Transcript

We spend a lot of our lives worrying. But one of the basic things we almost never remember to do is to go back and check how our worries fared against reality. For example, one week, we might be worried about running out of money, the next of being sued by a contractor at work the third about having offended a friend, the fourth of being brought down by a rumor on social media, and the fifth about leaving out something key from our tax returns. The worries go on and on shifting relentlessly from one target to another, ruining our precious time on Earth in the process.

What we seldom ever get round to doing, once the event is past, is pausing to compare the scale of the worry with what actually happened. In the end, we're too taken up with the next topic of alarm ever to return for a composed audit. Nevertheless, if we force ourselves to perform one, a strange realization is likely to dawn on us. Our worries are nearly always completely and deeply out of line. With reality, extended out across a year, a worry audit is liable to yield similar conclusions. We almost lost our minds to worry, but we didn't in the end run out of money.