"At least I won't be caught off guard"

Some people worry mainly as a guard against shock. They reason that if they expect the worst all the time, the worst can't ambush them. They've seen what it's like to be happy and hopeful and then be knocked flat by a phone call, and they've decided, not always consciously, never to be in that position again. For them it seems better to stay low than to be dropped from a height.

Michelle Newman and Sandra Llera have built a theory of chronic worry on this idea. They propose that some people are especially sensitive to sudden shifts from feeling fine to feeling dreadful, and that they use worry to keep themselves in a mildly bad state so that no shift can be that sharp. On their account the worry isn't a failed attempt to feel better. It's working as intended, because it keeps the person braced.

I find this the most sympathetic of all the reasons for worrying. It usually has a history. Somewhere back there is a phone call, a diagnosis, or a parent's mood that changed without warning. Bracing was a reasonable response to it.

But consider how the trade works. You pay with certainty, a bit each day, in low mood and tension and spoiled weekends. What you get for it is a softer landing on an event that, going by chapter 4, will mostly not occur. It's like an insurance policy that collects the premium every day, and when the claim finally comes in, pays nothing out. The premium was the only thing that was ever certain. If the event does come, you've suffered in advance and you'll suffer again, since bracing takes off less of the blow than you'd hope.

There's honest evidence on the other side, and I want you to have it. Kate Sweeny and her colleagues followed 230 law graduates through the four months of waiting for their results in the California bar exam. The ones who spent the wait anxious and pessimistic, going over and over it, did respond better when the news came. If they'd failed, they handled it more productively. If they'd passed, they were more delighted. So bracing isn't nonsense, and there was a measurable payoff at the end.

The same study found something else, though. Nothing the graduates tried made the waiting itself any easier, and some of their efforts seemed to backfire. They bought the payoff with four months of misery. A separate review by Sweeny and Zlatan Krizan looked at when people naturally lower their expectations, and found that they tend to do it as the moment of truth gets close. The authors think that late turn towards pessimism serves a purpose.

I draw a practical conclusion from these two pieces of work, and it's my own reading and not theirs. If bracing helps, it helps at the end. Whatever softening it gives you can be had by lowering your expectations on results day, or the evening before. Being braced since February adds nothing to it. If you like to walk into the room expecting the worst, walk into the room that way. You don't have to live that way for the four months before.

There's also a well-known strategy called defensive pessimism, studied by Julie Norem and Nancy Cantor in the 1980s. Some people set their expectations low before a test or a performance and then do perfectly well, and when experimenters interfered with the strategy, those people did worse. If that's you, and you have a pessimistic routine before big events that ends in good work, I wouldn't take it away from you. What matters is whether the pessimism is tied to an event, lasts a limited time, and ends in effort. The thing this book is about has none of those features.

So I'm not asking you to become an optimist. I'm asking you to notice when the bracing starts. If the event is on Thursday and the bracing began the Friday before, you might ask what the first five days of it bought you.