Are You a Natural Worrier?

“I spend a lot of time worrying about my interactions with other people.”

“I have trouble going to sleep because I stay up thinking.”

“I often think about my health, especially during these times, but all of my checks have come up clean (when I’ve actually gone to the doctor).”

“I have uncomfortable symptoms way more frequently than most people I know.”

If these things ring true for you, you might be a natural worrier - someone who finds more comfort in worrying and worries way more often than others. You may worry about small things that no one else seems to care about, worry for much longer periods, and even be uncomfortable when you’re not worrying.

So why is this? 

Our best guess forty years ago was that we worried excessively because of a chemical imbalance in the brain. Unfortunately, decades of research later and we’ve got more evidence against this idea than for it.

So if it’s not nature, is it nurture? Do we learn to worry from our parents and then carry it for the rest of our lives? There’s more evidence for this model, but then how do we explain our ability to change as we grow older? There’s an enormous body of work on how we can drastically reduce the amount we worry through different therapies, allowing us to live without excessively worrying, regardless of our parents. So if it’s not nature, and nurture is only a small part, what could it be?

The full picture is actually found in something you (might have) learned in your high school health class: neuroplasticity - the idea that our brain changes based on the choices we make and the behavior we engage in. In other words, when we choose to do something often, our brain changes to make that choice feel easier. The more we choose to do it, the easier it becomes to choose to do it again.

In high school, the discussion about neuroplasticity usually centers on exercise. When we haven’t been exercising for a long time, choosing to exercise is really difficult because our brain has adapted to not exercising. As we start to exercise, it becomes easier to choose to do it again. The more often and the more consistently we exercise, the easier it gets for us to say “alright, I’m gonna exercise today no matter what” and actually follow through. This is what has led to the old expression that goes something like “once you exercise for three months, it becomes a habit.”

So, back to our original topic. Using this lens of neuroplasticity, how can we understand worrying? Well, if we look at worrying like any other behavior, for example exercise, it becomes easy to figure out why we get so comfortable worrying; if we learned to worry from our parents when we were young and kept doing it through our teens, our brain has built around making it easy for us to keep doing it. Some of us can reach adulthood being so comfortable with worrying that it becomes our way of life, just like we can go for decades without seriously exercising. 

But within this idea lies great hope for us natural worriers: if our brain can adapt one way, it can adapt the other way. The same way we see so many people finally stick to an exercise routine for the first time in their thirties, forties, and fifties, it is possible for us to change our comfort around worrying once we choose to devote serious time to it. As we begin choosing not to worry, our brain slowly rebuilds to be less comfortable with it. In time, this means even those of us who worry the most excessively can get down to normal and healthy amounts - in essence, no longer being “natural worriers” anymore.

Of course, inducing this kind of change is uncomfortable. Like choosing to exercise, it takes constant effort over time. But it also gets substantially easier the more we do it. In fact, it’s not uncommon to go from hours of worrying a day down to a couple minutes with just a few months of practice given the right methods!

If you’re interested in reading more about these methods, sign up for my mailing list or like my Facebook page. I wrote an entire book about how we can use this scientific perspective to recover from excessive worrying and high anxiety, and I’ll be releasing it soon. I’ll also be posting more content like this, including a videos.

For now, I wish you luck on your journey and hope you have a speedy recovery.