"I'm just being prepared"

This is the belief that holds the whole habit up, so it deserves a careful answer. It goes something like this. "The world is uncertain. Sensible people think ahead. When I go over what might go wrong, I'm getting ready for it. People who don't do this are the ones who get caught out."

Most of that is true. Thinking ahead is one of the best things a human mind can do. People who check the tyres before a long drive, keep some money aside, and read the contract before signing do have fewer disasters than people who don't. If worrying were the same as that, I'd have no book to write.

So look closely at what preparation is like when you see someone do it. Take a person getting ready for a job interview. They read about the company. They write down five questions they might be asked and sketch an answer to each. They check the train times and pick an earlier train in case of delays. They iron a shirt. That's an evening's work at most, and at the end of it they're finished, in the plain sense that there's nothing left on the list.

Now take the same person worrying about the same interview. "What if I go blank? What if they ask about the gap in my CV? What if the train's late? What if I don't get it, and I'm stuck in this job another year? What if I'm just not good enough for this kind of role?" That can go on for a fortnight, and at the end of it no shirt has been ironed.

I'd point to three differences. Preparation is concrete. It deals in train times and shirts, and it asks "how" and "what". Worrying is abstract. It asks "what if" and "why me", and it drifts upwards from this interview to your whole career to what kind of person you are. Preparation also comes to an end, because each item gets done or dropped and the list runs out. Worrying doesn't, because every answer raises another "what if". And preparation leaves something behind that you can point to afterwards, such as a list or a booking or a packed bag, while worrying leaves you tired and no further on.

A psychologist called Edward Watkins reviewed a large body of research on repetitive thinking and found it could be either helpful or harmful. One of the things that made the difference was the level of the thinking. Concrete, specific thinking about a difficulty tended to go with planning and recovery, and abstract, general thinking about the same difficulty tended to go with anxiety and low mood. That fits what you see if you compare the two lists above.

There's more direct evidence too. In 2020 two researchers, Sandra Llera and Michelle Newman, ran an experiment on exactly this belief. They asked 185 people to describe a real problem in their lives. They then asked some of them to think about the problem in a worrying way, some to think about it objectively, and some to do a breathing exercise. After that, everyone came up with solutions and picked their best one. Judges who didn't know which group anyone was in rated the solutions from the worry group as less effective than those from the objective group. The people who worried more also said they were less likely to carry their solution out. And they finished more anxious than the others. This held for people who worried a lot in daily life and for people who didn't.

An older finding sits alongside it. Graham Davey tested whether people who worry a great deal are worse at solving problems, and found they weren't. What they lacked was confidence in their solutions. This rings true to me. A worrier often has the answer by minute three, doesn't trust it, and spends the next two hours checking it against imagined cases.

Here's the honest objection. Sometimes a round of worry does lead to a useful thought. You're lying there fretting about the holiday and you suddenly remember the passport expires in May. That happens, and I wouldn't deny it. But notice how it happened. The useful thought arrived early and took a few seconds. It was concrete. It would have arrived in any sort of thinking about the holiday, including a calm five minutes with a checklist. What I'd question is the hour of worrying that went on after it.

I think of the first flicker of worry as an alarm, and a good one. It tells you that something needs attention. The mistake is to keep the alarm ringing in the belief that the ringing is the work. When the first "what if" arrives, you can ask what you'd do about it with a pen in your hand. If something goes down on paper, such as a call to make, a thing to check or a date to look up, you're preparing. If nothing can go on the paper, there's nothing to prepare, and what follows will be a round.

For this week, I'd suggest you only watch. Catch yourself in a round once or twice and look at the questions you're asking. Count how many begin with "what if", and how many with "how" or "when". You don't have to change anything yet.