Five hundred years ago, Michel de Montaigne said: “My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened.” According to Don Joseph Goewey, “Now there’s a study that proves it. This study looked into how many of our imagined calamities never materialize. In this study, subjects were asked to write down their worries over an extended period of time and then identify which of their imagined misfortunes did not actually happen. Lo and behold, it turns out that 85 percent of what subjects worried about never happened, and with the 15 percent that did happen, 79 percent of subjects discovered either they could handle the difficulty better than expected, or the difficulty taught them a lesson worth learning. This means that 97 percent of what you worry over is not much more than a fearful mind punishing you with exaggerations and misperceptions.”

HT: http://donjosephgoewey.com/eighty-five-percent-of-worries-never-happen-2/