Worry, and going over it again

Worry points forward and rumination points back, and both feel like work. That is the whole difficulty. If they felt like the waste of an evening, you would have stopped years ago; instead they feel like being responsible, and asking someone to give that up sounds like asking them to be careless.

So the argument has to be made honestly. Preparing is worth doing, and preparing has an end: you decide something, or you find out something, or you write it down and stop. Worrying has no end, because its subject is not a problem but a possibility, and possibilities do not resolve. The test is simple and you can run it tonight — ask what the last hour of it decided.

Rumination makes an even better case for itself, because it comes dressed as learning from your mistakes. The eleventh replay teaches nothing the first did not. What the replays are actually for, most of the time, is a kind of payment: a sense that feeling bad about it for long enough is what a decent person owes. It buys nobody anything, least of all the person you think you wronged.

These are general books, not treatment. Worry that has taken over your days, or that comes with physical symptoms you cannot settle, deserves a real assessment by someone qualified — and getting one is not an admission of anything.