If we added up all the hours we’ve spent worrying about things that never ended up happening, the total would probably surprise us.
Whole evenings gone to a phone call that turned out to be nothing. Days spent waiting for a test result that came back fine. We don’t keep track of it because worrying doesn’t feel like wasted time while we’re in it. It feels like we’re dealing with something.
Almost everyone does it. And it turns out to be one of the things people regret most near the end of their lives.
The people who have lived longest almost all say the same thing
A Cornell gerontologist named Karl Pillemer spent years asking older Americans, more than a thousand of them, some past a hundred, what they had learned and what they would do differently.
He expected the big, dramatic regrets. The affair, the bad investment, the risk that didn’t pay off, the years given to the wrong job.
That mostly isn’t what he heard.
Asked about their biggest regrets, they said almost in unison a version of the same thing: I wish I hadn’t spent so much of my life worrying. One of them, a retired construction worker who had spent much of his life short on money and scared about it, gave Pillemer one piece of advice and not much more. Don’t worry, because it won’t help anything, so stop.
What struck Pillemer was that they didn’t regret what they had done.
They regretted the hours they had spent feeling sick over things that never ended up happening. As one man told him, I wish I had learned this in my thirties instead of my sixties, because I would have had so much more time to enjoy my life.
There’s a reason it’s so hard to stop
We worry because our brains are set up to.
The job of the brain isn’t to make us happy. It’s to keep us alive, and the safest way to stay alive is to expect the worst and get ready for it.
For most of the time humans have been around, that worked. Someone who heard a noise in the grass and assumed it was a predator was usually wrong, but the one time they were right, they lived. The person who assumed it was nothing, and was wrong, didn’t.
We come from a long line of people who worried, and we inherited their brains, the ones that overestimate the danger, because guessing wrong about a threat costs them almost nothing and missing a real one costs them everything.
That’s why worrying can feel responsible, like we’re doing something useful, even when we’re sitting still and feeling bad. It made sense when the dangers were animals, cold, and hunger. But the same system is still running now, in lives with very little in them that can hurt us, so it goes off over unanswered texts and worst-case guesses and whatever we read on our phones at midnight.
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Most of it never happens
And most of what we worry about never happens.
Some researchers had a group of chronic worriers write down every worry they had over ten days, then checked back to see how many came true. The numbers weren’t close.
About nine in ten of the things they had worried about never happened at all. For a quarter of the people, not one worry came true. Of the small share of worries that did happen, about a third turned out better than they had feared.
The worriers had even been asked beforehand how likely each worry was, and their careful, logical guess was already much too high. What they felt was higher than that. The worrying had very little to do with what was going to happen.
So worrying doesn’t help with the things that never happen, which is most of them. But that isn’t even the worst part. The worst part is what it does to the time while we’re doing it.
When we worry, we go through the bad thing ahead of time, and most of the time. We feel the grief while the person is fine and in the next room. We sit in the dread of a conversation we haven’t had. And the version in our heads is almost always worse than how things go. We feel all of it over something that never comes, and the hours we spend feeling it don’t come back.
What they figured out
It would be easy to hear all this as just “think positive.” That isn’t what they meant, and it isn’t fair to who they were.
These were people who had buried parents, husbands and wives, in some cases, their own children. They had lived through the Depression and the war. They knew the difference between a real disaster and a worry better than almost anyone. And after coming through the real ones, the thing they kept saying was that the worrying had been the waste.
Worrying feels like it’s keeping us safe. What these people are saying, looking back from the end of their lives, is that mostly it just uses up the time we have.
A lot of them, once they let go of the worrying, talked about doing the opposite, paying attention to the small good parts of a regular day, the first cup of coffee, a bird outside the window, the kind of thing the worry used to drown out.
Their advice was plain. If there’s something we can do about the thing we’re afraid of, we should do it, because making a plan is worth the time. If there’s nothing we can do, the worrying won’t change how it turns out. It only takes up the time we have while we wait.
