What worrying buys you

People don't keep up a habit for years unless it pays them something. So before I count what worrying costs, I'll set out what I think it gives you.

The first payment is the sense of doing something. A threat has appeared and you can't act on it yet, because Thursday is four days off. Waiting with nothing to do is one of the more unpleasant states a person can be in. Worrying fills that gap with what feels like work. There's effort involved and it tires you out, so at the end of an evening of it you feel as though a shift has been put in. When researchers asked worriers why they worry, the most common answers were that it motivates them, that it prepares them for the worst, and that it helps them avoid or prevent bad outcomes. All three describe worrying as a job that needs doing.

The second payment is a feeling of being responsible. Somebody ought to be thinking about the boiler and the motorway and the mortgage rate, and you're the one doing it. Against that, relaxing looks like negligence. Many worriers half believe that the moment they stop keeping watch is the moment it'll happen.

The third payment is harder to see, and I find it the most interesting. Worrying is mostly made of words. Researchers who interrupted people during rounds of worry and asked what was in their minds found that they mostly reported thoughts and not pictures. That may matter, because a picture of your daughter's car on the hard shoulder goes straight to your stomach, while a sentence about it is duller. One theory holds that talking to yourself about a fear is a way of not quite feeling it. You stay busy with the commentary and avoid the jolt. The researcher who proposed this, Thomas Borkovec, called it a speculation, and I'd treat it as one. But it matches something people often say, which is that worrying is unpleasant and yet somehow preferable to sitting still with the fear itself.

The fourth payment comes at the end. Thursday arrives, the chat turns out to be about Leeds, and relief floods in. That relief is a real pleasure, and some of the credit for it goes, without your noticing, to the worrying that came before. Chapter 5 is about this.

The fifth is protection against shock. If you've already lived through the worst in your head, nobody can spring it on you. Chapter 6 is about that one.

I don't think any of these payments is imaginary. The question I'd ask is what they're made of. Every one of them is a feeling. There's the feeling of doing something, the feeling of being responsible, a sharp fear made duller, relief when it's over, and the sense of being braced. Not one of them changes what happens on Thursday. The chat will be whatever it was always going to be.

Now for the costs, most of which you know better than I do.

The most obvious is time. An hour of worrying is an hour of your life, spent in a future that mostly won't occur. It adds up to days in a month.

Less obvious is what happens to the present. You were at the birthday party and you weren't. People who live with worriers often say this before the worrier does. The children notice that you're looking through them, and a good weekend that would have been yours goes by with you elsewhere.

Sleep suffers too. Rounds start easily in bed, because there's nothing to interrupt them, and a tired mind is worse at stopping them the next day.

Your body pays a share of the bill. The shoulders and jaw stay tight, the stomach churns, and headaches come more often. Your body can't tell a rehearsed disaster from a real one, so it gets ready each time.

Decisions get put off. It seems odd that someone who thinks about a problem all day should fail to act on it, but it's common. The worrying takes the place of the phone call. You can worry about the noise from the boiler for a month without ringing the engineer, because ringing might bring bad news and worrying lets you stay busy with the problem without risking that.

And the habit spreads. Each round you complete makes the next one easier to start. New subjects get recruited. People who've worried for years often say there's always something, and that's what you'd expect if the rounds came first and the subjects were found to fit them.

At any point in a round, you can ask yourself one test question, which is whether the last ten minutes have produced anything you can do or decide. If they have, fine, that was thinking. If they haven't, you've been paid in feelings, and the price was ten minutes of your evening.