Why Worrying Drains Your Energy and How to Get It Back
Why Anxious Thinking Leaves You Exhausted with Nothing to Show for It
Understanding How Worry Drains Capacity in the Adapted Self, and the Four-Step Process for Getting It Back
Worrying can leave you more exhausted than a full day of hard work, and when it's over, you have nothing to show for what it cost you. You can sit at your desk all day, or move around the house doing ordinary things, or lie awake longer than you meant to, and still reach the evening completely emptied out, unable to name what drained you. For most of my adult life I assumed that meant I was weak, or disorganized, or not trying hard enough. What I understand now is that I had been spending my inner resources all day long, and most of them were leaving through my thoughts, where I never saw them go. You may be doing the same thing without realizing it, and learning to protect those resources is how you begin to have more of what you want.
I used to spend three hours every evening on a routine that now takes me forty-five minutes, and for years I had no idea that most of that time was going to worry.
Over the past few weeks I've been talking about capacity as one of the internal resources you need to live your life well, and I keep returning to the image of a bank account because it makes something invisible easier to follow.
Think of your capacity as a balance of capacity dollars. That balance isn't unlimited, and it isn't the same from one day to the next. Some parts of your day are withdrawals, costing you capacity whether you notice them or not, and other parts are deposits that give some of it back. When you start learning what drains your account and what replenishes it, you begin to have the internal resources to follow through on what you say matters to you, to build something creatively, and to use your time instead of watching it fly by.
This matters most in the places where you've been trying to change and haven't managed to. There may be behaviors you already know aren't supporting you, emotional eating, drinking, scrolling, shopping, binge watching, gaming, and still, you can't find whatever it would take inside you to stop reaching for them. There are probably also things you keep promising yourself you'll finally begin: taking better care of your health, improving your relationships, building something professionally, becoming more creative, following through on the idea that has been sitting in the back of your mind for longer than you'd like to admit. Every one of those asks for capacity. Change and growth require your brain and your nervous system to do something different from what they already know, and the unfamiliar is always more expensive than the familiar.
If your account is empty, you cannot create change.
Most of us were taught to believe otherwise. We learned that if we got serious enough, or hustled hard enough, the change would come, and when it didn't, we concluded we simply hadn't been serious enough yet. But when there is no capacity, there is no capacity, and life stays exactly the same no matter how sternly we speak to ourselves. You cannot consistently create change with resources you don't have. That is why I encourage people to become protective of their capacity in the same way they would become protective of money if they knew they needed that money to build something important. You would want to know where every dollar was going. You would start to notice the leaks.
"If nearly all of your capacity is being spent getting through the life you already have, there is very little left over to create the life you want."
One of the sneakiest leaks is in your thoughts. There is a line from Erma Bombeck that I love so much I used it in my book: "Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere." I've never found a better description of anxious thinking. The way I often put it is that anxious thinking is like driving down the highway with the window rolled down and your wallet wide open on the seat beside you, your capacity dollars flying out the window while you get absolutely nothing for them. When you spend capacity cleaning the kitchen, at least you have a clean kitchen when you're done. You can spend an enormous amount of capacity worrying and have nothing whatsoever to show for it. Think honestly about this for a moment. Have you ever come out of an anxiety spiral feeling more prepared, more certain, or holding the solution to the problem you were spinning on? I never did. I only ever came out more tired.
Why worry feels like protection
Part of what makes this so difficult to see is that anxious thinking very often feels protective. Your brain is trying to figure something out. It goes back over yesterday's conversation, trying to work out what you should have said differently. It wonders what someone meant by the look on their face, or the comment they made, or the thing they did. It rehearses every possible outcome of a situation that hasn't happened yet, because some part of you believes that if you think about it long enough, you will eventually arrive at certainty. From a nervous system perspective, that makes complete sense. When your nervous system doesn't feel safe with uncertainty, thinking gives it something to do, and worrying creates the feeling that you are preparing, solving, scanning and controlling. For a system that feels unsafe not knowing, that feeling is a kind of relief, even while it wears you down.
The trouble is that your body participates in every one of those thoughts. An anxious thought is not free. When you imagine something going wrong, your nervous system responds to what you're imagining, your activation rises, and your body begins spending its resources to prepare for the problem you're thinking about. Then your anxious body makes the thought feel even more urgent, and now you are inside a loop, one that researchers who study worry have described as keeping the body activated long before and long after the thing we're worried about. Your capacity account is being drained by the thought and the body at the same time.
"The thought activates the body, and the activated body makes the thought feel more believable."
This is part of why you can spend eight hours working and walk away wondering what you accomplished. Being busy and being effective are not the same thing, and a day can be completely full of effort while very little of that effort reaches the work in front of you.
I know this well from my own life. Years ago, evenings in my house used to feel enormous. There were always so many things that needed to get done before I could finally stop for the day, and I would look around at all of it and begin thinking about how much there was to do, what order I should do it in, whether I'd forgotten something, how tired I was, and how long it was all going to take. The evening routine could easily consume three hours. What's interesting is what happened as I became less anxious. Those same tasks started taking me dramatically less time. I hadn't set out to become more efficient, and I wasn't trying any new method. I simply began to notice that what used to take three hours now took forty-five minutes.
There weren't fewer things to do. There was less interference.
I was no longer spending half of my energy thinking about the work while trying to do the work. I was no longer using part of my nervous system to manage the anxiety my own thoughts were creating, while another part of me tried to complete whatever was in front of me. I just did what needed to be done. That was one of the most surprising gifts of learning to tend to my anxiety. I felt better, and I also got capacity back, and things that had felt so taxing became far less expensive.
If you're reading this and thinking that you can see what anxious thinking costs you, but you aren't trying to be anxious, the thoughts are simply there, I understand that completely. What I want to offer you is that you are not subject to your thoughts. They will come whether you want them to or not, because that is your brain's default, a path it has walked so many times it no longer asks your permission. With continued awareness, attention and diligence, you can rewire your brain toward less anxiety. I've done this in my own life. I went from being a highly anxious person to someone who almost never feels anxiety, and when I do, I know how to meet it and care for it. In my book ‘You're Not the Problem’ I teach a four-part process for this, and the clearest way I know to show it to you is through one of my own old anxious thoughts.
The thought was "I can't handle this," and I thought it all the time. Sometimes it came in response to a lot of responsibilities landing on me at once, and often it came for no reason at all, simply because it had been an adaptive way of thinking for so long that it followed me around like a little lost puppy.
The first step is awareness. You can't change a thought pattern while you're completely inside it. So, the moment you recognize the thought, when you can say to yourself, "oh, there's that thought that I can't handle this," or "I'm circling again, I'm catastrophizing, I'm trying to think my way to certainty," you have created a little bit of separation between you and the thought. You don't judge it or make it wrong. You recognize what your brain is doing, and that recognition alone begins to restore choice.
The second step is to interrupt the thought, using your body, your voice and your mind, without being mean to the part of you that's producing it. I use my hands and my voice. I make a gesture and say "stop" out loud, because bringing the body in makes the interruption far more concrete than one thought trying to argue with another. Your anxiety is not bad. It wants to protect you. So, the tone I want is forceful and compassionate at once, and I might say something like, "I hear you. I know you think this is important, but I'm not going to keep going down these thoughts right now. If this still needs my attention later, I'll come back to it." That last sentence matters a great deal, because I'm not ignoring a legitimate problem and I'm not ignoring my life. I'm stepping in to lead the conversation in a more mature way. I step away from the thinking, at least until I can return to it as my resourced self.
"An activated survival brain is not the version of me I want making decisions."
The third step is returning to the body. By the time you've been thinking anxiously for a while, your body is usually anxious too, and your nervous system may still believe there's a problem even after you've interrupted the thought. I come into the present moment and notice what's happening for me physically. I might feel my feet on the floor, notice my breathing, and bring my awareness into my body to see what's there. Then I meet that sensation with support. If there's tension somewhere, I might place a hand there. Sometimes I need movement, so I'll breathe, walk, stretch, or use another somatic practice that helps my system metabolize some of the activation. None of this is about forcing myself to calm down, which would only be one more demand on a system that is already working hard. I'm helping my body recognize where I am now, instead of continuing to live inside the future my mind was imagining.
The fourth step is to acknowledge what you just did. If you have spent decades automatically following anxious thoughts wherever they led, interrupting even one of them is a big deal, and your brain needs to know you are choosing something different. For example, I might think, "oh, awesome, I caught that thought." It doesn't have to be dramatic. When you recognize the victory, you reinforce the new pathway, and because your brain changes through repetition, every time you catch an anxious thought and redirect yourself, you are practicing a different response.
You may have to do this with the same thought over and over again, and that doesn't mean the process isn't working. It means the old pathway has been practiced thousands of times, so of course it's easier for your brain to travel down it. The new path becomes easier because you keep choosing it. Over time, this can dramatically change how anxious you feel, and it can change how much capacity you have available for the rest of your life.
Your thoughts are expenditures. Some of them are worth every capacity dollar you spend on them. Others are draining your account of dollars you desperately need for something else, for the health you keep promising yourself, the relationships you want to tend, the idea still waiting at the back of your mind. Anxious thinking is complex, and these four steps are only the tip of the iceberg but learning to notice which thoughts are worth what they cost, and to stop paying for the ones that take you nowhere, may be one of the most generous things you can do for the life you're here to create.
You’re Not The Problem
The thought that followed me around for years was never evidence that something was wrong with me. It was an adaptation, a way my nervous system learned to scan for danger and brace for more than it believed I could carry, and understanding anxious thinking that way is central to the book ‘You're Not the Problem’. Chapter 8 walks through the four-part process I've described here in much greater detail, and the workbook gives you exercises to identify your own anxiety patterns and practice the four steps, so the process becomes something you live rather than something you only understand intellectually. When this work is done inside the bigger picture of nervous system regulation, anxiety can change dramatically. You can find the book and the workbook here. If you'd like to go further with me, the full video is on my YouTube channel, and subscribing is the best way to follow the rest of this series on capacity. And if someone in your life needs to be reminded that they're not the problem, please send this to them.
About Lori Montry
Lori Montry is a somatic healing practitioner and the author of You're Not the Problem. A former corporate attorney and Harvard Law School graduate, she left the practice of law to focus on the nervous system work that reshaped her own life and now helps others understand the difference between being broken and being adapted. She lives in Colorado, where she can usually be found running.