The Utility of Worry
How worrying and fantasizing serve great purpose in our lives, but more than often overstep their bounds.
We’re all haunted. Lying at night in the minutes before sleep, I flinch remembering social missteps and painfully awkward or unkind things I’ve done. Or think myself into and out of holes; where I could be if I hadn’t done some certain thing, or if I’d chosen an alternative route along the way.
For those bereft, there’s a common ruminative masochism of “If we’d only caught the sickness sooner,” or “If I’d only intervened.” The chronic questioning of how things might be if, only if, one small thing had been different.
Then there’s the more permeating doubt, the wide-open unknowing of, “Am I in the right place? Am I doing the right thing? Could I be happier? How?”
It’s not wrong to think about those things. It can ignite change, the first tiny tick forward in a slowly-spinning cog or the first tossed pebble in a rapid landslide of difference. But most of the time that I’m doing it, this ruminative spinning is not useful. I’m just using it as a distraction, to get me out of whatever uncomfortable thing is for me, now.
In longer meditation sits, one of my steadier objects of focus is labeling thoughts as past, future, or present. Maybe 10% are the latter, noticing the birdsong or the ache in my knee or the itch on my chin. The other 90% consists of memories or questions, and lots of visions of futures that won’t exist. Endless “What if’s,” and “How can I get there’s,” there being a detailed fantasy of happiness and fulfillment.
I catch myself in this all the time. Complaints of how things are, contorted into pinings of the future. Once I get a good night’s sleep, it’ll change. When I get a different job, all this suffering will go away. When I get that degree, I’ll have more freedom and time and will feel content. Once I am able to travel, all will be well.
Worry is an easy thing. I’ve never met someone who is not innately gifted at worry. Anxiety about the future, the negative “what if’s,” and the positive fantasizing of the future, the positive “what if’s,” are both tools we use to step away from the present.
Not to say they’re innately negative; inventive curiosity and vivid imagination of how things could be is the origin of innovation. It’s also a protective mechanism, a gentle dissociation to protect our psyche from the suffering we are embroiled in at present. Concern and visions of negative outcomes are also protective. It’s how we predict danger, keep ourselves safe and our children safe, it’s how we get to work on time and anticipate consequences.
I remember hearing one story from a Buddhist teacher about being late for a flight.
Of course, if you’re running late for a flight, you’re going to worry. You’re going to check your watch and realize, you need to walk fast. You may even think about backup plans, wonder what the next flight might be, and imagine how the delay would impact your schedule ahead. You’ll walk faster and do your best in the circumstances. That’s useful worry.
The question is, when does that worry become a disservice, a distraction? If the late person is chronically checking their watch, their face contorting with worry as they envision and re-envision the multitude of consequences of missing the flight, catastrophizing the scenario in their mind to the point of calamity and true panic, they’ve exhausted the utility of worry. They’ve stepped fully and truly into the ruminative cycle of “What if’s.”
Let me know if this rings a bell. You’re in this setting, late and reaching beyond the utility of worry. Perhaps you spew venom about how you’re always like this. Perhaps you wonder how you have never learned to add an extra hour for Atlanta traffic, thinking how you’re a failure of an adult to have such poor time management. Or, you might scowl at the people ahead or around you, damning those blocking your path as you take your long strides down the tiled hallway, body careening forward.
That’s easier than sitting with your raw emotions. Nervousness, fear, anxiety, anger, sadness. That shit is uncomfortable as hell; I don’t want that stew inside me.
So, generally, my go-to tactic is to try and project it outward. All those sensations just become a glowy chemical flashlight to shine on everyone else. Or, that toxic light of unacknowledged feeling shines down my own throat and reflects through my whole torso as if my insides were made of broken mirrors.
If I were to just be with the fear and anxiety, the anger and nervousness, let it accompany me on my sprint to the gate, I wouldn’t be so full of reflective jagged edges inside. Instead of being an inside-out disco ball of pain, perhaps I’d just deal with each of those elements one at a time. Or, better yet, I’d put a pause on those individual elements until a time arose that better suited their inspection.
I started rock climbing about three months after my mom died. I liked it a lot. It was physical and fun, a puzzle that my body solved. At the time, I was coping with a lot of unacknowledged pain that would surface as intrusive, negative rhetoric. I’d hear a voice telling me how broken I was, how unsalvagable and unlovable, a failure in every way.
The first time my friend Lucy took me climbing outdoors, I was about halfway up a wall, maybe 75’ up a 100’ climb. There was a relatively simple move hand-foot-match that I needed to do, but I was psyched out. It was my first time being so high. I trusted her, I trusted the rock, I trusted the rope and the system in play, but I had little to no trust in myself.
I froze just long enough for the voice to enter in. What are you even doing here? What made you think you could ever be capable of this?
It would have gone on, but I shook myself, saying out loud to the rockface and the voices, “I will listen to you and I will believe you when I am back on the ground. But right now, I have to scale this cliff. Go the fuck away.”
When I finished the climb and descended back to my beaming friend, I was smiling too. From then on, I loved climbing.
That was the first time I learned I could silence my inner critic. That the anxiety that I felt had been running my life for months was actually mine to control, mine to silence. I think it truly just wanted to be acknowledged—I’ll listen to you, I’ll value you, but I won’t be ruled by you.
Worry and fantasy have their necessary function in my life. But beyond a certain degree, they lose their utility and become a source of suffering. This week was a brilliant reminder of this for me, ripe with brooding thoughts and negative fascinations, resentful fantasies of how things could be better in a glistening perfect future. But sometimes, you just have to say Go the fuck away.
I love your radiant ruminations