Worry Wards Against Evil

It's not just me!

But worrying was supposed to keep bad things from happening--that was the entire point of worrying. You said to yourself, I hope I don't X, and you didn't, see? Because you worried about it.

When I was young and afraid of imaginary things in the dark, I made a game of imagining all the ways those monsters might catch me unawares and stealthily snatch me. Because every scenario I imagined was immediately eliminated from the catalog of possibilities. I couldn't be caught unawares in that situation once it entered my realm of awareness. So the more ways of being seized I could conceive, the safer I'd be. The worry was the safeguard.

I thought I was the only one who experienced worry like this, then I ran across the passage above in Laura Ruby's book The Shadow Cipher. I know plenty of worriers and people with anxiety, but generally they are less happy because of it and this is the first time I've seen worrying so well described as a type of reassurance. It wards us against evil. At the very least, catastrophizing allows us less spontaneous, deliberate types to create back-up plans in advance for things not going as we expect; it's a way of being more adaptive.