In the comic strip Pearls Before Swine, Stephen Pastis introduced a character’s term for the burst of worry that detonates in your head at the exact moment you try to sleep: the worrybomb. You know the feeling. You get into bed, turn off the light, snuggle down, get all comfy — and then, POW. It hits from out of nowhere.
Except it isn’t really out of nowhere. That’s the maddening part. The worrybomb had all day to take aim, and it waited until the one moment you were finally still.
Yes, I’m a Worrier
I confess, I’m a worrier. My mother was a wonderful woman, and I sometimes describe her as an Olympic-level worrier, so I come by this naturally. And yet my sister almost never worries, which tells you nurture isn’t the whole story. If you go looking for why we worry, the explanations all start to sound alike: We’re built for it. Vigilance kept our ancestors alive. Scanning for danger, rehearsing what might go wrong, staying one step ahead of catastrophe — these were survival skills, not personality flaws. Most of us no longer need this instinct nearly as often as we use it. But we never evolved past it. It just stayed, quietly running in the background, looking for something to worry about.
A lot of our worries come down to this: We don’t know how things will turn out, and we have very little control over the outcome. Say you’re facing a medical diagnosis. It may be days before anyone can tell you what’s actually going on, let alone what to do about it. And even once you know, the outcome is often still out of your hands. For people who like to feel some sense of control, that’s a near-perfect recipe for worry. The same is true for our children. They may be the most important people in our world. But who they become and what they do is, in the end, largely theirs to decide, not ours.
My Standard Phrase
My friend Sarah Lascano of RayZen Energy once pointed out something that has stuck with me: Worry is a thinking problem. It lives almost entirely in the realm of what could happen. It’s the rehearsal of everything that might go wrong. Which means the way out is often surprisingly simple. When I catch myself spiraling and stop to say, “I’m okay right now,” the worry loses its grip. Not because the situation has changed, but because I’ve stepped back into the present moment, where things are usually far more manageable than they are in my head. It still amazes me how often that one sentence is the whole solution.
So is worry ever useful? I tried to think of a time it actually paid off. The closest I could come: I recently flew to another city for a week, and in the days before, I worried about being ready — what I’d need, what I might forget. I ended up throwing a few extra things in my suitcase that I would otherwise have left behind. But here’s the honest question underneath that: Was the worry doing the work, or would a simple packing list have done the same job without the two nights of low-grade dread? I suspect it’s the list. Worry just feels more thorough.
Does Aging Change Worry?
That made me wonder whether travel worries, in particular, have crept up on me as I’ve gotten older. The research on worry and aging is actually a little encouraging: Most of us worry less overall as we get older. However, what we worry about shifts. Careers used to top the list. Now it’s things like independence, mobility, and whether we can still do life on our own terms. The worries change costumes. They rarely retire.
So no, I haven’t figured out how to worry-proof my life. But I’ve gotten better at catching the worrybomb before it detonates — at recognizing it as thinking, not truth, and bringing myself back to what’s actually happening right now, which is almost always more okay than my imagination gives it credit for. As Mark Twain said: “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”
I’d love to hear about your thoughts on and experience with worry in the comments below.
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