Worry isn't preparation. It's a loop — and it's been quietly billing you for years. Here's how to audit it.
I'd just landed in a new city, suitcase still by the door, talk still a day away.
The stakes were real this time - I was delivering a half-day session to a new client, the kind of opportunity that opens many other doors if it goes well. I've presented to many thousands of people across my career; by any reasonable measure, I had nothing to worry about. So I told myself: you've got this.
However, my mind disagreed. What if the tech failed at the worst possible moment? What if the audience sat there, polite and unmoved, and I could feel the room go quietly cold? What would I do to save it? What if someone asked the one question I hadn't prepared for, and a gap I'd never even considered stood there exposed in front of everyone? What if I opened it up for interaction and no one raised a hand or said a word? I ran through each scenario in detail, more than once, the way you'd rehearse lines for a part you've already played a hundred times.
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At some point, sitting on the edge of the kingsize with my suitcase still unpacked, I chose to ask myself a different question. Not is this worry justified — because worry can always justify itself, that's its whole trick. The question instead was: in what way is rehearsing everything going wrong actually helping me show up as my best tomorrow?
I went looking for an answer.
… I struggled to find one.
You're not alone in this
If you've ever lay awake auditing tomorrow before it's happened, narrating the worst version of a conversation you haven't had yet, or felt that particular exhaustion of having "worked on" a problem all evening only to realise you hadn't actually done anything — you’ll know this territory well. And if you're anything like me, you've also had the added insult of knowing better. I've stood on stages for years. Experience should have been enough to settle it. It wasn't, and that's the part worth saying out loud: worry doesn't ask permission from your competence. It doesn't check your track record before it starts taking over. It shows up regardless of how qualified you are, which means more expertise was never going to be the fix here.
High-achieving women live in this territory more than almost anyone, because we've been taught, in a hundred small ways, that vigilance is the price of competence. That if we stop scanning for what might go wrong, then something will.
So let's do something we don't normally do with worry. Let's audit it.
What worry actually is
Worry isn't quite the same as fear, and it isn't quite the same as anxiety, though the three get used interchangeably. Fear is the response to a threat that's actually in front of you. Anxiety is the diffuse bodily charge — the tight chest, the shallow breath — often without a specific object. Worry is narrower and stranger than both: it's a verbal, cognitive loop. It's the mind talking to itself about a future that hasn't happened, trying to think its way to safety through repetition.
That's worth sitting with, because it reframes worry as something with a job description. It isn't just unpleasant background noise. It believes it's working. It thinks that if it runs the scenario enough times, it will either prevent the bad outcome or, at minimum, prepare you for it. Worry has taken on the role of your chief risk manager.
The problem is that no one has ever asked it to.
Why we hired it in the first place
Here's where the neuroscience earns its place, because it explains something genuinely strange: your amygdala, the part of your brain that flags threat, doesn't have a reliable way to distinguish an imagined catastrophe from a real one. When you rehearse a disaster in vivid enough detail, your body produces real stress chemistry for an event that is, as of right now, entirely fictional. Cortisol rises. Sleep architecture changes. Working memory (i.e. the very thing you need to actually solve problems) narrows under the load. You pay a real biological price for a hypothetical event, every single time you run the loop.
There's also a quieter reason worry persists, and it's less about biology and more about belief. Many of us were raised — explicitly, or by watching those who raised us — to equate worry with care. To stop worrying about someone or something can feel like abandoning them, like a withdrawal of love. And for high achievers specifically, there's a second, almost superstitious belief running underneath: if I rehearse it enough, I'll prevent it. If I stop, I'm tempting something. We'd never call ourselves superstitious. We'd call it being thorough.
But thoroughness produces a plan. Worry produces a loop.
Running the audit
So here's the exercise I want to walk you through, because it's the one that actually shifted something for me that night, and it's stayed with me since.
Take a recent stretch of worry — an hour, an evening, a particular week you spent circling something. And ask it three questions, the way you'd interrogate an expense before approving it.
I ran mine against that night before the talk. The tech, the cold room, the unanswerable question, the silence where interaction should have been — four scenarios, rehearsed in detail, more than once.
1. What did this worry cost? Be specific. Not "I felt stressed" but the actual ledger: the hour of sleep you didn't get, the conversation with your child you were only half-present for because part of you was still in tomorrow's meeting, the bath you sat in without feeling it because your mind had already left the room. For me, it was an evening in a new city I never actually arrived in — I was there in body, rehearsing a disaster, while the present moment went entirely unlived. I didn’t relax, or sightsee, or rehearse. I wasted my evening in a worry loop. Worry doesn't just cost neurochemistry. It costs this particular evening, which you don't get back.
2. What did this worry prevent? Not what it helped you feel ready for — prevent. Did it stop the outcome from happening? Did it, on its own, change anything about what actually occurred? Be rigorous here, because this is where worry usually gets away with it. It will try to take credit for outcomes that action actually produced — the call you made, the boundary you set, the work you did. In my case: the tech was going to work or not, and no amount of rehearsal the night before would change the equipment. The audience would engage or it didn't, and that had everything to do with what I actually did on stage, not what I sat dreading in a hotel room. Worry doesn't make calls. It doesn't test microphones. It doesn't answer questions. It has no hands. Whatever went right the next day would come from preparation I'd already done weeks earlier, and from showing up present and ready — not from how many hours I’d spent dreading it the night before.
3. What did this worry cost you in confidence? This is the one most of us skip, and it might be the most expensive line item of all. Every hour spent pre-living a disaster is an hour spent quietly telling yourself: you are not capable of handling this if it actually happens. You can only cope with it if you've already suffered through it in advance. For someone with years on stage, that's a strange thing to discover you still believe. That's not preparation. That's a vote of no confidence in your own future self, cast over and over, until it starts to feel true.
Run that audit honestly across enough of your life, and a pattern tends to emerge. Worry has an almost perfect record of doing nothing it claims to do, and costing exactly what it always costs.
Here's how mine turned out. The talk went ahead the next day. None of the four scenarios I'd rehearsed came true. The tech worked. The room leaned in. A hard question came, and I answered it — not because I'd pre-suffered through it the night before, but because I knew my material and trusted myself to meet what came up. Sixty attendees in the room, an average rating of 4.7 out of 5, and feedback that called the content practical, fresh, insightful and transformational — work they could take back and use to change how they led, with effects that would ripple out to the people they worked with.
None of that came from the worry. Every minute of it came from presence, and from trust in a version of myself I already knew was capable, if I'd just let her show up instead of trying to do her job for her in advance.
What replaces it isn't calm
This is usually where wellbeing advice tells you to relax, breathe, let go. I want to offer something different, because "just stop worrying" has never once worked for anyone, and you know that already.
The opposite of worry isn't calm. Calm is just the absence of the loop — and absence is fragile, easily knocked over by the next hard thing. What actually displaces worry is trust: not trust that things will turn out fine, but trust in your own capacity to meet what comes, as it comes, with the resources you'll actually have then rather than the ones you're trying to manufacture now through dread. That's what got me through the room with sixty people in it. Not the rehearsal. The trust.
That kind of trust isn't naive. It isn't the soft opposite of competence, infact it's a more advanced form of it. Vigilance got you here. It's a powerful tool and it has served you. But there's a more sophisticated skill on the other side of vigilance: the regulation to act well without first requiring certainty, and the willingness to let your future self handle her own moment, with her own faculties, instead of pre-living it for her tonight.
Try this
For one week, when you notice the loop start — the rehearsal, the scenario-running, the pre-living of something that hasn't happened — pause and run the three-question audit. Cost. Prevented. Confidence. Don't try to stop the worry outright. Just make it show its workings.
Most weeks, it won't have much of a case.
Worry has never once prevented anything. Only action has. And you already know how to act.
What are you paying worry for, exactly? I'd love to hear what your own audit turns up — hit reply and tell me what you found below.