Nine out of ten worries we have will never happen.

A Penn State study published in Behavior Therapy had people with generalized anxiety disorder record their specific worries and then track what actually happened. 91% of their worry predictions did not come true. The median participant had 93.5% of worries fail to materialize, and for seven participants, 100% of their worries didn’t happen.

Better yet when the bad thing does happen, we handle it much better than we thought we would.  A new 2026 randomized controlled trial found participants tracked their worries using a smartphone app; 89% of feared outcomes didn’t happen. And when something they feared did happen, participants reported that they coped better than expected 84.% of the time.

Worry asks us to suffer today over a future that, most of the time, never arrives — and research suggests that even when it does, we’re better at handling it than we predict.

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