We Are Hard Wired to Worry, but It’s Ok

I imagine the part of my brain that does the worrying, an increasingly busy department since my early thirties, as a huge gun placement, pointed out into the world. My worrying department look intently through its cross hairs and scan my life’s theatre, constantly searching for threats.

I accumulated a series of ever greater things to concern myself with, building steadily from my teens: puberty, exam results, sex, relationships, exam results, moving out, career, money, buying a house, family, friends, money, career, identity, politics, money…until the steady accumulation of life’s worries reached its crescendo with the introduction of…children (as if I didn’t have enough to worry about already)

If any of us are lucky enough to start life with nothing to worry about, then we can enjoy our young lives, quietly and inquisitively emerging into the world. The wonder of it all prickling our young senses and falling upon us like layers of colour. Every new sight, sound and smell, the seed for a lifetime of memory and association. The warmth and love of our family feeding our fragile sense of self with small bundles of nourishment. A smile here, a cuddle there, the soft lilting voice of our mother before we understand the meaning behind the words, their rhythm tuning our heart strings, gently planting new pathways of green shoots that we will walk, both physically and metaphorically, for decades to come.

I was one of the lucky ones. My early years, spent growing up in the English countryside in the late 1970s, the youngest of three boys, was a golden time. I was given the luxury of what we now call, growing up slowly (back then I think it was just called growing up) What I remember was a deep blanket of security. Most of my grandparents were still alive, as were all of my many aunts and uncles and all of our pets. I had two older brothers to both shield me and to play with me, and lots of free time to sit around thinking about the world, which I experienced so vividly and with such tactile pleasure. I was allowed to develop my personality unimpeded by threat and daily stress.

It was my protected early years that gave me the tools to be able to slowly amass more than my fair share of later life worries without buckling under their weight. A rock solid foundation, laid down in its entirety before my fourteenth birthday, shortly after which my parents separated, proved to be enough of a base to absorb what was to come my way.

It still breaks my heart to see our eldest son, now aged twenty, whom we adopted as a four year old, cycle through patterns of self-doubt. Self sabotage threatens to colour every big event in his life. His attachment skills often stuck in acquisition mode, unable to find the maintenance setting. His stress bucket so full that the slightest deviation from his day, be it a late change of plan, a critical word or a simple misunderstanding, will cause it to brim over into anger, isolation and dissociation. Where my early years were calm, his were stormy. The intended pathways were never laid down, the nurturing of his sense of self was hijacked by a daily stress response pattern. From birth, his self regulation was railroaded by self preservation.

What he taught me about myself, was how fortunate I was to be gifted those early years, and how they would fortify me in my later life and give me broad shoulders.

From the moment our first child entered our lives, I knew that we would never be free from worry again. Such was their dominion over our hearts.

But we already had a bit of form in the worry department.

In our first year of marriage, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer and one accepted pathway was rudely uprooted for another. The numbing shock of the initial news, followed by a cycle of tests, operations and a looming threat to our family plans, caused such a sharp re-wiring of my mind that I experienced strange physical tells years later (such as an extremely unfortunate inclination to smirk whenever having a serious conversation with my wife. It was like a kind of facial tic, triggered by the threat of more bad news than my unworldly self could handle) The tic lingers twenty years later and I am again reminded of the fundamental impact of trauma in a young child, and of its developmental impact on a lifetime ahead.

My first experience of real world worry, even with my blue chip bedrock years, changed me permanently.

The worrying department of my brain, having had relatively little to do since my birth, had suddenly fired up its engines and armed the big gun, which was now strafing my world looking for threats, DEFCON 1 had been initiated. Counter measures were being jettisoned almost constantly as I sought ways to cope with the prospect of various worst case scenarios beyond my comprehension. This was real and I was not ready. I formed new safe zones in my physical and mental world; sleep, silos of positive thought, prayer, rationalization, alcohol and excessive thinking all intensified until the DEFCON 1 rating was eventually downgraded, test results bore good news and the murky picture of our future started to come back into focus.

And I started to understand what it was to have mental scars.

Having spent a disproportionate amount of my life since the age of thirty worrying about something, I reflected during the quieter moments, when the big fears had receded or been resolved, that these were spaces that could not sit empty. I had built large chambers to house these worries, some with sound proof walls and bomb proof ceilings, and these spaces did not just disappear when the big worries were banished. They were purpose built and they came at the expense of older, quiet spaces.

No, these spaces were here to stay and they needed to be filled.

The resolution of one worry did not free my mind into a period of temporary euphoria, but instead the crosshairs of my worry gun simply rescanned my life for something else to worry about. And as the big barrel swept across a landscape filled with concerns of all shapes and sizes, it quickly acquired new targets, the next largest to the one that had just been banished, and these were painted with the laser guidance system and locked-in.

So this was it now was it? A lifetime of worry. I had been reprogrammed.

The worry roll call grew over the next twenty years; we adopted our first son, started our own business, had our second son, lost all of our grandparents, an aunt and uncle, bought a house we could not afford, almost lost our business in the pandemic and experienced breast cancer for a second time. We were struck very low at times and the pressure was occasionally acute and ever present.

When we did enjoy longer periods of good times (which were frequent and often long lasting) I would sometimes check myself, what were we thinking? We had not spent enough time worrying recently, we were being complacent. Complacency would lead to more bad things. We needed to be on it all of the time, sleeping on the job was not an option.

The rewiring of my mind had been a professional job, I was in this for the long haul.

But for all of life’s curveballs, certainly less than many people experience, but definitely more than others, I did not buckle.

At fifty years old, some of the things in my life are starting to make a bit more sense. I am not going to pretend to have all of the answers, that day will never come. But as I start cresting the arc of my life, I am able to tilt my head a little less sharply to look back at my trail.

This is what I know;

It is OK to have constant worries in my life, light cannot exist without darkness.

We cannot love without fear of loss.

Being protected in your early life, is your parent’s greatest gift to you.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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