The Nuance

Most Things You Worry About Will Never Actually Happen

Persistent worrying is pointless. Here’s how to stop doing it.

Markham Heid
Elemental
Published in
4 min readAug 15, 2019
Illustration: Kieran Blakey

InIn his 1915 book Worry and Nervousness, the American surgeon and psychiatrist William Samuel Sadler described worry as an “inability to relax the attention” once it had fastened itself onto a given fear. All people experience…

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Markham Heid
Elemental

I’m a long-time contributor at TIME and other media orgs. I write mostly about health. I grew up in Michigan, but these days I live in southwest Germany.