Worry is a catch-22 for many women. It leaves them feeling wound up, on edge, and filled with self-doubt. But at the same time, a part of them secretly believes that they need their worry to manage their lives and ward off disaster. They feel stuck in a never-ending double bind, caught between a rock and a hard place. For this reason, many women find worry to be the less of two evils.

Why do women believe they need to worry? What possible advantages do they see in worry when they’re constantly suffering the disadvantages? For many women, worry doesn’t feel like a conscious choice that is under their control. It’s as if the mind has a “mind” of its own, determined to keep worrying regardless of the cost. Here’s why: the vast majority of times you worry about things, they don’t end up happening. But instead of learning that you might as well not have bothered to worry in the first place, your mind makes the mistake of assuming that your worry somehow prevented something bad from happening. If you’re usually worrying about something, then you seldom get to experience that nothing bad would have happened in the absence of worry. The same outcome probably would have occurred even if you never gave it a second thought. So your mind hangs onto worry as a strategy to prevent the next disaster coming down the pike.

Here’s a list of common beliefs about worry from a Penn State research study*:

• Worry helps motivate me to get things done that I need to get done.
• Worrying is an effective way to problem solve.
• If I worry about something, when something bad does happen, I’ll be better prepared for it.
• If I worry about something, I am more likely to actually figure out how to avoid or prevent something bad from happening.
• Worrying about most of the things that I worry about is a way to distract myself from even more emotional things, things that I don’t want to think about.
• Although it may not actually be true, it feels like if I worry about something, the worrying makes it less likely that something bad will happen.

If any of these sound familiar or if worry feels uncontrollable for you, you can break this cycle. Examine these beliefs by treating each one as an assumption and taking it through all the steps you’ve learned in this chapter. Here are some considerations to keep in mind as you examine each of them:

1. Look for evidence by comparing a time in your life when you worried a lot to a time when you hardly worried at all. Were you really better off when you worried to anticipate every little thing?
2. When a situation turned out better than expected following worry, wouldn’t that same outcome have occurred even if you hadn’t worried about it?
3. Isn’t it possible to effectively solve problems without worrying about them first?
4. Aren’t there other ways to motivate yourself without the anxiety and distress of worry, such as rewarding yourself as you accomplish certain tasks?
5. Usually it’s adaptive to be aware of your current surroundings. See if you’re missing any important information from the present moment while your thoughts are elsewhere worrying.

As you take your worry beliefs through the five steps you’ve learned in this chapter, weight the negative costs of excessive worry against the benefits you perceive. What are the disadvantages of holding onto these beliefs about needing to worry? In addition to all the distress it causes, worry keeps you from discovering that you can cope with situations and manage your life without it.


* Study reprinted from Journal of Behavior Therapy & Experimental Psychiatry, vo. 26, Borkovec and Roemer, Perceived functions of worry among generalized anxiety disorder subjects: Distraction from more emotionally distressing topics? pp. 25-30, copyright 1995, with permission from Elsevier.



Excerpt from Women Who Worry Too Much: How to Stop Worry and Anxiety from Ruining Relationships, Work, and Fun by Holly Hazlett-Stevens, Ph.D., and Michelle G. Craske, Ph.D.