The modern worries
These are not six different problems. They are one process wearing six costumes.
Worry about the climate, about your job, about money, about how you come across online — these feel like separate conditions, and people treat them separately. The research points the other way: they are all repetitive negative thinking, sustained by the same two engines (not tolerating uncertainty, and beliefs about worry itself). That is good news, because it means you target the process once rather than fighting six battles.
What each module adds is the part that is genuinely specific: what is actually real about the threat, the particular trap that domain sets, and where the evidence says the leverage is.
Take the driver profile to switch on the ones that match your life.
Anxiety about the state of the world
Climate, conflict, politics, the news
The threats are real and you are not miscalibrated for noticing them. The literature is explicit that there is a difference between adaptive concern — a proportionate response to a genuine threat, which can motivate action — and maladaptive anxiety, which is defined by functional impairment. The goal here is not to talk you out of caring. It is to stop the caring from eating you while achieving nothing.
Job and career insecurity
Redundancy, restructuring, automation, performance
Job insecurity harms mental health independently of whether you actually lose the job. A meta-analysis of 56 samples and 53,405 participants (Llosa et al., 2018) found subjective job insecurity significantly correlated with depression, anxiety and emotional exhaustion. The anticipation is itself the exposure. You are not being dramatic; the state of not-knowing is the thing that does the damage.
Money and financial anxiety
Bills, debt, savings, whether it will be enough
Financial stress is a documented load on cognition, not a character weakness. Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir & Zhao (Science, 2013) found that experimentally inducing thoughts about finances reduced cognitive performance among poor participants but not well-off ones — and that the same farmer performed worse before harvest, when poor, than after harvest, when rich. Money worry consumes bandwidth. That is why you feel less capable when you are worried about money: you measurably are, and it is the situation doing it.
Health anxiety and body checking
Symptoms, searching, appointments, mortality
Bodies do produce symptoms, symptoms sometimes matter, and people are sometimes dismissed by clinicians when they were right. Vigilance about your health is not inherently irrational.
Relationships and social standing
Being judged, conflict, whether people are annoyed with you
Social standing genuinely matters, misreadings have real consequences, and caring how you affect people is a feature rather than a defect.
Social media and comparison
Feeds, comparison, being perceived, the urge to check
The urge to check and the low flat feeling afterwards are real and widely reported. Being visible to a large, partly unknown audience is genuinely a novel social situation, and comparison against curated material is a rigged contest.
Read the social media and comparison module →