Here’s Why You Can’t Stop Worrying
By: Woody Rini
Tags: Anxiety, Personal Development, Worry, Mental Health, Stress

On my 10-year journey to conquering my Generalized Anxiety Disorder, I learned quite a lot about why we have so many anxious thoughts. One of the most fascinating things I learned was why we just can’t stop worrying, no matter how hard we try.

Worry was, and frankly is (I’m still experimenting on myself to remove worry from my life) running my life, and I want to help you by giving you some more information on WHY we all worry so much even though it doesn’t really help us at all.

Today I’m going to show you exactly why you can’t stop worrying

In this article I will show you how we develop a pattern of worrying, how we cement that pattern, and how we become trapped in something I call “The Mental Worry Paradox” — a pattern of thinking that keeps us from ever being able to stop worrying.

I’m also going to give you an option to join me in some “experimental techniques” I’m using to free myself from worry. I’m a work in progress here, but I’ll get to this at the end of the article so that I don’t leave you hanging.

Without further ado — here is my explanation of why we all worry so much!

We worry first as children because we model others

You’re a six year old and you break something in the house, and your mom frowns at you in worry.

You’re ten and you see your dad watching the news, a frown etched on his face, worried about the state of the world.

You’re fourteen and you hear your parents arguing downstairs, worrying about money.

Worry is everywhere, so it makes sense for you to model it. And throughout your childhood, you do. When something is in jeopardy, you worry. When you are stressed about school, you worry. When you have a sports competition and don’t know how you’re going to do, you worry.

You worry about whether the other kids at school will like you, and you worry whether your parents will approve of your friends once you make them.

In some cases, people even have traumatic childhood experiences that cause them extreme worry, going beyond ordinary worry circumstances.

We worry to try and prevent bad things from happening

When I was in high school, I would actually lie awake in bed and worry that the wind at my window was going to suddenly turn into a tornado and kill me. I’d sit and think “Please don’t blow my house down. I don’t want to die. Please don’t be a tornado.” It made no sense, but I was literally trying to control the outside world with my mind, as if thinking these worry thoughts was going to stop a tornado.

And what was the result? Eventually, the wind would settle down. The storm would pass. And I’d be able to stop worrying and relax.

This happens to us in all aspects of life — we worry, worry, worry, and then once the threat is over and life has gone on, we allow ourselves to relax. We saw our parents do it, and then we do it.

Now, worrying is natural for a child. If you’re 6, or even maybe 16, you still aren’t fully grown. Your logical abilities aren’t fully intact. Your prefrontal cortex that allows you to make decisions for the long term isn’t developed all the way. So, you’re going to do some irrational things, such as worry.

When we grow up, we just keep worrying

What’s really fascinating is that as adults, we just keep on worrying, even though it’s totally harmful to our well-being and helps in no way. When I was sixteen, I worried about a tornado killing me. When I was 25, I worried about someone approving of my presentation at work.

What’s the difference? As a 25 year old adult, I should know that worrying won’t ever help me in life. And yet I didn’t know this, and chances are you don’t. You still worry all the time, or you wouldn’t be reading this article.

Ever since I realized just how prevalent worry is, and just how pointless it is, I’ve become totally obsessed with this simple question:

Why do adults worry even though it’s completely pointless and irrational?

And, as a corollary/subsequent question,

Just how happy could I be if I never worried again?

And, finally,

How can I stop worrying forever?

So, today we’re going to get into all of that. But first I want you to understand my definition of worry.

What exactly IS worry?

When I say worry, I don’t mean just thinking about something in order to solve a problem. I mean trying to negate the very laws of physics by screaming in your own head for something to stop, similarly to what I did when I would think “Please don’t be a tornado” when winds picked up around my childhood bedroom.

This is what we do in real life, even as adults. Okay, here’s a simpler metaphor to explain what I mean by worry. Have you ever watched a sports game, or an election, or anything where you had a vested interest in the outcome? Have you ever held your breath, put your own happiness on hold, and just thought “I don’t want to exist until I know this works out OK!” Just today I watched a replay of an NBA playoff game, and found myself worrying at the highlights because I so desperately wanted the Mavericks to beat the Clippers!

Worrying = Saying “Life is Not Worth Living” until a problem is resolved

That’s what I mean by worry. The act of pointlessly putting your life on hold in order to use your mental energy to wish for things to come true, even though your wishing does nothing to affect the reality of the situation.

Why Do We Accept The Existence of Worry in Our Lives?

Most people accept that they will worry because they perceive that they are irrational. Have you ever been out eating with someone and heard them say: “Well, I’m supposed to be on a diet, but screw it! It looks like my hand is grabbing this donut and I can’t stop it!”

In essence, people give up their responsibility for their own actions, claiming that they are irrational.

I think this is why people accept worrying. They just say “Well, worrying is irrational, but so am I. So I’ll try to manage this worrying thing, maybe try to not do it quite as much, maybe I’ll go to some therapy or get some medication, but ultimately this is part of my life.”

Personally, I refuse to accept that, because I’ve come to know in my studies as a life coach that every single action we take is rational. We ALWAYS do things for a reason. It may be a shortsighted reason, like eating the donut for pleasure instead of eating healthy to lose weight, but there’s a reason.

How can I be a completely rational person and a worrier at the same time, if worrying is irrational?

The answer to this leads us to the deepest insight in this article. Our own human use of the scientific method traps us in worry, simply because we don’t know any other way to live.

If you have studied science, you know that science is defined by the combination of logic and empiricism. For an experiment to be truly scientific, it must not just contain a reason why it will work (logic): it must also be performed and observed in the real world (empiricism).

So, rather than simply looking at the logic of worrying, and why worrying is illogical, let’s look at the development of the human worrying habit from a scientific perspective. Let’s look at the empirical side, our real world experience.

Picture me as 16-year-old Woody again, sitting in my bed, desperately worrying that a tornado is going to blow my house down. I notice a strong wind. I have a fear a tornado will happen. I “negate myself” by just ignoring all other thoughts and emotions except for my worry desire, “Please don’t blow the house down.” I feel horrible, I feel sick, like I’m going to die. Because that’s the way worry feels. And yet, after all of this worrying, what happens? The wind dies down. No tornado comes. I survive. And life goes on.

What am I going to learn from that scenario?

I’m going to learn that since I worried, and then nothing bad happened, worrying might be correlated to preventing bad things.

Think about that for a second!!!

We worry because we see the positive correlation between worrying and life working out OK.

Now, if we were born as 25-year old, fully developed adults, in a society full of people who were completely rational, we might worry once and then never again. We’d hear wind at our window and worry “Oh, I don’t want a tornado to come.” But then we’d stop and think logically: “Wait … this is a new scenario. And it doesn’t seem rational to worry. So I just won’t worry, and if it works out, I will know worrying was unnecessary!”

Then, we’d learn not to correlate worrying with life working out, because the truth is that life works out regardless of whether we worry or not.

But here’s why I brought up all of the childhood worry examples in the beginning of the article — by the time we’re able to think logically as mature adults, we already have thousands, likely millions, of instances of where we “worried” and yet life “worked out OK.” So by the time we can logically realize that worrying doesn’t help, our mind has already empirically learned that worrying is the only way to live, that there is no other option.

We practice worrying so much in childhood that it becomes scientifically learned in our mind.

And when I say learned, I mean scientifically, actually learned. Electrically hard-wired into our neurological circuits. Logically, the mind has drawn a correlation between worrying and life turning out OK. This is not a mild correlation, this is a 100%, perfect correlation.

If you’re reading this right now, that means you’re still alive and life has turned out OK. So every single time you ever worried, you didn’t die — life turned out OK.

Also, if you’re reading this right now, you’ve probably spent ALL of your adult life with a worry instinct. Worrying at everything.

What this means is that you have an EXACT correlation, which has created an AIRTIGHT electrical pattern in your brain, that relates worrying with life turning out OK.

In addition to drawing the logical conclusion, the mind has empirically experienced life turning out OK after worrying. It doesn’t think about the fact that worrying made you sick, made you unhappy for no reason. That’s not the mind’s job. The mind’s job is to keep you from dying, and all it knows is this:

Your mind has a sample size of about 1 million instances where you worried and things turned out OK, and a sample size of ZERO of not worrying and having things turn out OK.

I want to be clear that I believe worrying happens to us in every micro-moment of every day. When you hesitate deciding what food to eat for breakfast, you are worrying. When someone frowns at you and you don’t know why, you worry. When you start walking one way but think about going somewhere else first, you are worrying.

It is my experience from my own life that I was spending every single moment filled with micro-worries.

Ultimately, the habit of worrying, developed in childhood, is cemented electronically in our brains in such a way that we simply can’t overcome it in daily life. Thus, even though we know worrying is irrational, we literally can’t stop ourselves from worrying.

I call this the Mental Worry Paradox.

It makes sense, right? You have no experience doing anything but worrying, so you just keep worrying.

Is your mind blown? Mine was when I realized that this Mental Worry Paradox had been ruining my life and causing me a 10 year battle with generalized anxiety.

The truth is that life always works out whether we worry or not

So how did we end up drawing such a false correlation between worrying and life working out?

We did it because as long as we’re still alive, life ALWAYS works out. Period. We have massive impact bias, believing events are more important than they actually are.

You could believe that eating three ham sandwiches a day was the only way to survive, and chances are, life would work out that way.

Or, you could choose to only eat pea soup every day, and life would work out that way.

Because humans are so resilient and because life is so much larger than any one human, what we do has a very tiny impact on the world, and what we think has no impact on the outside world.

Two Adult Habits That Demonstrate Mental Worry Paradox

How Watching Sports Cements Mental Worry Paradox In Adults

When you watch sports, you worry. This is a great example because it seems so casual and harmless, but creates such a damaging habit. If you’re a sports fan, every moment you’re watching the team you’re rooting for, you’re worrying. You worry that they will lose. You worry that they won’t win by enough. I grew up a University of Kentucky basketball fan, and the team was very good. They often won by 20 or 30 points. Yet, when I was rooting for Kentucky, even if they were ahead 80 to 40, I’d worry if the other team even scored a few points in a row. Worrying is compulsive and happens in every moment.

Another sports example comes from my experience playing tennis. It’s commonly known that in sports players rarely perform as well in competition as they do in practice. Why? During competition, they worry. When I played tennis, I learned from a young age that tournaments and matches mattered, while practice didn’t. So in every match, with every single shot, I would send out a little “worry,” thinking “please don’t miss, please don’t lose,” with each shot. I coded that into my brain. By the time I was 18, I had hit hundreds of thousands of tennis shots in matches with “worry” encoded in, and zero without.

Quick point for re-emphasis: I literally mean hundreds of thousands, or millions of worry moments. In my personal experience, every little tiny thing I do has a “worry encoding” attached to it. So every tennis ball I hit, every shot my favorite basketball team takes, every moment new worries are created and the Mental Worry Paradox is cemented in me.

Here’s what happened with my tennis game once I reached adulthood. Once I was in college, I realized that logically, there was no reason for me to worry or be uptight in a tennis match, since it hurt, not helped. Yet no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get myself to stop worrying. I’d think “just one more hit with worrying.” My mind was addicted, because it had zero sample size without worrying, and so it just couldn’t bring itself to try something that wasn’t empirically tested.

That’s how sports can trap you in mental worry.

How Watching the News Also Cements Mental Worry Paradox In Adults

If you aren’t into sports, I’m willing to bet you cement your mental worry paradox by worrying about the national news. It’s as if you think that sitting in your chair, nervously watching election coverage on Fox/CNN/MSNBC is going to change the results of a national political election. Or as if you think arguing with your friends over politics is going to change the results of an election.

The only thing that’s going to change an election result is your ACTION, such as voting or helping get out the vote for the candidate you favor. Or maybe posting on social media to raise awareness. But one thing that definitely DOESN’T change the world is worrying.

I want to be clear that I’m advocating that you do vote and take other actions to promote civil liberties, but that you spend no time worrying about the parts you can’t control.

You Can’t Just “Stop Worrying” in Daily Life No Matter How Hard You Try

The Mental Worry Paradox, the fact that you’re trapped in worry because it’s been cemented in you electronically, is what’s running your life right now. You have millions of worry repetitions in your brain, hard-wiring your neural pathways to be a certain way. And even when you realize you are worrying, and think “I want to stop worrying,” your mind refuses to listen.

Here’s an analogy that will help further illustrate how the Mental Worry Paradox operates in your life.

Worrying is like Driving — Dangerous But Comfortable

If you drive a car every day to work, and grew up around cars, they probably don’t cause you much anxiety. You can likely get into a car, drive through the crowded city, navigate the multi-lane highways, and then end up at work or wherever you drive to. You do this without fear. In fact, you probably feel comfortable driving around because you are in control of where the car goes.

But here’s the thing: Driving is d-a-n-g-e-r-o-u-s! People die every day in car crashes, and yet since you’ve been desensitized to it, you don’t feel a big sense of fear when you get in a car. Have you ever had a sudden near-collision on the road, dodged it, and thought “Oh, this driving thing really is dangerous!” It happens to us all, but outside of those moments, we feel relaxed and in control even when driving a dangerous motor vehicle, around tons of other drivers who could easily crash into us from a moment’s distraction.

But, you have years or decades of conditioning doing this, so your body isn’t afraid at all. It feels natural.

And while worrying is painful, frustrating, taxing, and stressful, just like driving a car, it is also ultimately comfortable because it’s the only thing you know.

Now, let’s compare riding in that car to another experience. At the Grand Canyon there is something called the Skywalk, a glass bridge which extends over the canyon in a U shape.

Image Credit: Paradise Found Tours

Because the floor of the bridge is made of glass, patrons who visit the bridge can see thousands of feet down to the bottom of the Canyon simply by looking beneath their feet. This structure is seemingly unsupported, but is actually attached securely to counterweights buried deep in the canyon wall.

The walls of this bridge are 6 feet high, also made of glass. It’s completely safe. Short of climbing the wall and jumping on purpose, there’s a 0% chance of falling off of this bridge.

Compared to driving to work, walking on the Grand Canyon Skywalk is infinitely safer. Yet, which one would you feel safer doing?

I might not even want to walk on that Skywalk because it would freak me out. But, even if I did, I know one thing for certain: my heart would race, my body would sweat, and I’d be incredibly nervous, even though I knew I was logically safe. Because no matter what I told myself, my body would have ZERO experience walking on glass above a thousand foot drop.

Leaving worry behind is impossibly disorienting

Starting to live a life without worry is just like walking on the Grand Canyon Skywalk. You have absolutely zero experience at it. Moreover, it inherently looks horribly dangerous. Just as there is no concrete to support you on the glass bridge, living without worry means there are no worries there to support your frame of mind. Your mind feels oddly empty, freaky, in a way that doesn’t make sense. Your electrical circuits don’t support it. Not worrying is devastatingly disorienting simply because you don’t have any experience with it.

When you are walking the Grand Canyon Skywalk, your mind doesn’t care that it is a carefully designed cantilever bridge with millions of pounds of counterweights built deep into the ground, where it could not possibly fall. Your mind cares that it looks like you are stepping onto thin air, and you’ve never done this before.

Now, let’s say you got the courage to walk on this glass bridge. Your heart is racing. Your body is sweating. You look down at the canyon and feel sick because it’s so disorienting. This is not a pleasant experience.

Being Disoriented is Even More Painful Than Worrying, So We Always Turn Back to Worrying

So let’s say you walk around the bridge and go back onto the regular Canyon floor. Once you’re back on solid ground, you think “Phew, I’m so glad to be back on solid ground. I’m glad that’s over.” Unfortunately, if you try to just “stop worrying” in everyday life, this is exactly what you’ll feel. You’ll go through a life experience without worry feeling disoriented, which will actually be more unpleasant than the worrying itself. It’s only because not worrying is new — there’s no reason for living without worry to be painful, just as there’s no reason to be nervous on a perfectly safe glass bridge — but you’ll instinctively pull back to solid ground because it’s your first time and it’s so scary. And when you allow yourself to worry again, you’ll feel relief at those familiar worry thoughts.

When we try to overcome the Mental Worry Paradox in Daily Life, we Actually Make Things Worse

What’s really terrifying about trying to escape worry is that every time we try to escape, we make it worse. We cemented this correlation in our brain that worrying makes us OK. Now, suddenly, let’s say we try to live without worry and we walk on that bridge, just like I described above.

Maybe you try to just go to one meeting at work without worrying. Maybe you let yourself stop worrying about your children for just one date night while they’re safely watched by a babysitter. Whatever it is, when you try to live without worry for the first time, you’ll feel this lurching, disoriented, empty, confusing sensation.

After you experience disorientation like that, your experience with not worrying is even worse than when the sample size was 0. Now you still have a sample size of a million saying that worrying feels comfortable (if painful), and you have a sample size of exactly 1 saying that not worrying feels so disorienting it’s actually worse.

Maybe you persevere, and try again and again. But all you build are more samples of feeling disoriented and scared, and you ultimately end up worrying about: “What if there’s no way to stop worrying?”

That’s where I was for a while. I felt trapped, and I felt that every time I tried to stop worrying, things actually got worse instead of better!

The Mental Worry Paradox Has Trapped You In Worry, and You Need an Intervention

So, you’re trapped in an impossible scenario. The Mental Worry Paradox has you in its grip. Worrying is the only thing you know, and even though worrying is making you miserable, trying to break out of it feels worse than walking on the Skywalk for the first time. It’s too disorienting.

Don’t Worry — A Fix For Mental Worry Paradox is In Progress!

Now that you have an idea of what you’re up against if you want to stop worrying, I want to be transparent with you about what I am doing to remove worry from my life.

I cemented my “knowledge” of Mental Worry Paradox on a walk in the summer of 2020. I was so frustrated about something (I forget what), and so I decided to take a walk to clear my head.

I also noticed that I was quite stressed about posting on social media. I would always WORRY about whether people would see my posts, whether they would care about what I posted, whether they would respond, etc. etc.

So I decided to do an experiment.

My First Anti-Mental Worry Paradox Experiment

I wanted to worry less about social media and how people perceived me. I had this inkling that I was trapped in a worry paradox, because I had worried thousands of times about social media, maybe tens of thousands, and I had never posted on social media without worrying.

I knew that even if I “told myself to post without being afraid”, and I did it, I would fall back into the worry paradox because it would just be too scary.

So I decided to envision making the SAME simple social media post IN MY HEAD hundreds of times, over and over again, until I no longer felt the impulse to worry.

I would walk, and with each step I would go through the following process:

I would envision making the social media post I would envision feeling the same anxiety, fear, and emotional/physical reaction that I would normally feel when making a social media post. I would then choose to NOT WORRY. I want to be clear about what this means. I would still feel anxious and fearful and nervous. Those things aren’t worry. What I would do, though, is I would NOT NEGATE MYSELF. I would not put myself on hold on the inside. I would allow myself to feel everything and all my senses and be at “acceptance” with the way the world is, regardless. I would finish the “mental simulation” and realize that I WAS STILL ALIVE, HAPPY, AND NOTHING BAD HAPPENED WHEN I DIDN’T WORRY!!!!

At first it took some practice just to get one “repetition” of this exercise right. I’d imagine making some post, I’d feel all the feelings associated, I would purposefully NOT self-negate, which is SUPER disorienting, and then I’d celebrate that I’m still alive and everything worked out OK.

The beautiful part of this is that since it’s just a mental exercise, I know the post isn’t real. So I know it’s OK that I don’t worry, because the post isn’t real anyway.

Ultimately, I became fast enough that I could do a “rep” of this exercise in about a second, correlated with a step or two of walking. As I counted my steps walking around my neighborhood, I counted my “reps” of “anti-MWP exercise” as well.

On my first walk I did about 750 repetitions of this exercise, and could already feel the edge come off of my worry instinct towards social media!

Now, I know that sounds complicated, and I don’t expect you to fully understand this process based on one explanation.

I also want you to know that I’m not perfect at this yet. In fact, I’m still very much a beginner. While I’ve managed to isolate some simple things like social media fears, I still would say that I’m trapped in the Mental Worry Paradox the same as you are.

I’ll need hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of repetitions of this exercise to break free. But I do think I will get there, and if I can do a few thousand “reps” a day, then I may be mostly free from worry in as little as a year or two!

I’m Looking for “Experimental Subjects” To See if My Anti-Worry Techniques Will Work On You Too!

If any or all of this “anti-worry” work sounds cool to you, you’re more than welcome to join me in my mental practices.

The coolest thing is that since I’m just at the very beginning of this journey, just experimenting to see if I can totally change my mental health with this perspective, everything is TOTALLY FREE to you right now!

If you want to talk on the phone or Facetime and do a “live practice session” of the anti-MWP exercise, then I’ll happily do a free session with you. Just click this sentence/paragraph, which is linked to a calendar invite.

I’ll also post some on social media, although while I’m in “experimental mode” I might have my head down and might not be posting or writing as much!!

Regardless, I hope that this article has helped you see how worry works more clearly!