Most Things I Worry About Never Happen Anyway: A quiet truth from Tom Petty, and why worry rarely earns its keep

There’s a line buried near the end of a Tom Petty song—“Crawling Back to You,” from his Wildflowers album—that I’ve never been able to shake:

“I’m so tired of being tired / Most things I worry about never happen anyway.”

It’s not framed like advice. There’s no fix-it energy in the line. It’s just an honest, weathered truth. The kind of thing you say when you’re not trying to sound wise—just real. To me, that lyric reads like a Zen koan in denim: the kind of spiritual clarity you’d find scrawled on a gas station napkin at 2 a.m., no incense, no preaching. Just a sigh and a truth.

As a therapist, I often sit with people who are worn down—not from one big crisis, but from the low-grade hum of chronic worry. The kind that loops and loops, trying to outrun uncertainty. We all wrestle with it, in different forms. Worry can be useful—it’s part of how we plan, anticipate, protect. But when it takes over, when it becomes a lifestyle, it costs us more than it protects.

It’s sneaky, too. Worry often disguises itself as productivity, as love, as responsibility. But underneath it can be fear—fear of not being good enough, not being safe, not being in control. The trouble is, it rarely delivers on its promises. Worry tends to be exhausting without being effective. That’s where Petty’s lyric lands with such surprising accuracy: most of what we spend our mental energy fearing never actually shows up.

And if it does? Most of the time, we rise to meet it. We respond, we adjust, we reach out. But when we worry endlessly about imagined outcomes, we live through them twice—once in our minds, and once in reality (if they ever happen at all).

I often share this concept in session—not to minimize real fears, but to gently invite people to consider the cost of staying tangled in imagined futures. Worry can become a reflex, a form of mental rehearsal we didn’t mean to sign up for. But there’s another way.

That doesn’t mean we stop caring. It means we practice separating what’s worth our energy from what’s just noise. It means we recognize when our minds are offering stories that aren’t rooted in the present moment. And it means learning, sometimes slowly, to trust that we’ll meet life as it comes.

Petty wasn’t a therapist, but he had a knack for simple, durable truths. He gave us a lot of music about being lost, being found, and getting back up again. That line about worry has lived in my mind like a gentle post-it note: it’s okay to let go of what hasn’t happened yet.

In another song on the same album, Petty sings,

“You belong somewhere you feel free.”

That might be the quiet antidote to worry: not control, but clarity. A return to places—internal and external—where we feel grounded enough to trust our own resourcefulness. That trust doesn’t live only in the head. Informed by the heart, guided by the gut, it emerges when we learn to listen across the whole internal system. Sometimes, that means honoring what we feel in our bodies before we can explain it with our minds.

It’s also worth acknowledging that Petty himself wrestled with heavy things—including addiction. Like many people, he carried a complicated inner world, and ultimately, dependency played a role in his passing. But what he left behind is a body of work that doesn’t pretend to have answers. It simply names the struggle in ways that feel real, familiar, and deeply human.

Therapy isn’t about eliminating fear or pretending life is safe. It’s about recognizing when fear has taken the wheel—and helping people develop the tools to take it back. Not with slogans, but with steady, practical strategies and a deeper trust in their own capacity and inner knowing.

Sometimes a rock lyric says it best. But it’s what we do with that wisdom that matters.