Do Most Worries Come True? What One Study Actually Found

You may have seen it on a poster or in a social media post: "91% of the things you worry about never happen." It sounds like the kind of statistic someone made up to be comforting. But this one comes from a real study — and what it actually found is more interesting, and more useful, than the slogan.

The study

In 2020, two psychologists at Penn State, Lucas LaFreniere and Michelle Newman, published a paper with a memorable title: Exposing Worry's Deceit. They worked with 29 people who had generalised anxiety disorder — people for whom worry is a frequent, hard-to-control part of life.

For ten days, participants were prompted at random times to write down what they were worried about. Each night they reviewed their worries online. Then, over the following weeks, they recorded whether each worry had actually come true.

What they found

• 91.4% of the worries did not come true. For the typical participant, the most common result was that none of their worries had come true.
• Participants had expected far more of them to happen than actually did.
• When a worry did come true, the outcome was often better than expected.
• Interestingly, people whose worries were more often untrue tended to do better in treatment afterwards. The authors suggest that seeing your own predictions fail might be part of what helps.

You can read the full paper on PubMed Central.

What the study doesn't say

It's worth being careful with the poster version.

• It was a small study — 29 people — and all of them had a diagnosis of generalised anxiety disorder. The proportion might look different for other people or other kinds of worries.
• It doesn't say your worries are silly. Some worries do come true. The study found that roughly one in eleven did.
• It doesn't mean you should stop caring. It's about forecasting, not about whether things matter.

The real lesson isn't a number. It's that worry is a poor forecaster. It consistently predicts more trouble than arrives — and that pattern is something you can check for yourself.

Why worry overestimates

Worry is designed to keep you safe, and from a safety point of view, it's better to overestimate danger than to miss it. So your mind leans towards the worst case and feels very confident about it. The feeling of certainty — this is going to go badly — is part of how worry works. It doesn't tell you much about what will actually happen.

There's also a memory effect. We tend to remember the times a worry came true ("I knew it!") and quietly forget the many times it didn't. Without a written record, the score is always skewed.

Run the experiment on yourself

The most powerful part of this research is that you can copy its method. You don't need a lab.

Most people are surprised. Not because every worry turned out fine, but because of how confident the worries felt compared with how often they came true. That gap is the useful part. We walk through this method in more detail in prediction vs. what happened.

What to do with the result

Next time a worry arrives with that familiar certainty, you'll have something to set beside it: your own record. Not a slogan, not someone else's reassurance — your own evidence that your mind's forecasts often miss.

It won't stop worries from coming. But it can make them a little less convincing. You might find yourself thinking: this feels certain, but so did the last twenty, and most of those didn't happen. That's often enough to let it go a little sooner.

If worry is a constant companion and it's affecting your life, it's worth talking to a professional. Generalised anxiety is common and well understood, and the kind of approach used alongside this study — testing your predictions — is a recognised part of treatment.