LAST year, an American financial advice headline drew ridicule online for sounding absurdly privileged: ‘I am scared to death that I’ll run out of money: My wife and I are in our 50s and have $4.4m. Can we retire early?’

In fact, the headline understated the person’s wealth – besides the $4.4m in investments, they also owned two houses and had another $25m in value in a business they partly owned.

The article attracted much disbelief, indignation, and mockery. How could someone with so much wealth possibly feel financially unsafe? I have no great insight into the wealthy’s financial concerns. As a CBT therapist, however, what struck me was not the sums involved, but the phrase ‘scared to death’.

Anxiety is not always logical. More specifically, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) – which involves persistent and excessive worry – has little respect for external reality. Some might assume financial anxiety only affects people with real money worries. Certainly, financial stress can be a major driver of anxiety, but if you have GAD, you don’t have to have money problems to worry about it.

GAD is less about actual danger and more about a mind repeatedly searching for certainty. You seek reassurance, but feelings of relief are invariably fleeting rather than lasting.

The person in the article had millions, but any anxious person will recognise the core feeling here: the persistent fear that something may go wrong and catastrophe is just around the corner.

Uncertainty

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) emphasises that the excessive worrying that characterises GAD is

driven by intolerance of uncertainty. Worriers overestimate threat and underestimate their ability to cope, so life becomes organised around prevention, with the worried mind scanning for risk and trying to anticipate every outcome in advance.

Some worriers may focus on money, others on health, relationships, work, or children. The content doesn’t really matter, because the underlying process is largely the same – not tolerating uncertainty. The problem is the anxious mind will always shift the goalposts. Unsatisfied, it returns with further questions: What if you’ve missed something? What if circumstances change? What if XYZ happens?

All this worrying can be exhausting, keeping the nervous system in a prolonged state of threat. Even when life is objectively “fine”, the threat-focused mind behaves like danger is imminent. Fatigue, poor sleep, reduced concentration – GAD hurts well-being and ensures life becomes dominated by management rather than experience. One of GAD’s cruellest features is that achievement rarely resolves it. People often assume anxiety will ease once they reach a certain financial, relational, or professional milestone. In reality, anxiety adapts, with one concern being replaced by another.
This is why reassurance rarely provides lasting relief. The anxious mind seeks certainty, but certainty is not something life can provide.

Tolerance

Thus, CBT aims to help people change their relationship with uncertainty itself, and reduce behaviours that foster this intolerance, like checking, reassurance-seeking, repeated mental review, and so on. Initially, that can feel uncomfortable.Worriers tend to be conscientious, and if you have long seen worry as a responsible form of preparation, then letting go might seem unsafe or even reckless.

However, recovery is not about throwing caution to the wind, but about truly seeing the difference between practical problem-solving and repetitive, fear-driven behaviours.

For example, there’s a difference between reviewing your finances once with a qualified adviser and going back over the same calculations late at night because your mind won’t settle. One leads to decisions and practical action, the other is an attempt to reduce unease in the moment. CBT also emphasises that anxiety is often built on assumptions about uncertainty, with one assumption being that not knowing is itself dangerous.

However, most uncertainty cannot be removed by thinking harder or longer about it. One must see it as a normal condition of life, not a problem to be solved.
Consequently, attempts to eliminate uncertainty backfire. The more you try to achieve certainty, the narrower life becomes. Decisions get delayed, opportunities are avoided, and you’re left battling a constant niggling sense of unease, with satisfaction increasingly dependent on a sense of safety that never fully arrives. The reaction to the original headline focused on the scale of the man’s wealth, but that misses the more important psychological point: the way anxiety can persuade us that what we have is unstable or insufficient.

At its core, GAD is a difficulty in trusting that one can live and function in the presence of uncertainty. Thus, the aim is not to remove uncertainty (that’s impossible), but to build a life that is no longer organised around trying to eliminate it.