Worry is Epidemic. Worry is Expensive. Worry is Exhausting. Worrying is costly in its psychological toll, and in lost time and productivity. One recent study in which subjects were given frequent but random alerts during the day and told to write down their thoughts indicated 47-55% of the time they were worried about something. Worry is psychologically draining, leads to inefficient divided attention, and doesn’t lead to anything positive.
Worrying is Bad for Your Health
How does worry cause illness? Controlled fMRI studies from Harvard and replicated elsewhere, have shown that imagining an event lights up the identical areas of the brain with the same intensity as actually experiencing the event ... and both events produce identical hormones (Ganis et al., 2004). In this way, chronic stress, in which one imagines alarming events, can create disease in a compromised area of the body.
Under chronic stress, which often involves guilt, worry, resentment or anxiety, heart rate, and blood pressure rise and stabilize at a higher level, arterial plaque is deposited, substances such as acetylcholine, adrenaline, sugars, fats, thyroxin, cortisol circulate freely, fat is deposited at the waist.
