Areas › Worry and anxiety › What worry does
Watch for the moment a what if turns into a when. That small slide, from a possibility into something you can already picture in detail, is where worry does most of its damage.
The detail is what convinces you. Your mind supplies the phone call, the face, the exact words, and the body answers the picture as though it were news that had arrived. Catching the slide is usually enough to loosen it. Say the sentence back to yourself with the word maybe in front of it and notice that nothing has actually happened yet.
Qur’an and Sunnah
No soul knows what it will reap tomorrow (Quran 31:34). The certainty your mind is offering you about tomorrow was never certainty in the first place.
إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ عِندَهُۥ عِلۡمُ ٱلسَّاعَةِ وَيُنَزِّلُ ٱلۡغَيۡثَ وَيَعۡلَمُ مَا فِي ٱلۡأَرۡحَامِۖ وَمَا تَدۡرِي نَفۡسࣱ مَّاذَا تَكۡسِبُ غَدࣰ اۖ وَمَا تَدۡرِي نَفۡسُۢ بِأَيِّ أَرۡضࣲ تَمُوتُۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ عَلِيمٌ خَبِيرُۢ
Knowledge of the Hour [of Resurrection] belongs to God; it is He who sends down the relieving rain and He who knows what is hidden in the womb. No soul knows what it will reap tomorrow, and no soul knows in what land it will die; it is God who is all knowing and all aware
Qur’an 31:34read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Within a cognitive behavioural treatment programme, reductions in how badly people tolerated uncertainty accounted for the reductions in their worry, which points at the not knowing rather than the content of any particular worry as the thing to work on. That was a mediation analysis inside a trial, so the direction is inferred rather than proven. It fits what people notice anyway: settle one what if and another one arrives.
Bomyea J, Ramsawh H, Ball TM, Taylor CT, Paulus MP, Lang AJ, Stein MB. (2015). Intolerance of uncertainty as a mediator of reductions in worry in a cognitive behavioral treatment program for generalized anxiety disorder.. Journal of anxiety disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A vivid picture gets treated by the body as information, so noticing that you made it takes some of its force away.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
There is a small gap between something happening and the story you tell yourself about it. That gap is the cheapest place to step in.
Some fears are about nothing at all. Others are about something real that your mind has swollen out of shape. It is worth knowing which one you are holding, because they need different answers.
Parents see an adult sized person and assume adult sized judgement. It helps to say out loud that the wiring is still being finished well past eighteen.