True … because the ten percent of the things you worried about that came true helped you to deal with the problems because you were prepared.

I’m going to worry so much more now.

Thanks

It actually does work. If you worry about things you can prepare for things. There’s a reason this behavior is completely natural for us humans, and it’s because it’s actually useful.

However, the mechanism behind “worrying” isn’t very smart. An extremely traumatic event may just turn worrying into overdrive in general, trying to prevent the next extremely traumatic event… But those extremely traumatic events are so rare that often they’ll just by chance only happen once in someone’s lifetime, not even needing any special preparation. And human brains don’t understand chance-based events. It doesn’t care if you have a 0.001% chance of being a homicide victim, if a person in your town gets murdered, it might feel as if you’re next, even though that is likely completely irrational.

There’s also no real reason for your brain to ever turn that off… Like, it prevents you from dying or other terrible consequences, right? So no need. You don’t need to be happy to survive and reproduce. That’s why it’s so hard to get rid of. You need to do a massive effort, working against a very natural and useful part of yourself.

97% of the things I lie in bed for hours thinking about never happen, y’all are inefficient!