reminds me of everything else, to which he replied with the obvious, “you must have a very busy mind.” Bingo!
I remember an article that asserted that successful people were characterized by the continual adjustment of goals—up, down, sideways—whatever it took to keep on toward a desirable end point. I’ve found this tactic quite serviceable through the years because it unleashes maximum autonomy under nearly all circumstances, and in the words of a salty old friend, “Autonomy is what mental health is all about, Baby!”
It’s my grateful conviction that your humanizing articles bring a much-needed dimension to sites like this, Ms. Rogers. I am reminded so often lately of Yuri/Omar Sharif’s line to his brother Yevgraf/Alec Guinness in “Dr. Zhivago” that, `The personal life is dead in Russia.’ It seems as though, in the midst of this era of near-nude bodies; a kind of fraudulent, instant intimacy; and an almost total lack of any kind of behavioral restraint, that a frighteningly intolerant coldness toward anything remotely smacking of human foibles, warmth, and uniqueness is disappearing. I think Leonard Cohen had it right with his “Ring the bells that still can ring, there is crack in everything, that is how the light gets in.”
(De Becker’s “Gift of Fear” was a great read. I will order “Only the Paranoid” today!)
Perhaps I should have let well enough alone and kept this as anonymous, since it quite possibly comes under the heading of “TMI”…but some of us “worts” just can’t stop tweaking
Yes, MayberryLady, tweaking (and re-tweaking, and then, just for good measure, re-re-tweaking) comes with the territory. And a glorious territory it is, as your and Anonymous’ comments vividly demonstrate.
You are the soul of kindness!
[Seems I inadvertently cut out the second and third paragraphs of this confessional that might help make a bit more sense of it. So here they are if you can stand it
]
When I was a child, my dad was “worried” that my night-owl behavior might develop into chronic insomnia, so he suggested I take some time earlier in the evening to write down all the stuff I was thinking about, so I could pop into bed with a blank slate and fall asleep immediately. It worked for about a week.
I always have a plan(s), which I sometimes refer to as doing fire drills in my head. This is actually a part of my temperament that provides me with a great deal of pleasure, because anticipating happy events from a long way out is exquisite and allows me to get a lot more mileage out of them, and devising responses to not so happy possibilities is only slightly less so because it imparts feelings of control and competence.
Yipes! This is the hard part about the horses: slowing those babies down. I was plainly in an altered state as I dashed this one out, and left off a *key* part of the Cohen quote, so let’s try it again:
“Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering, There is a crack in everything, That is how the light gets in.”
Meant to say, “a frighteningly intolerant coldness toward anything remotely smacking of human foibles, warmth, and uniqueness is becoming the norm.”
well, a top ten list of things to worry about right now wouldn’t be pointless: it’d be the news.
“Worry” to me connotes a sort of futile wheel spinning, is reactive and not productive.
Recognizing a problem and figuring out a solution (your example Anna Freud)is proactive. In the process of effecting a solution, you might worry about whether or not you will be successful, but that’s normal and healthy worry.
Sometimes, when you set aside the “worry” (an interference pattern) the fog lifts & the solution appears. I think that’s a Buddhist thing
I worry that I am not adequately explaining myself here.
“Sometimes, when you set aside the “worry” (an interference pattern) the fog lifts & the solution appears. I think that’s a Buddhist thing”
I think you did great.;). That is a profoundly true observation.
As a private pilot, I plan ahead in case things go wrong. What will I do if the weather is worse than forecast? Is the terrain survivable should I have an engine failure? Will I have enough fuel if the winds are different than forecast? In short, I’m concerned about the things that I have control over. I don’t worry about what I’ll do if the wings fall off. In that case, I’ll die and there isn’t anything I can do about it other than make sure the plane is maintained properly and flown within its limits.
An engineer looks for how a system can fail and tries to eliminate as many possibilities as possible. When the possibility of failure can’t be completely eliminated, what can be done to make the system fail gracefully, giving time for a controlled shutdown without loss of life? However, as Rumsfeld so accurately pointed out, there are “known knowns”, “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns”. A good engineer works to handle the “known knowns” and tries to understand the “knowns unknowns”, but by their very nature there isn’t much anyone can do about the “unknown unknowns”.
I forgot to include an old saying that applies to worrying: “Man plans, God laughs.”
You can make all the contengency plans and worry about possible outcomes all you want, but ultimately the world has a way of throwing surprises at us that are beyond our control. All we can do is be as prepared as possible to handle things that are foreseen and those that are unexpected. Excessive worry is like excessive fear – it feeds upon itself and results in inaction and paralysis. The Boy Scouts say “Be prepared” and by that, they mean “be prepared for anything.”
If “worry” means nervous strain (which I’m guessing is something like what Seneca had meant), it is obviously something to be avoided. In addition to its being bad for your health, nervous strain tends to prevent salutary action, not to encourage it. Nervous strain is the reason people often find it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to do even the simplest things that they are not accustomed to doing.
If, on the other hand, “worry” means thinking about unpleasant things, then most likely we all could use a lot more worrying!
Worrying is like preventative maintenance on a house — anticipate future problems, do something to prevent them. Case closed.
First of all, I really enjoyed this. It was just right on!! I’ve watched, as others have, our country literally unraveling like someone’s using a seam ripper! Suddenly, I’ve found myself in an odd sphere as far as blogging goes where people don’t even want to discuss whats going on!
Well anyway..this column was great because there is a difference between being consumed with worry in a negative way (wringing of the hands).. where you can be grateful and appreciative on the one hand but stay informed- in addition to examining, seeking and looking for a way to solve or contribute in some way towards a solution. Thanks!
i carry a pistol, and keep a fire extinguisher, a small hand axe and pry bar in my car, “just in case of emergency”. i’ve used the fire extinguisher a couple of times. the rest, including the .45, not so far, but “better to have and not need than to need and not have”. i also have a two way radio that has been useful frequently. no, i’m not a police officer, and don’t play one on television, or anywhere else. just an ordinary joe who thinks the boy scout motto is a dammed good idea. do i worry? not much, but i do like, another poster above, run “what if” scenarios in my head and plan ahead.
Excellent essay, Ms. Rogers. I agree with Regina that you’re right on. I also think it is unusual to find writing this good online and a writer willing to look at subjects others don’t pay enough attention to. I remember my Boy Scout days and believe in being prepared. That way I end up worrying less. This essay brings together everything I believe about the wisdom of worry all in one place. Well done!
so true. you almost never find thoughtful. polished writing on the internet – for that I usually read a book. it’s a pleasure to read belladonna rogers. she hits the nail on the head week after week. i’ve been a worrier as long as i can remember and have been called many of the names in this article. i don’t care, it’s the way i am, and i agree that it’s better to err on the side of caution than to live as if there’s no tomorrow. live as if there’s no tomorrow and there may be no tomorrow, due to your own carelessness.
I think when people denigrate worry they are talking about worry without action.
once action is taken it becomes preparation.
a large percent of worry is worry without action and this is indeed a total waste of time and energy — which could be used drinking.
Sláinte!
I have to agree … worry can be a powerful force for good.
Any business person worth his or her salt is always looking over his shoulder. That’s called survival. And in my own business, I worry when I DON’T have the time to worry, when the day to day pressures keep me so busy that I can’t sit down and assess what might go wrong next month.
Worry doesn’t need to be strangling the life out of something, but rather the wringing of every drop of worthwhile information and understanding out of every experience. Enjoy it! Savory it! Be better at it than everyone else.
well said – one can be forward thinking and audacious all they want – but it is always good to have a back-up plan.