The Worry Was the Only Thing That Got You Going

Why your brain learned to run on worry

For as long as you can remember, the only way to get yourself to do something was to worry about it first. The dish you said you’d bring Thursday, the call you owe a friend, the form that’s been sitting a month: none of it moves until the worry gets loud enough, and then you’re up at 6am doing all of it at once.

To everyone around you, you were the calm one, the dependable one, the person who always came through in the end. What they never saw was how much quiet worry it took to get you there, every time.

So when a doctor called it anxiety and wrote you a prescription, you believed them. The worry was real, it wore you out, and it never let up. It took you thirty years to start asking whether anxiety was ever the whole story.

There’s a 5-minute worksheet at the end of this newsletter called What Your Worry Was Doing. It takes you back through the times worry got you going and shows you what it was doing for you, so the next time it hits you’ll know what you’re looking at.

What the worry was doing

There’s a reason the boring things never got done until you were panicking about them. Our brains run under-stimulated, short on the everyday alertness most people have without trying, so an ordinary task with no urgency just doesn’t hold our attention. It can sit on the list for weeks while you do everything around it.