"It didn't happen because I worried"

Hardly anyone says this one out loud, because said out loud it sounds like magic. But a lot of people hold it somewhere below the level of speech. You can tell by what happens when they try to stop. If you imagine deciding, today, not to worry about your daughter's drive home, you may feel a faint dread along with the thought, as though by relaxing you'd be tempting fate.

The belief comes in two versions. In the sensible version, worrying makes me take precautions, and the precautions prevent the bad thing. In the superstitious version, the worrying itself somehow keeps the bad thing away. Researchers who study worry have found both. A Canadian group led by Mark Freeston built a questionnaire called "Why Worry?" and found that people's reasons fell into two groups. One was that worrying helps you find solutions. The other was that worrying stops bad things from happening.

I dealt with the sensible version in chapter 3. Precautions do prevent things, but it's the precautions that do the preventing, and worrying is a slow and unreliable way to arrive at them. The superstitious version needs its own chapter, because it isn't really a belief you hold so much as something you've been trained into.

The training goes like this. You worry about something for a week, and then it doesn't happen, because most things don't. You feel a rush of relief. Relief is one of the strongest rewards there is, and it lands straight after a long spell of worrying. Anything that's followed by a reward tends to get repeated. The mind doesn't stop to ask whether the worrying caused the good outcome. It only registers that worrying came first and relief came after. Since nine worries in ten end this way, you get the reward nine times in ten. It would be hard to design a better schedule for building a habit.

Borkovec and others who study worry have described this pattern, and they used the word superstitious for it. I think it's a fair word. A football fan wears the same socks to every home game because his team won the first time he wore them. They win about half the time, which is plenty to keep the socks in use. He doesn't really believe in the socks. He just feels uneasy at the thought of leaving them in the drawer.

Your unease at the thought of not worrying is of the same kind. It's what a long-rewarded habit feels like when you think about breaking it, and it tells you nothing about whether worrying works.

You can't rerun your life without the worrying to see what would have happened. But you can do something nearly as good, which is to look at the things you forgot to worry about. There are thousands of them. You didn't worry about last Tuesday's drive to work, or the meeting the week before the one you dreaded, or your son's school trip in the spring when you were distracted by moving house. Those went fine as well, and they went fine at about the same rate as the things you did worry about. If worry protected anything, the unworried parts of your life ought to be where the disasters cluster, and they aren't.

It works the other way round too. Think of the worst things that have happened to you, the three or four real blows. I'd guess that most of them weren't on your list beforehand. People very often say that the thing that actually hit them came on an ordinary Tuesday, from a direction they hadn't been watching. All that lookout duty was posted on the wrong wall.

Here's a small experiment, and I'd keep it small. Pick one minor thing this week that you'd normally worry about. It might be whether a parcel will turn up, or whether a friend liked the present. Decide in advance not to give it any rounds. When it comes to mind, note it and move on to something else, without arguing. Then see how it turns out. One trial proves nothing, and I wouldn't claim it did. But you may notice the faint feeling of tempting fate as you do it. If you do, you'll know the belief in this chapter is one of yours, and you'll have seen it fail once.