At the BC Human Resources conference in April, I was excited to hear best-selling author and Harvard psychologist Shawn Achor talk about ways to enrich our lives by growing our gratitude mindsets, optimism and by deepening our relationships. After that day, I began reading his books and I’m including his insights here while sharing some of my reflections about the cost of worrying.
Perhaps, like me, you’ve observed comments from people suggesting that if they don’t worry about their work or their family, it means they are being uncaring and/or irresponsible. But if you look at the impact of this pattern more closely in families, you’ll see that parents who worry incessantly about their children will end up inadvertently transferring their anxiety on their children. When children grow up in a worry-filled atmosphere, they tend to internalize both of these messages; that they cannot be trusted to make good choices for themselves, and that the world around them should be feared.
In the workplace, we’ve all encountered people who seemingly worry about everything. Usually they project a quality of energy that is filled with angst as they try to micro-manage as much as possible of what goes on around them. In his book Before Happiness Shawn Achor explains that worrying not only undermines the positive genius that potentially resides in each one of us, it actually has other negative side effects, one of which is to speed up the aging process. This was found when researchers from Harvard and other institutions discovered that phobic anxiety and fear destroy the proteins at the end of our chromosomes called telomeres. Achor adds that new research is also showing that work exhaustion and worry also have the same effect on chromosomes which is speeding up aging.
Shawn’s writing about the cost of worrying is just a small part of the wealth of information, inspiration, insights and research findings that abound in Before Happiness. I highly recommend this book and I hope that you too will find that there is so much practical value in reading about positive psychology especially from Shawn whose writing shines with such clarity, cleverness, warmth and humour.
