The message came in at 4:52 on a Thursday. Got a few minutes tomorrow morning? No subject line, no smiley face, nothing after it.
By dinner I’d decided I was being let go. By ten I’d rewritten my résumé in my head, picked which bills to pay first, and practiced a calm, dignified face for the walk out of the building. I slept maybe three hours.
The meeting took six minutes. My boss wanted to know if I could cover for a coworker’s vacation in July.
I’d love to call that a one-off, but I know the kind of worrying that fills a calm house, and I know my own habits. So when I ran into a line the Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote about two thousand years ago, it read like he’d been sitting in my kitchen that night.
“We suffer more in imagination than in reality.”
He wrote it to a friend, with a hedge built in
The line comes from a letter Seneca sent to his friend Lucilius, one of more than a hundred, and this one usually goes by the title “On Groundless Fears.” Lucilius was bracing for trouble. Seneca’s advice was plain: don’t be unhappy before the crisis comes.
The version that gets passed around drops a word. In the most common English translation, he says we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
More often. He left room for the times the trouble is real.
He had reason to. Seneca had been exiled to an island for eight years, and he’d eventually be ordered to die by the emperor he once tutored. If anyone knew bad things could happen it was him.
His point was about timing and size. Some things, he told Lucilius, torment us more than they should. Some torment us before they should. And some torment us when they shouldn’t be tormenting us at all.
My Thursday night managed all three.
He also gave Lucilius a way to check himself. Think of how often the thing you expected never came, and how often the thing you never expected did. And if trouble is coming anyway, he asked, what good does it do to run out and meet it?
Psychologists counted, and the worries mostly lost
For a long time that was a nice thought from a man in a toga. Then researchers checked.
A group of chronic worriers was asked to write down every worry as it came up, for ten days. These were people whose worrying had been diagnosed as a disorder, so they had plenty to record. Then the researchers waited a few weeks and went back through the lists to see what had come true.
About 91 percent of it never happened.
Researcher Lucas LaFreniere at Penn State ran the study, and describing worries that never arrive, he said what struck him most was a gap inside the same person. A participant’s gut would put a fear at 85 percent likely. Their own reasoning, asked separately, would put it at zero.
I know that gap. At 4:52 that Thursday, the reasonable part of me knew a boss with bad news doesn’t ask for “a few minutes.” The rest of me was already carrying a box to the car.
It doesn’t help that I write for a living. People with strong verbal skills tend to worry and replay things more, since a mind that’s good with words can narrate a disaster in complete sentences.
It was a small study, 29 people, all of them heavier worriers than most. If anything, that makes the number more striking. The people most sure of disaster were wrong nine times out of ten.
And keeping the list turned out to be the treatment. People who watched their own predictions fail, one after another, started worrying less.
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The bad days hurt less than the preview did
Of course, 91 isn’t 100. Some of it comes true.
A few years ago, one of mine did. A job I’d been afraid of losing for most of a year went away on an ordinary afternoon, in a conference room, in about the time it took to settle that vacation question.
What I’d pictured was months of ruin. What I got was a bad week, a strange, empty Monday, and then a string of normal days where I made coffee, sent emails, and slowly found the next job. The dread had lasted far longer than the damage.
There’s a name for the mistake. We overestimate how long we’ll be unhappy after a loss, mostly because we forget we’ll do anything about it. We picture the blow and leave out the recovering.
Psychologist Daniel Gilbert at Harvard, in work on our hidden resilience, calls it a psychological immune system: quiet habits of mind that start making sense of a loss almost as soon as it happens. We rarely know we have one, so we never count on it.
His stranger finding is that the big hits can fade faster than the small ones. A serious blow wakes the whole system up. A minor annoyance slips under it and hangs around for days.
It matches my record. I got over losing that job faster than I got over a rude email from the same year.
Where Seneca was only mostly right
So far the old man is holding up. He slips in two places, and both sit inside the word “imagination.”
First, the suffering in my head that Thursday night was still suffering. My heart rate didn’t know the meeting was about July. LaFreniere’s way of putting it is that worry “makes you miserable in the present moment” in order to head off misery later.
The imagined version was the only one that kept me up.
Second, a little of it works. Worry about a crash gets the seatbelt on. Worry about a diagnosis gets the appointment made. Worry that a plan might fall through is where plan B comes from.
Psychologist Kate Sweeny at UC Riverside, writing about worry’s useful side, found that women with a moderate amount of it were more likely to get a cancer screening than women with too much or too little. “Worrying the right amount,” she said, “is far better than not worrying at all.”
So the split that matters is between worry that ends in an action and worry that only loops. One has me checking the smoke alarm battery. The other has me carrying a box to a car at 2 a.m. for a firing nobody scheduled.
Seneca mostly knew this. His advice to Lucilius was to stop being miserable early, which is different from never looking ahead.
The one question I ask now
I still get the Thursday feeling. A short text, a missed call from a number I half recognize, a “we need to talk about the car.” I don’t think it goes away, and I’ve stopped waiting for it to.
What’s changed is one question. When the dread starts, I ask: is there anything to do about this tonight?
If there is, I do it. I send the email, check the balance, make the appointment. It’s usually ten minutes, and the worry has done its job.
If there isn’t, then I’m watching a preview for a movie that, nine times out of ten, never gets made. And on the tenth, I’ve been through the real thing before. It was shorter than the preview.
I can’t say I always turn it off. Some nights I watch the whole trailer anyway.
But I got that message again last month. Got a few minutes tomorrow? I read it, asked my question, found nothing to do, and went to bed.
The meeting was about parking.
