Have you ever wondered why humans worry?

"Worrying does not take away tomorrow's troubles. It takes away today's peace."

Randy Armstrong

All starts with the mind

To understand why we are worrying we need to understand a bit about how the mind works. Don’t worry, I am not going to overcomplicate things. However complex the mind processes are, they all serve three main purposes: safety, comfort and procreation.

We are going to focus on the mind's job of keeping us safe. To keep us safe, our mind evolved with this role of being an “overly protective mother” that works on the simple principle “better safe than sorry”. In other words, our mind tends to overestimate the danger and underestimate our abilities to cope.

You may wonder by now, what has this to do with worrying. Well, during our evolution the mind has developed this amazing ability to predict things based on past experiences and our imaginative processes. Imagine a situation when our hungry ancestors came across some berries they had never seen before. If they were to rush on eating them, and the berries were poisonous, they might had gotten ill or die. To protect them, the mind intervened and presented them with a few possible scenarios to consider: What if the berries are poisonous? What if you get ill? What if you get ill and must fight an enemy or a predator? What is going to happen to your family and your children if you die? What if they have already eaten a few berries and die or get ill? This example gives us the opportunity to learn what might trigger our mind to worry.

Every time when we come across a situation that is uncertain, novel or ambiguous our mind jumps to the rescue trying to predict what might go wrong so that we can stay a step ahead of danger. In other words, it catastrophizes, predicting the worst-case scenarios.

We are not only worrying about us, but we are also worrying about others, people that are close to us, loved ones, pets, economy, wildlife, the planet, all sort of things that matter to us.

When we overexercise this ability of predicting what might go wrong, we worry excessively. The worries come to mind like cars on a busy motorway and they could generate high anxiety levels, depression and exhaustion. Some people find it hard to stop worrying, to rest, sleep, eat or function well. This is clinically named Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

FACT: 98% of our worries never happen. They are a futile imaginary anxiety inducing exercise, for our safety sake.

I hope you found this helpful. I very much welcome your views on worrying.