Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Worrying feels like working
Thinking versus solving
Thinking about a problem differs from solving one. Solving produces something: a decision, a conversation, a plan, or a next step. An anxious spiral can burn enormous energy without producing any new information, and it ends where it started, with the person more exhausted and the imagined outcome more familiar.
Replaying one conversation in your head looking for clues leaves you more confused than when you began. The brain counts this as progress, but the activity is feeding a prediction.
Repetition and likelihood
Repetition also dresses fear up as likelihood. After a disaster has been pictured fifty times, it feels like it is approaching when it is only repeating, because familiarity gets mistaken for probability. Anxiety works like paying interest on a debt you may never owe.
Why does worry feel productive?
Psychologist Thomas Borkovec, who studied worry for decades at Penn State, proposed that worry is mostly verbal thought, and verbal thought produces less physical arousal than vivid imagery. The lowered arousal works as a small reward, which keeps the habit going. Because many feared events never happen, worry also gets credit for preventing them. A 1995 study by Borkovec and Roemer found that people with generalized anxiety disorder were more likely than others to say that worry motivates them and prepares them.
Why does repetition make a thought feel true?
Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino at Temple University reported the illusory truth effect in 1977. Participants who rated statements across several sessions judged the repeated ones as more likely to be true. The effect rests on fluency, since a familiar statement is easier for the mind to process. A 2015 study by Lisa Fazio and colleagues found the effect even for statements people knew to be false.
How is rumination different from problem solving?
Psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema developed response styles theory in 1991. She defined rumination as repeatedly dwelling on distress and its causes, and her studies linked it to longer and more severe episodes of low mood. In a 1995 experiment, Sonja Lyubomirsky and Nolen-Hoeksema found that people in low moods who ruminated came up with less effective solutions to hypothetical problems.
More from On Purpose with Jay Shetty
