Worry as Worship: The Religion of the Restless Mind

Worry demands ritual. It is not casual; it is ceremonial. There is an order to it: wake, worry, eat, worry, sleep (or attempt to). The mind kneels before possibility, offering up thoughts like prayers, believing that if it obsesses enough, something divine will intercede.

But the divine never arrives.

Because worry is not prayer — it is idolatry. It is the worship of a problem that does not love us back.

Anxiety has its own cathedral, a grand and looming structure in the mind where doubt is a deity and fear the high priest. Its doors are always open, its sermons always the same: “What if? What if? What if?” The congregation, our thoughts, bow their heads in agreement, whispering litanies of concern, as though repetition alone might conjure an answer.

I have spent years in this cathedral, tithing my energy to the unknown. Offering my peace as a sacrifice. The pews of my mind are filled with past regrets, future dreads, and hypothetical tragedies that have not yet come to pass. Some never will. And yet, I still go through the motions, lighting the candles of overanalysis, reciting the verses of impending doom.

It is honestly exhausting to be both the believer and the preacher of such a faith.

And yet, I have continued. Because, like all religions, worry provides a sense of control. A false sense, yes, but control nonetheless. It gives structure to the chaos, a ritual to cling to when certainty is out of reach. If I worry, I am at least doing something, no?

No.

Because the truth is, worry asks for everything and offers nothing. It is the worst kind of devotion: one-sided, thankless, and devoid of any real salvation.

But I did not see this clearly until the past weekend in Barcelona, when a cobbler, of all people, delivered the most unexpected sermon of my life.

Barcelona, the Cobbler, and the Gospel of Letting Go

Barcelona, in theory, is a place designed for indulgence. The kind of city where worry should dissolve in the heat, where life is measured in tapas plates and sea breeze rather than in the tight grip of anxious thought, all wrapped in a Gaudí fever dream. A place built for slow afternoons, for languid strolls down sun-drenched avenues, for drinking wine at an hour that in other non-European cities might be considered concerning.

And yet, there I was stressed.

Not existentially, not even dramatically, just in the quiet, persistent way that anxiety manages to make itself known even in the most unreasonable of circumstances. It wasn’t a grand, life-altering catastrophe that set me off. No impending disaster, no earth-shattering revelation. Just a broken shoe.

(Which, surprisingly, doesn’t happen often to me despite the fact that I exclusively wear heels. A commitment I have upheld religiously, barring my trainers for golf and tennis. This was just an unfortunate stroke of luck, or rather, a particularly unfortunate piece of pavement.)

It was my vintage Dior heels that had betrayed me. Mercifully, it was only the heel itself that came off, not a snapped strap or a loosened sole — the kind of failure that leaves you stranded, clutching a shoe that now resembles modern art more than footwear. A small inconvenience, really. One that should have been met with mild annoyance and a quick solution.

But anxiety does not deal in proportion. It does not care for scale. A broken heel was not just a broken heel, it was a sign. A metaphor. A prelude to some greater disaster I had not yet foreseen. Because, of course, if my shoe could collapse so easily, what else could follow? A domino effect of things unraveling, starting from the ground up. The cracks in the pavement leading to cracks in the plan leading to cracks in, well, me.

So, naturally, I went in search of a cobbler, because despite my irrational panic, I am at my core a practical person. (A contradiction, but then again, what is anxiety if not an ongoing argument between logic and hysteria?)

I found the shop down a quiet street, the kind of place that didn’t seem to exist on Google Maps, a remnant of a world before algorithms and convenience. No neon signs, no aggressive branding — just a small, sunlit space filled with the scent of leather and polish. A radio hummed softly in the background. There was a cat asleep on a stool, wholly indifferent to my crisis.

The man inside had the easy confidence of someone who worked with his hands. There’s something about craftsmen that I’ve always envied — the way they move with certainty, their relationship with imperfection, their quiet assurance that anything broken can be fixed. He did not rush, did not frown at my frantic retelling of events, did not seem remotely fazed by the emergency I had brought into his shop.

I, on the other hand, sat there, left foot bare, over-explaining the crisis of my shoe with the kind of dramatic urgency usually reserved for medical emergencies.

And he listened, nodded, and almost absentmindedly said, “Preocuparse es como adorar al problema.”

Worrying is like worshipping the problem.

I laughed. But not the polite kind. The nervous kind. The kind that escapes before you have time to suppress it, because something about the moment has caught you off guard. I felt seen, but not in the warm, affirming way. In the exposed way. As if, in that moment, he had glimpsed the entire inner architecture of my mind — the altar of my anxious thoughts, the lifelong habit of prostrating myself before problems, believing that worry itself was some kind of virtue.

And yet here was a man who spent his days fixing things, and yet he had no interest in the religion of worry.

That unsettled me.

Because what he had said, so simply, so offhandedly, unraveled something in me.

I had spent so much time believing that to worry was to prepare, to worry was to care, to worry was to be responsible. I had justified it as diligence, disguised it as intelligence, made it part of my identity. But here was a man who understood something I had not — that worry does not mend, nor heal, nor protect. It is worship without reward.

He fixed my shoe in minutes, as if it had never been broken at all. And as I walked out of the shop, heels intact, I wondered how many other things I had spent years agonising over that could have been solved just as easily, if only I had stopped kneeling before the problem long enough to take a step forward.

The Gospel of Anxiety

Anxiety has its own scripture.

The Book of What Ifs.
The Psalms of Overanalysis.
The Liturgy of Sleepless Nights.

I know its verses by heart.

I have recited them for years, unconsciously, as if prayer alone might change something. As if devotion to my worries might somehow ward off disaster, keep the worst at bay. Anxiety is a faith I never signed up for, and yet I follow its rituals religiously — lighting the candles of overanalysis, whispering incantations of doubt, bowing my head before the unknown.

Worry is an old language, fluent in every dialect of fear. It speaks with the conviction of prophecy, convincing us that to anticipate disaster is to prevent it. That to expect disappointment is to somehow soften its blow. That if we just think about something hard enough, if we turn it over in our minds like a worn-out coin, we might find an answer hidden in its grooves.

There is a superstition to it, a quiet and desperate logic.

An unspoken belief that if I worry about something now, it won’t blindside me later. That if I rehearse every possible catastrophe, I might be ready when one arrives. That constant vigilance is a form of control.

It is why I double-check, triple-check, quadruple-check things that need no further checking. Why I replay conversations in my head like a director who cannot let go of a scene, convinced that, with enough scrutiny, I might rewrite the past. Why I treat uncertainty like an enemy rather than the inevitable condition of life.

And yet, the irony, both great and exhausting, is that worry does not change outcomes. It only changes me.

It makes my world smaller, my shoulders tighter, my nights longer. It erodes joy in advance, taxing happiness as though some unseen authority might demand a refund later. It keeps my mind in a state of constant motion but never actually moves me forward.

I know this. I have always known this. And yet, still, I worry.

Because worry feels like something.

It is not passive. It is not doing nothing. It is a form of participation, an illusion of agency. If I worry, at least I am engaged with the problem, aware of its presence, taking it seriously.

But the cobbler’s words had lodged themselves in my brain like a splinter, small but insistent.

“Preocuparse es como adorar al problema."

Worrying is like worshipping the problem.

And suddenly, I saw my anxiety for what it truly was — not preparation, not intelligence, not some necessary burden of responsibility, but worship. A misplaced reverence. A habit of kneeling before things that did not deserve my devotion.

What if I had been worshipping the wrong thing all along?

What if my faith had been misplaced, not in a god, but in my own doubt?

And what would it mean to stop?

That question lingered, unfamiliar and unsettling. Because if I did not give my time and energy to worry, then what? What filled the space it left behind? What would I believe in instead?

Hope?

Trust?

The terrifying and radical idea that not every moment needs to be braced for impact?

I did not know the answer.

But for the first time, I wanted to find out.

A Different Kind of Faith

What would it mean to redirect devotion?

To unlearn the rituals of worry, to step out of the temple of anxiety and walk barefoot into the unknown? To place my faith not in catastrophe, but in something softer, quieter — something that does not demand constant sacrifice?

The world is full of people who have learned this trick. The ones who move through life with an ease I do not understand. The ones who do not pause before every decision, who do not rehearse disaster, who trust the ground beneath their feet without needing to test it first.

They are not reckless. Nor naive. They are not foolish optimists floating through life on blind luck. They simply do not kneel before fear.

And I envy them.

But envy, too, is a form of worship.

To admire something is to give it power. To long for a way of being is to acknowledge its weight, its value. I have spent so long envying the unburdened, wishing for the lightness they carry so effortlessly. But longing alone does not change anything.

So perhaps I should start small. A quiet rebellion against the temple of anxiety. A single act of faith.

Maybe I wear the heels again without a backup pair in my bag.

Maybe I trust that even if something goes wrong, I will survive it.

Maybe I stop treating worry like a deity and start treating it like a ghost — acknowledge it, but refuse to let it haunt me.

Because ghosts lose their power when we stop fearing them.

And maybe I shift my devotion entirely. If I treated hope the way I treat worry, if I repeated affirmations of possibility as often as I repeated prophecies of failure — would my life look different?

I think it would.

Because worry is, at its core, a choice. An involuntary one at times, yes. A habit stitched deep into the fabric of my thoughts. But still, a choice.

And perhaps faith is, too.

Not the kind that requires certainty. Not blind belief in an easy, problem-free existence. But the kind that whispers, “even if things go wrong, you will find a way through.” The kind that does not need every question answered before it takes a step forward.

The cobbler in Barcelona had understood this instinctively. He had fixed my shoe with steady hands, unbothered by the potential for future breakage. And when I had walked out of his shop, I had done so with both heels intact — not because I had worried, but because I had acted.

Perhaps that is the real difference. Worry kneels; faith moves.

And I want to move.

The Cobbler Was Right

Barcelona faded into memory, but the phrase remained. It lingers, woven into the fabric of my thoughts, resurfacing at unexpected moments — when I feel the first stirrings of panic, when I catch myself rehearsing disaster, when I stand at the altar of worry, ready to kneel once more.

“Preocuparse es como adorar al problema."

Worrying is like worshipping the problem.

And I have spent a lifetime as a devoted follower.

But lately, I have begun to doubt worry. To question its sermons, to poke holes in its logic, to wonder if the god I have been praying to all these years has ever once answered back.

I have not abandoned it entirely. That would be unrealistic. Some instincts are too deeply ingrained to vanish overnight. But I have begun to shift my faith elsewhere — to action, to resilience, to the radical notion that I do not need to pre-suffer every possible misfortune in order to survive it.

And sometimes, that is enough.

Because faith is not about certainty. It is about choosing to believe in something despite the uncertainty.

And if I must believe in something, if I must devote myself to some unseen force, I would rather worship the possibility that things might just be okay.

S xoxo

Written in London, England

31st March 2025