Life is good. So why can't you stop worrying?

By Stephanie Dolgoff

updated 9:09 a.m. ET Nov. 28, 2007

I open my eyes with a start, like the murderous freak in the slasher movie the audience thinks is dead but isn't. The clock reads 3:55 A.M. I've awakened within six minutes of this time for the past three nights. I shut my eyes and take a breath, hoping to ease back to sleep. Too late.

The anxiety is already gathering momentum, my brain roiling with thoughts that have no business being there in the middle of the night. It's like a Law & Order episode in my head: Opposing sides argue and counterargue, witnesses are badgered, lawyers shout objections. I bang the gavel and demand silence so I can get some rest. That works for a minute, then the ruckus begins again.

What am I so anxious about? Have my 4-year-old daughters been abducted? No, both girls are snug in their beds. My job is stable, my marriage solid, my family absurdly healthy (knock particleboard night table). But I don't let any of that interfere with my worrying.

Neither do many of my friends and coworkers who, I've noticed, also tend to fret for no apparent reason. We likely possess what psychology researchers call high-trait anxiety, which means that worrying is a natural part of who we are, whether things are going poorly or well. If I happen to be facing a genuine crisis, I can at least take comfort in the fact that my mental state makes sense—it matches my life. When things seem suspiciously placid, on the other hand, I feel not only as if the other shoe is about to drop but that it will land on my head and I'll most likely get a concussion.

Baseless worries
I've learned that I can't go around complaining about my baseless worries to just anyone. The last time I mentioned my middle-of-the-night episodes to an acquaintance, she essentially told me to get myself some real problems, then treated me to a litany of her own. Yet anxiety that prevents a person from relishing life even when things are going swimmingly is a genuine problem.

As my friend Rhonda, 41, puts it, "Feeling good is like going up in a roller coaster—you know the drop is coming. It's hard to enjoy being lifted up if you know what's on the other side." The trouble with this kind of thinking, familiar with it as I am, is that girding yourself for the downturn doesn't necessarily soften the landing, not to mention that it makes it tough to take pleasure in the good times. Clearly, this is no way to live, so I decided to find out why people like me can't stop worrying and if it's possible for us to change our ways.

When I start calling experts, they confirm that even happy events, such as a promotion, can be fraught with uncertainty for us. ("Is the company solid?") As for why we agonize, "Worriers hope to gain a feeling of sureness," says Robert L. Leahy, Ph.D., author of The Worry Cure (Three Rivers Press). "They want to avoid disappointment or staunch a problem before it gets out of control." This makes sense to me. Before my wedding, I worried about everything, including the weather (which I couldn't control) and friends being mad if we didn't invite them (which I couldn't really control, either).

Anxiety needs no reason
But there needn't be a specific life event like a wedding for worriers to kick it into high gear. The mere fact of things going smoothly can be enough to set the courtroom drama in motion. "People don't worry so much about losing a dollar as they worry about losing $100,000. In other words, when everything is going well in your life, you have more to lose. It's normal to be aware of that and worry about it," Leahy says. What's not normal is when you trip over your worry as soon as you step out of bed and it follows you around all day like a pesky younger sibling, begging to be noticed.

When I'm in a worrying mood, I can fret about nearly anything. Doing so makes me feel as if I'm solving a problem, even if the problem doesn't exist yet. My husband, Paul, frequently points out that I get so worked up about preventing snafus that I forget they're hypothetical; I find myself as twisted up as if they've become full-blown disasters. That's a lot of wasted energy: A study in Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy found that fully 85 percent of the things we worry about never occur.

Still, in a world of drive-by shootings and tsunamis, I'm reluctant to part with my worrying ways. "Could it be that things work out well so often because of what we worrywarts do to prevent our concerns from happening?" I ask Tom Borkovec, Ph.D., professor emeritus of psychology at Penn State University at University Park and lead author of the worry study mentioned above. I tell him that recently, when my husband and I were packing for a trip, I had a seemingly irrational flash that our flight was going to be canceled. Feeling neurotic, I called to confirm. Wouldn't you know it? They had no record of our reservation, so I pitched a fit, thereby rectifying the situation. Don't I deserve points for that?

"No," Borkovec says. "There is no positive purpose for worry." Ouch. But what of productive worry, which spurs a person to action the way my airline call helped me head off a travel fiasco? Borkovec points out that I could have called without stressing about it. "The fact that you do useful stuff based on your worry does not mean the worry is necessary."

I tried to think of a trip I'd taken or a story I'd written that didn't involve some degree of worry, worry I'd always credited with helping me get the job done. If I hadn't been so anxious about establishing my career, getting married and having children before my eggs expired, I'm not sure I'd have had the drive to do those things. There's a name for the kind of worry that contributes to a positive outcome: defensive pessimism. "Defensive pessimists think they need to be a bit scared to stay motivated," Borkovec notes. "They use worry as a reminder to work hard and not take anything for granted. But it can be a problem if the worry gets paralyzing." I think of my nightly wake-ups. It's not surprising that these episodes not only take a toll emotionally but can be physiologically harmful, as well.

That's because worriers tend to be in a state of perpetual physical arousal—wired, tense and fatigued. Indeed, one study found that anxious people go to the doctor more often than calmer types, though it's debatable if this is because their worried state is causing physical problems or because they fret that every headache is a brain tumor. I haven't had any brain tumor scares, but my 4 A.M. fretting sessions leave me feeling zombielike, with no energy to do anything except...worry.

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