Breaking the Worry Habit: What It Is, Where It Comes From, and How to Stop It

I have a confession.

For years, I thought worry was just part of being a serious competitor. You care deeply about something, so of course you worry about it. You prepare hard, so of course you run through worst-case scenarios. It felt like the price of entry — the tax you paid for loving something enough to want to be great at it.

Then I started studying the mental game seriously. And I realized something that changed everything: worry isn't the price of entry. It's an expensive habit that's costing you more than you know.

In this blog post, I want to give you the complete picture — the definition, the source, the cost, and most importantly, the way out.

What Worry Actually Is

Let's start with the basics. Worry is your brain's attempt to solve a problem that hasn't happened yet. It's mental rehearsal of danger. It feels productive — like you're doing something, preparing, protecting yourself — but in most cases, you're not solving anything. You're just suffering in advance.

Here's a stat that stopped me cold: approximately 85% of the things we worry about never actually happen. And of the 15% that do? Most people report they handled it better than expected.

So we're spending enormous amounts of mental energy on scenarios that either never materialize or that we're more than capable of handling. That's not preparation. That's waste.

Now, this is important: worry is not the same as healthy concern. Healthy concern prompts you to check your equipment, warm up your horse properly, or have a contingency plan. That's useful. That's your brain doing its job. Worry is what happens when healthy concern gets hijacked — when instead of taking action, your mind just keeps circling the drain.

Where Worry Comes From: The Ego

This is where it gets interesting.

Worry doesn't just appear. It has a source. And that source is the ego — the false self that cannot live in the present moment. The part of you that is constantly scanning for threat, constantly trying to protect you from pain, rejection, failure, and embarrassment.

The ego lives in one question: am I safe? And it answers that question by projecting into the future and rehearsing every possible threat.

Think about what your worry actually sounds like. What if I miss? What if I embarrass myself? What if all this work doesn't pay off? What if people see me fall apart? What if I let my partner down? Every one of those what-ifs is your ego doing its job — trying to prepare you for a threat it has invented.

The problem is that the ego's protection strategy backfires. Instead of keeping you safe, it keeps you stuck. Instead of protecting your performance, it erodes it.

We've talked on this show about competing from love versus competing from fear. Love is present. Love is process-focused. Love is why you started riding in the first place. Fear is future-focused. Fear is outcome-obsessed. And worry? Worry is fear in its most chronic form.

What Worry Is Costing You

When your brain perceives a threat — real or imagined — it triggers your stress response. Your hypothalamus signals your adrenal glands to release cortisol and adrenaline. Your heart rate increases, your breathing gets shallower, your muscles tighten. This is an incredibly sophisticated survival system.

The problem is that it was designed for acute, short-term threats. A predator. A physical danger that passes. It was not designed to be activated for hours at a time while you sit in your trailer spinning through worst-case scenarios.

When worry becomes chronic, the effects compound. Elevated cortisol over time affects sleep quality, immune function, memory, and concentration. Research links chronic anxiety to increased cardiovascular risk, digestive issues, and muscle tension that can lead to physical pain.

But here's the one that matters most to competitors: chronic worry degrades performance.

The prefrontal cortex — the part of your brain responsible for focus, decision-making, and executive function — gets impaired under sustained stress. So the very faculties you need most in competition — clear thinking, quick reaction, calm focus — are the first things worry erodes.

You've heard the phrase "paralysis by analysis." That's worry's fingerprint on performance. The athlete who has over-rehearsed every possible disaster is often the one who freezes when something unexpected happens — because her system is already maxed out.

Emotionally, chronic worry breeds more worry. The more time you spend in the worry loop, the more your brain treats it as normal. Neurons that fire together wire together. Every time you choose worry, you're deepening that neural pathway. You're literally training your brain to worry more efficiently.

And emotionally, sustained worry leads to a state of low-grade dread that bleeds into everything. The joy starts to leach out of the things you love. You start to dread events you used to look forward to. How many competitors have we heard from who used to love going to ropings and now secretly hope they get rained out? Chronic worry is often the culprit.

What Scripture Says About Worry

If you grew up in a faith tradition, you've probably seen the verses about worry on coffee mugs and Instagram graphics. But there's a difference between knowing scripture and letting it actually land.

Matthew 6:25-34 is the most direct. Jesus says: do not worry about your life. Look at the birds of the air — they don't sow or reap, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? And then he asks the question that cuts through all of it: Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

The answer is no. Worry cannot add to your life. It can only subtract.

Philippians 4:6-7 says it differently: Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

That phrase — the peace that transcends all understanding — is not the peace that makes sense. It's not the peace that comes after everything is resolved. It's the peace that guards your heart and mind even when nothing has been resolved. Even when the run hasn't happened yet. Even when you don't know how it's going to go.

That is a supernatural peace. And it's available to us.

For me, the mental performance tools we use every day — the ACT strategy, power statements, process focus, the inner champion — these are not separate from faith. They're expressions of it. When I acknowledge a worry and trade it for a grounded, present-focused thought, I'm practicing what Paul describes in Philippians. I'm refusing to let anxiety have the final word.

Breaking the Habit: Three Tools That Work

Worry is a habit. Which means it can change. Here are three tools you can use in the moment to interrupt the worry spiral.

The Control Check. When a worry surfaces, ask immediately: is this something I can control? If yes, take one concrete action and move on. Write it down. Make a plan. Do the thing. Action breaks the loop. If no — and most worries fall here — consciously redirect. You don't have the bandwidth to spend on what you cannot change. Save it for what you can.

WIN — What's Important Now. When you feel the spiral starting, ask yourself: what is the one thing I can focus on right now, in this moment, that actually matters? Not tomorrow's run. Not what happened last month. What is important now. Then do that thing. Worry cannot survive in a mind that is genuinely present.

The ACT Strategy Applied to Worry. Acknowledge — yes, I am worried. I see you. Check — is this thought helping me perform, or is it costing me? Trade — swap the worry for a grounded statement. Try this one: I focus on what I can control and let go of what I can't.

That is not passive. That is not resignation. It is one of the most active, courageous choices a competitor can make — to redirect energy away from the uncontrollable and pour it into what's right in front of you. The preparation. The process. The present moment. That's where your power lives.

One More Thing

The worry habit can be broken. Not overnight, and not perfectly — but one redirected thought at a time. And if you've been doing a little bit every day, those neural pathways are already starting to shift.

But knowing what to do and actually doing it are two different things.

That's where coaching comes in. Not to give you more information, but to help you actually implement. To have someone in your corner who gets your world and helps you turn insight into action.

If you're ready to take this deeper — if you're ready to actually break the worry habit instead of just thinking about it — I'd love to talk with you.

Book your free discovery call → https://thehub-api.mastermind.com/widget/booking/4lv6jvtWDaKLScRzga20

Let's figure out the next best step to develop your edge and build a real plan together.

To your success,

Laurie 🤠

Mental performance training is NOT intended as, nor is it a substitute for, mental health care.