91.4 percent of the worries people with anxiety have never come true. Researchers at Penn State asked people with an anxiety disorder to write down their worries, then check back weeks later to see what actually happened. For 10 days, 29 people with generalized anxiety disorder, a condition where worrying about everyday things becomes constant and hard to stop, got reminders to write down what was bothering them. Each night they reviewed the list, and for 30 days they tracked what happened. Outside reviewers then checked which worries came true. Lucas LaFreniere and Michelle Newman published the study in Behavior Therapy in 2020. In total, 91.4 percent of the worries never happened. The most common result for a single person was 100 percent: none of their worries came true. Again and again, people guessed their worries were far more likely than they turned out to be. People who watched more of their worries fail to come true ended up with fewer anxiety symptoms, and they improved faster. The written proof seemed to help. Write a worry down with the date, then come back later and note what actually happened. The study was small and only included people with a diagnosis. On paper, though, 9 out of 10 of their fears never showed up.