85 Percent of Worries Never Happen: The Real Source.

Make a fear specific enough to be wrong.

A fear can only be scored if it is specific enough to be wrong. For example, "the business will fail" never says what failure looks like. Instead, "within twelve months I'll have spent my 5,000 dollars of savings and have fewer than ten paying customers" can be checked. Vague fears are safe from scoring, so they last.

So make your fears specific: rewrite your oldest one so a stranger could judge it a year from now.

Where 85 percent of worries never happen comes from.

Before you repeat that 85 percent of worries never happen, check its origin. It traces back to a 1999 paper by Thomas Borkovec and two colleagues at Penn State. In one assessment, 67.9 per cent of predictions by 29 undergraduates did not come true over two weeks. In another, 17 clients rated 85 per cent of worries "better than expected."

Better than expected is not never.

So is the 85 percent worry statistic true? Not as stated. The line that 85 percent of worries never happen blurs two findings, because the strict accuracy was not reported. As a result, the famous number measured something else. Then it took another twenty years to measure the real thing properly.