Most of us do a version of the same thing. A problem sits somewhere on the calendar, days or weeks away, and we start living it early. We run the conversation before we have it. We rehearse the diagnosis, the layoff, the awkward dinner. The event hasn’t happened, and may never happen, but our attention is already there. 

We are not psychologists or therapists, and nothing here is treatment advice. This is a piece of reading and reflection on an old Stoic line and some modern research that has circled the same idea. The studies below are mostly small or observational, and patterns across a group are not predictions about how any one person will feel.

Marcus Aurelius was the Roman emperor who reigned from 161 to 180 CE. He wrote his Meditations as private notes to himself, and in one sentence he made an argument against this habit. In the George Long translation, Book 7 reads: “Let not future things disturb thee, for thou wilt come to them, if it shall be necessary, having with thee the same reason which now thou usest for present things.” At first it sounds like generic reassurance. It’s actually a narrower, stranger claim, and the narrowness is what makes it useful.

The habit of borrowing trouble

Worry presents itself as preparation. It feels like work. If we just think hard enough about the bad thing now, the reasoning goes, we’ll have somehow handled it, or softened it, or earned the right not to be caught off guard.

That’s the idea Marcus is pushing back on: that tomorrow’s problem is ours to solve today.

And the strange is that the feared thing often doesn’t arrive.

In one clinical study, Lucas LaFreniere and Michelle Newman asked 29 people with an anxiety disorder to record their specific worries over ten days, then checked back to see which came true. About 91 percent of the worries never happened. This is a small sample, not a universal fact about everyone’s fears, so treat the exact figure as a clue rather than a law. But the direction is telling, and it gets sharper: of the few worries that did come true, the outcome turned out better than expected about a third of the time.

LaFreniere is blunt about what worry costs. “It makes you miserable in the present moment to try and prevent misery in the future,” he told an interviewer. He put it more vividly too: worry, he said, “sucks the joy out of the ‘here and now’ to prevent an unrealistic ‘then and there.'” That’s one clinician’s view, not a settled verdict. But it lands close to the emperor’s point.

The “same reason” argument

Marcus says something more precise here than “don’t worry, it’ll be fine.” He isn’t promising the future will be gentle. He allows that the hard thing may be necessary, may actually come. His claim is about what you’ll bring to it. The mind you’ll have when the difficulty arrives is the same one you’re using right now to read this. Nothing is missing. You are not being asked to face tomorrow with fewer resources than you have today.

Modern psychology in a way arrived at a version of the same idea from a different direction. Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert study how people predict their own feelings. They found that we tend to overestimate how hard a future event will hit us, and how long the feeling will last. One reason, they argue, is that we forget how well we cope. In their review, they note that people often “fail to anticipate how quickly they will cope psychologically with such events in ways that speed their recovery from them.” The part of us that adjusts, reframes, and recovers is real, and we routinely leave it out of the forecast.

Wilson and Gilbert also describe a subtler pattern: a tendency to credit outside forces for our recovery, thanking luck or circumstance when it was mostly our own coping doing the work. It’s a tendency, not something everyone does. But it also fits the emperor’s blind spot closely. We keep underrating the one tool we’re guaranteed to have on hand.

Where the Stoic read gets misused

It would be easy to twist this into “don’t plan” or “don’t feel,” and that isn’t what the Stoics were after. They had a deliberate practice of rehearsing hardship in advance, calmly imagining loss or difficulty ahead of time. The point was not to soak in dread.

Donald Robertson, a cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist who writes on Stoic technique, draws a clear line between that practice and anxious spiraling. It, as he describes it, “isn’t about worrying; it’s about progressively reducing your fear of the unknown and developing the confidence to handle whatever life throws at you.” 

Planning looks at a future problem, does the finite work it requires now, and then sets it down. Worry looks at the same problem and keeps picking it back up, not to solve it but to feel the weight of it again.

Marcus isn’t telling you to skip the planning. He’s telling you to stop carrying the emotional load of a moment you’re not yet standing in.

Handing the problem back

So what do you do with an old man’s note to himself? The usable move is small. When you catch yourself living a future difficulty early, notice that you’re borrowing trouble, and hand the problem back to the version of you who will actually meet it. That person will have the same reason you have now, plus whatever the situation itself makes clear, which is always more than you can see from here.

Read this way, the line offers no comfort about the feared thing not coming. It makes a claim about capacity: that you carry your response with you, and it doesn’t get left behind in the present. The only real test is what happens when the hard thing finally arrives, and most of us, looking back, have already run that test more times than we remember.

If worry about the future is a constant weight rather than an occasional visitor, a qualified counsellor or therapist is worth talking to.