Day 4: Worry, Worries and the Worried Unwell
Week 1 Awareness
A lot of negative self-talk can be classified as worry. Worrying has an additional problem because it takes your mind’s processing power away from problem-solving. Instead of sorting things out, you end up spending all your time fretting instead. Worrying can be a very destructive mental habit. Get into this worry habit and you’ll find yourself worrying about things more frequently and for longer. You’ll then start worrying about things you can’t do anything about. Perhaps you’ll start taking on other people’s worries. Then as your worry habit becomes so ingrained, you’ll begin to make up things to worry about too. When things get really bad, you can even start catastrophising about the future, even when things are generally going well, and there’s no real need to worry.
The Paradox of Worry
To a degree, worrying is good for you. It’s an inbuilt protection mechanism that takes you out of complacency. It’s your body’s way of telling you that something isn’t quite right. Worry alerts you to possible danger. But too much worry can make you hypervigilant, stressed, and anxious towards the world around you.
We do need to worry about the things that can cause us harm and upset. In the right circumstances worry protects us from doing things that could go wrong. But go overboard on worry and your worries really start to wear you down. Your life ends up stuck, frozen in a state of fretfulness. Worry is one of our survival instincts. It’s entrenched in our psyche and mental processes. The problem is when you worry too much, because that’s when worry becomes a real problem. This is when it starts to affect your ability to cope and lead a normal life.
The Lawnmower Analogy
A therapist once used a great analogy. He said that worry is like cutting your lawn with a pair of scissors. Worrying about cutting each blade of grass means it takes ages, it takes much more mental effort, it’s a job you just don’t want to do, and you’d probably never even finish it in the time you’ve got. Worrying too much about the small stuff can make it almost impossible to get things done. It takes you away from the big picture. It wears you down. It makes you avoid starting things and it gets you stuck.
In real life, too much worry means it can become difficult to get through a normal day’s work. Even the simplest of tasks can take twice as long. Then maybe at the end of the day you’ll find it difficult to switch off and end up taking your worries home with you too.
For some people, excessive worry is part of their daily lives. They can’t turn their worries off. Their life becomes a cacophony of anxiety and dread that causes stress, insomnia, and in some cases mental illness. With a life surrounded by excess worry, you can actually fail to see what you really should be worrying about.
Neuroplasticity and the Worried Mind
Our brains are excellent at learning and throughout life we can develop new habits and thought patterns, especially with repetition. When we’re troubled by something we worry, but even when that worry is gone we can continue to worry because that worried state of mind has become mentally reinforced. Have a few more things go wrong, get a few more things to worry about, and you could be a few small steps away from a state of mind that learns to habitually worry. Instead of worrying about something specific, you worry about worrying. Those worry pathways become imprinted and your worrying mind becomes your default normal state of mind.
This is neuroplasticity working against you. The original problem is gone, but the worry habit remains. It moves from one thing to the next, and then to everything. That’s how a worried mind develops. Not through one catastrophic event, but through the slow accumulation of reinforced worry patterns.
When the Inner Voice Collapses: Simone Biles
At the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast in history, withdrew from multiple events mid-competition. The reason wasn’t physical injury. It was the twisties, a terrifying mental block where gymnasts lose spatial awareness in the air. When you’re performing at thirty feet on a four-inch beam, losing track of where your body is mid-rotation isn’t just a confidence problem. It’s genuinely dangerous.
What Biles described publicly was exactly what this lesson is about. Her inner voice had turned against her. Years of elite training, thousands of hours of repetition, and a mind that had reliably guided her through extraordinary performances suddenly couldn’t be trusted. She put it plainly: she just didn’t trust herself as much as she used to. Her inner voice was getting in the way of her technical ability. Skills that should have been completely automatic, things she had performed thousands of times, were being interrupted by worry. The conscious mind was interfering where it should have stayed quiet.
That’s neuroplasticity working against you at the highest possible level. Not a character flaw. Not weakness. A brain that had learned, through accumulated stress and pressure, to expect catastrophe rather than capability. The worried mind doesn’t care how talented you are.
But the story doesn’t end there. After Tokyo, Biles stepped away from competition entirely, took time to heal, and committed to therapy. She did the work. She came back to elite competition at the 2023 World Championships and then led Team USA at the 2024 Paris Olympics, where she won three gold medals and one silver. One of the greatest comebacks in sporting history, built not on ignoring the inner voice but on learning to work with it. The same brain that learned to catastrophise can learn something very different instead.
The Emotional Baggage of Worry
Worries themselves are not just worries. Worry brings with it a combination of other emotions. Fear, anxiety, sadness, guilt, as well as the ongoing stress that comes with having these emotions. Worries come with emotional baggage and constant unrest, with the additional cost of having fewer positive thoughts. A worried mindset causes you to focus on your worries, and through this selective perception you distort your reality and see the world as a place of worry and stress.
Too much worry can cause you to fear and back away from the real world, unable to cope with normal life. Excessive worry is part of the diagnostic criteria for serious mental health conditions such as anxiety disorder and OCD. Worry and chronic stress can also worsen the symptom burden in a range of long-term conditions — IBS, fibromyalgia, chronic pain and chronic fatigue among them. That isn’t the same as saying those conditions are caused by worry, or that they’re psychological. They aren’t. But managing stress can make living with them easier.
The Worry Spiral
One thing that happens consistently is that worry compounds worry. The more you worry, the more you worry. The more you feed your worries, the more they grow. Too much worry leads to a worried mind. Mentally you can get stuck in your worries.
Good self-talk is essential if you’re going to leave behind these old ways of thinking. Your self-talk is a running commentary of what’s really going on inside your head. For some people, it’s a commentary of constant worry. Negative self-talk and excessive worry will get you frustrated. You will hit a bottleneck in what you can do in life. The real world and your internal world become mismatched.
Breaking the Worry Habit
Here’s what most people don’t understand about worry. It feels productive. It feels like you’re doing something about your problems. You’re not. You’re just rehearsing disaster scenarios and calling it preparation. Real preparation involves action. Worry is mental wheel-spinning that burns energy without moving you forward.
So how do you break a worry habit that’s been years in the making? You start by recognising it for what it is. A habit. Not reality. Not preparation. Not wisdom. Just a mental habit your brain has got stuck in because it once served a purpose and now just runs on autopilot.
You learn to distinguish between productive concern and unproductive worry. Productive concern identifies a problem and looks for solutions. Unproductive worry just spins the problem round and round, getting nowhere but using a lot of energy.
You practise catching yourself in the act. When you notice you’re worrying, ask yourself whether it’s helping. Can you do anything about it right now? If yes, do it. If no, let it go. Easier said than done. But it’s a practice, not a perfection.
Later in this course, in Day 17, you’ll learn a specific technique called the Worry Blow-Out, designed to drain your worries of their emotional charge and redirect your mind towards solutions. For now, just start noticing when you’re worrying and whether it’s actually helping you.
If your worry is severe, persistent, or feels unmanageable — or if you’re experiencing clinical depression, serious anxiety, or a mental health crisis — please speak to a doctor. This course can complement professional support but it doesn’t replace it.
References
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- Beck, A.T. (1979). Cognitive Therapy of Depression. Guilford Press.
- Borkovec, T.D., & Inz, J. (1990). The nature of worry in generalised anxiety disorder. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 28(2), 153-158.
- Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (1991). Responses to depression and their effects on the duration of depressive episodes. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 100(4), 569-582.
- Wells, A. (1999). A metacognitive model and therapy for generalised anxiety disorder. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 6(2), 86-95.
- LeDoux, J. (1996). The Emotional Brain. Simon & Schuster.
- Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever You Go, There You Are. Hyperion.
- Burns, D.D. (1980). Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. William Morrow.
- Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C.H.M., Potts, H.W.W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009.