Dr. Ellen Langer

I have a few one-liners about worrying.

The first one is,

You should ask yourself, which is not the case here, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience?

And you're talking about potential tragedies.

But most of the things we worry about are just inconveniences.

And most of the things we worry about never happen.

And if you reflect on the last time you worried and how you dealt with it and you saw it didn't even happen, you'd be more persuaded of that.

The way to deal with stress, I think, is...

Stress relies on two things.

It relies on an assumption that something is going to happen and that when it happens, it's going to be awful.

Well, the first, you can't predict.

And this is very hard for people to accept that predictability is an illusion.

You can post it.

You can look back.

You know, let me make this, use an example.

Let's say you're at a party and we see Tom and Susie fighting.

And I said to you, are they going to get divorced?

You say, kind of why, no, right?

Sometimes people fight.

Well, let's say we don't have that conversation.