68. Most Of What You Worry About Won’t Happen (And How to Stop the Worry Cycle)

0:00 I'm worried I'm gonna get stuck in traffic. I'm worried I'm not gonna be able to lose the weight. I'm worried about being able to work in my 60s. I'm worried about having enough money to retire. I'm worried about my joints getting sore. What's gonna happen? Any of that ring a bell or sound familiar to you? We worry. We worry a lot. And it doesn't actually help. So let's talk about it. Welcome to Mind Your Midlife, your go-to resource for confidence and success, one thought at a time. Unlike most advice out there, we believe that simply telling you to believe in yourself or change your habits isn't enough to wake up excited about life or feel truly confident in your body.

0:50 Each week, you'll gain actionable strategies and, oh my goodness, powerful insights to stop feeling stuck and start loving your midlife. This is the Mind Your Midlife podcast. So I want to do two things in today's episode. I want to talk about what worrying really is and where it comes from and why we do it. And I want to give you an idea, which I have to confess, I originally disliked this idea. But I have researched it a bit, I've looked into it a bit, I've tried it out, and I am starting to think that this might be a solution, especially if you've been struggling with worry for a long time.

1:41 Now, what is worry? Well, there's kind of a couple ways to think about it. And I'm looking actually at an article in The Atlantic from back in 2024. And if you know of Arthur Brooks, he writes about a lot of interesting things like this. But they said that a research firm found that the five most common worries of people worldwide were inflation, poverty and social inequality, crime and violence, unemployment, and corruption, corruption being financial and political. So those people, though, were just picking from a list, or typically, they probably were, of global problems.

2:25 Most of the time, if you do a survey about your worries, you're picking from a list. And so they may not catch, even though those worries are all valid, they may not catch your personal worries. And that's about your relationship, or about your body, or about your kids, or about your parents, or about your job, or about your house, or you know, I could keep going. Those personal worries are the ones that often just run in our heads all the time. Maybe it's a health worry. I think I skipped that one.

3:05 So what we want to make sure that we understand is how to start shifting away from this worry cycle constantly running in our heads. And I'm gonna give you some statistics and then I'm gonna tell you kind of a little bit more about how the brain works. So there was a study done at Cornell and also at Penn State. So I'm gonna combine some things here. And these studies found that 85%, and actually in one case I saw 91%, but let's stick with 85. We're gonna be conservative.

3:45 That 85% of what we worry about never actually happens. 85%. That's more than 8 out of 10. That's a lot. A lot of things that we worry about never actually happen. And get this, that leaves 15%, the things that we worry about that did happen, small amount. But almost 80% of participants in this study handled that difficulty that happened that they had been worried about better than they expected. Or they learned a lesson, or they came through it a lot more smoothly than they thought.

4:26 So if you do some math here, about 97% of our worrying is not doing us any good. It's a waste of our mental energy. And given the quite big things that are available for us to worry about in midlife, they're potentially even putting our quality of life, even our health at risk. Because in so many conversations, in so many episodes, you've heard me or me and a guest talk about stress, right?

5:10 And talk about our nervous system and our nervous system needing to be in that rest and digest phase as opposed to fight or flight. And we've talked about cortisol, cortisol levels being high, and all of that goes together, but cortisol being high on a on an ongoing basis. I almost use the word chronic, is not good for your body. It's not good for any of our bodies. So we need to be able to calm ourselves down, and that's mentally and physically in our bodies. We need ways to calm ourselves down.

5:51 And I guess maybe that should be a totally separate podcast episode so that we can have ways to calm ourselves down. Today, I don't want to go too far down that path. I want to stick with worry. So it's very common to have worries running around in your head. Very common. And why is that? This is how the brain works. So you know, if you've listened to Mind Your Midlife at all so far, that a lot of what we do on a day-to-day basis to just kind of go through our day is us running on automatic because our subconscious brain is running all of those processes.

6:39 So you get up and you brush your teeth and you go to the bathroom and you have some caffeine or you go for a walk, or you don't have to think consciously. I pick my toothbrush up with my right hand. Then I pick my toothpaste up with my left hand. Then I squeeze a quarter of an inch of toothpaste onto the toothbrush. You know you're not thinking about any of that, right? You are absolutely doing it automatically, and you are probably thinking about something else. You're either running something else in your head or you're listening to something else, or you're talking to someone, and you do not have to walk yourself through the steps of brushing your teeth.

7:26 A little bit scarier, this even happens when we're driving. If you've ever, I think every driver has had this happen, except for new drivers. If you've ever arrived at a destination and thought to yourself, wow, I do not remember driving here. You knew you were doing it, but you don't have any recollection of the drive. That's because you were on subconscious automatic. Your brain knew how to do it. Your brain knew what to pay attention to. Now that feels a little scary to me, but this is how a lot of our day runs. Our subconscious brain runs all those procedures in our bodies that are needed and it does it automatically.

8:12 The other thing your subconscious brain, well, not the other thing, one of the other things your subconscious brain does is to store your beliefs about the world and your beliefs about yourself. So if you think of yourself as someone who loves to exercise, then that's your identity inside your subconscious brain. And you probably are going to exercise more than someone who has a self-belief that they're terrible at sports and they're terrible at exercise and they're just so stiff they can't ever move. If they believe that, they will then make decisions accordingly, if that makes sense.

8:58 Your subconscious brain holds these beliefs. Maybe you have a belief that when you start a conversation with someone new, you you never say the right thing and it's always embarrassing. Well, if that's your belief inside your subconscious brain, you want to know how many new conversations with new people you're starting? Probably not a lot, because you believe it's going to be embarrassing and you're not going to be good at it. So I'm just using those to make a point. Sometimes what's running around in our heads, the thoughts that are just kind of sitting in there during the day when we're going about our business, is related to these beliefs that we hold about ourselves or about other people in our world or about the world. Sometimes it's your subconscious brain trying to keep you safe.

9:43 And that's the other big one that I want to talk about. So we are wired to keep ourselves alive. Thank goodness. That's a good thing. And way back when that used to mean staying away from being eaten by an animal and having shelter and being warm enough and those sorts of true, true life or death things. Now, in most cases, we're not running from a tiger down the street. And we probably have shelter and warmth or cooling, whichever way. But your brain is still trying to keep you safe at all times.

10:26 And so the way it's able to interpret that is clues from your body. So here comes the nervous system. If you are in a situation where your nervous system is riled up and you that cortisol is spiking, your brain is going to go, this is not safe. Get out. Or it's going to say avoid in the future. Or maybe it's going to say both of those things. On the other hand, if you're relaxed and calm, you're in what we call rest and digest, you are all good. Whatever you just did, the brain is going to now equate with safe, stay alive, good.

11:11 So sometimes what that means is we shy away from anything that is a little bit new and different, or that we know might have a bit of a challenge to it. Because your brain wants to keep you safe. And so sometimes what that leads to, because I mean, hey, if we always lived on our couch under a blanket watching TV shows we'd seen before, that would be very comfy and safe, wouldn't it? But that wouldn't be much of a life. So even if you are not the risk-taking, challenge-loving person all the time, you're going to put yourself out there in the world sometimes.

11:55 Even if it's just calling on the phone to ask a question that might lead to a difficult answer. Or walking or driving out of your house to go and shop. Even if it's something that's so simple we know we have to do it, maybe you're going to end up seeing people, or there's something a little bit nerve-wracking about the situation. That's where the worry comes in. Because somewhere in that subconscious brain, your brain is telling you this situation could be a little bit scary.

12:38 This situation is new. This situation in the past has led me to feel this way. Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh. And so the train of thought starts. Last time I did this, I felt so silly and so embarrassed. Last time I did this, I felt so silly and so embarrassed. What if I feel silly and embarrassed? What if I feel silly and embarrassed? What if I feel silly and embarrassed? That's worry. Because you're looking forward, it hasn't happened yet, but you're imagining this negative outcome that you're going to feel silly and embarrassed.

13:20 Well, not necessarily, right? And you're thinking to me, you're thinking right now, well, probably, because I know I have evidence from the past, but still not necessarily. And remember what that study showed? 85% of the things we worry about don't actually happen. So I want to say two things about worry in particular. And the one, the first one is what we've just been talking about. Your brain is trying to keep you safe. It's taking evidence, it's taking beliefs you've created from situations that have happened in your life, and it's finding times to be concerned, and it is ramping up the concern in those times, and it's giving you these worry trains of thought, trains of thought.

14:11 Yeah. The second thing is sometimes we get it into our head, and I think there's a lot of sort of cultural sayings that buy into this, but sometimes we get it in our head that if we think of the bad things that could happen ahead of time, and we really worry on them. We really worry on them and we think on them and we worry about them, then they're less likely to happen because we've thoroughly worried through that, right? It's probably it's like carrying umbrella. I think I've even said this. Oh my goodness, I'm realizing this about myself.

14:52 You know how the saying sort of goes that if you carry an umbrella, it's probably not going to rain. We often identify with worry in this way. Well, if I worry about this worst case scenario and I think it all through and I just sort of chew on it for a while, then it's probably less likely to happen. And that is a cousin of one of my least favorite sayings: don't get your hopes up. So don't get your hopes up may have come from various things, various reasons people say this. Obviously, on the surface, we're saying this to ourselves or to someone else because we don't want them to be sad, right?

15:37 We don't want them to be disappointed. We don't want them to get their hopes up and then be disappointed. But it's such a close cousin of worry because if we're always thinking I better not get my hopes up, then it leads right into, well, what's I'm doing air quotes, probably gonna happen, meaning the bad thing, the negative thing, the less happy thing. I guess I'll focus on that because I don't want to get my hopes up. I don't want to think about the thing that could be the good outcome.

16:56 I'll focus on the thing that could be the bad outcome. And that doesn't help. It doesn't change the outcome. And in fact, there's some fairly good evidence through studies of the brain and studies of how our thoughts work, that, and you probably will have heard this saying before, what we focus on grows. What we focus on tends to come about a little bit more often. So let's kind of follow that all the way through. What we focus on, if we're always focusing on what we don't want to happen, that worry thing, we're worrying on it, we're like chewing on it like a dog with a bone, then it actually makes that more likely to happen, not less.

17:49 And the reason is that your subconscious brain, like we said in major point one here, your subconscious brain is running a lot of your day-to-day life. And so whatever you're focusing on, the way that we retrain our brain, the way that we store beliefs, we store memories, we learn new things, is repetition with emotion. So if I'm just I'm really worrying on this thing, worrying on it, focusing on it, focusing on it, focusing on it, guess what's happening? We're training our brain. We're storing it right in there as a core belief that this negative thing is going to happen.

18:33 So not only does worrying about something not help us avoid it, so we've dashed that theory, it often brings it about even more likely. I don't know if my English was good there, but hopefully you followed what I was saying. Now, I found something interesting in the same article I referenced at the beginning, and that was that as we get older, statistically we worry less. And I found this quite interesting because we need to focus, of course, on midlife. But this was a poll, a Gallup poll done in 2009.

19:13 And at that time, 37% of people in their 40s reported experiencing worry a lot of the day yesterday. So they were asked about the previous day, did they experience a lot of worry? 37% of people in their 40s said that they did. People who were in their mid to late 60s, only 23% said that they experienced worry a lot of the day yesterday. And then people who were even older, those numbers kept dropping. And it made me chuckle a little bit because the article says we know that people tend to become less neurotic as they age, but it's also possible they simply have less to worry about at 90 than they did at 40.

20:03 Fair enough. Fair enough. So we're somewhere in the middle of that, right? You're in your 40s, you're in your 50s, maybe you're in your 60s. So we're in that middle point that they were studying. And yes, you may have a lot of things to worry about. I have a lot of things I can worry about. We've got aging parents. We've got retirement coming in five, 10, 15 years. It feels closer, right, than it used to. We uh have so many physical changes, and we're trying to figure that out. I think about how many podcast episodes that I've done about HRT and menopause, and clearly it's a topic that we're worrying about.

20:44 Because it's, I mean, how much more personal can you get? It's our bodies. We have kids who are growing up and they're making decisions and we're not in charge anymore. And so we're hoping that we did a good job and we're worrying about them because maybe they're off on their own. And I could go on and on and on, and relationships might be changing. I mean, there's a lot that we could be worrying about right now. And it doesn't help. Because most of what you worry about isn't going to happen. And because we hold ourselves back by not getting our hopes up and by focusing on the negative.

21:25 And in fact, sometimes we even lean ourselves toward those things being more likely to happen. So what to do? Okay. First of all, tapping is one of my favorite tools to deal with a propensity to worry. And believe it or not, I'm going to say 20 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, I was a very negative person. I come by it naturally in my family. And I really just was complaining all the time. And most of the time I was calling it venting, but I was doing it all the time.

22:07 And I'm sorry, but if you're doing it all the time, it's not venting anymore. Venting is like isolated. Let me vent about this, and then we're done. And I realized it and I didn't love where I was headed with my attitude, with how I was speaking. And I started working on how I can change this. And the first thing for me, as you've probably heard me say, was just being aware, catching it. Whew, catching it. Oh my goodness. I'm going to link my episode on complaining in the show notes so that you can go and find that one because it's definitely related. The second thing was learning how to interrupt, learning how to change the way I was thinking, to go through the emotions and move on.

22:52 And my favorite tool for that, favorite, is tapping. And in fact, in the bonus subscription that you can get on Apple Podcasts, you can just click subscribe when you go to the Mind Your Midlife page on Apple Podcasts, or you could go to CherylPFischer.com slash bonus episodes. In that bonus subscription, right now in January 2026, I am doing a mini-series on tapping. What is it? Why is it not woo-woo? How does it work? And some actual tapping practices that you can go through. So make sure that you grab that because it will make a difference. So that's learning how to calm our body, learning how to interrupt the pattern once we recognize it.

23:38 And then here's the tool I promised you at the beginning. And this I did not know about until reading the article from The Atlantic. So I'm going to challenge us all to try a worry outcome journal. So here's what you do in this journal. And you could do this in a note in your phone, or if you have a notebook, do it in a notebook, whatever you, whatever you prefer. Don't try to make yourself do something you're not going to do, right? Do the format that works for you in a Google Doc, who knows. Step one: write down in this notebook or document what specifically you are worrying about.

24:21 So we need to talk about this step because I don't really want us to get in a loop where we're always constantly ruminating about something and focusing on something. We've established it doesn't help. So let's think of this as venting. So if if you could start to pause a couple times a day and just check, check what's going on in your head. So give yourself some triggers. Like sometimes when I come up the stairs to go into my office, I pause and I think, how am I feeling? And if you don't have my story cycle, it'll walk you through this. Cherylpfischer.com slash story cycle, it'll walk you through exactly what I'm saying right now.

25:03 How am I feeling? Okay, let me look behind that. What's going on in my brain? What am I telling myself? And sometimes I have to just kind of let see what comes up, see what comes to the top. But the other day I realized I was really, really worried about something with one of my kids. I was just like really stuck in thinking about it. So when I realized that, now I can write it down. I'm worried about write it down. Maybe your car might need to go in the shop. You could write down, I'm worried I'm gonna need a whole new transmission. You could write down, I'm worried that I'm gonna feel embarrassed when I go to the networking thing.

25:46 I'm not gonna make up worries for you, but you get the idea, hopefully. Write it down. Step two, record the level of distress that the worry is causing you in that moment. So we could do a one to ten scale like we do in tapping, or actually zero to ten scale. Ten being a lot of distress, zero being totally fine. Somewhere in the middle, give it a number. Step three, you set a specific date, and it's recommended that it be at least two weeks from now, or maybe a month from now, that you're gonna revisit this.

26:32 So you note down a date, or maybe you have it in tabs, or uh who knows, you have an organizational system where you're gonna come back to the previous month after a month has passed, you're gonna come back and look at this. So make a note of the date. And on that date, step four, write down what the outcome actually was. So it's possible that some things that you're worrying about are not going to be solved in a month. So maybe that date needs to be farther ahead, but some things will be quicker. So you're assigning the date, and then on that date, you're coming back and looking at it.

27:13 And here's the idea behind this journal. The idea is that it will show us that so much of what we worried about actually hasn't happened or isn't happening or didn't happen. So much of it. And I don't think you're gonna need to do this forever. And I don't really want you to, because it does keep the focus on worrying, maybe a little bit more than we'd like it to, right? I just want us to use it as a teaching tool to teach ourselves that yes, I'm worrying about these things. Oh my goodness, that never actually happened. Oh my goodness, I know that is never gonna happen.

27:54 What was I thinking? Maybe it's even that simple, just coming back to it in a different mood where you're like, uh, of course that's not gonna happen. Why was I worried about that? Sometimes we need evidence like that to help us see that we really are overdoing it on the worry and it's not getting us anywhere. And we didn't need to worry about it to begin with. So it's really important that we not beat ourselves up because this is a process that is very normal for all of us. Your brain is trying to keep you safe. And experiences, sayings, cultural stuff that you've grown up with is a piece of this.

28:41 And good heavens, we got a lot of stuff on our plate right now, right? So absolutely no beating yourself up for doing a lot of worrying. Say, I'm a normal human being, and then let's try. Notice it, interrupt it, ideally with tapping, maybe it could be affirmations, deep breathing, going for a walk. And then try this worry outcome journal and see if it's a good tool tool for you. And I would love to hear from you on social media if you find this to be a good tool, if it has helped you, if you have some other tip that has helped you, come find me on social media.

29:23 I'm at Cheryl P. Fisher almost everywhere or basically everywhere. So I can't wait to hear from you. And make sure that you have hit the follow button because next week's episode is about hypnotherapy. I have a hypnotherapist joining me. We had a fascinating conversation, and I actually had a hypnosis session with her before we recorded the episode. You will want to hear it. Can't wait to have you join me for that. And in the meantime, take just a little bit better care of yourself during this period of life. Just a little bit better care on the inside and on the outside makes a big difference.