This is something riskfactorphobes may know all about. Worrying. Apparently we Brits do it seven times a day for around eight minutes at a time. That’s 56 minutes a day spent worrying.
Actually, some seasoned worryers might think that’s not bad, as it means you’re not worrying for 23 hours and four minutes (okay, so I’ve included the time you spend asleep in that little equation, but some people probably have dreams about worrying, don’t they?). So what are we worrying about? According to energy supplier npower, which carried out the survey into fretting, these are the top 10 worries in the UK today:
1 Cost of living
2 Lack of money
3 Illness
4 Personal health
5 Not being able to pay a bill
6 Remembering to lock the house
7 Having enough put by for a ‘rainy day’
8 Putting on weight
9 Spending too much money on shopping
10 Upsetting someone
Trust health to make it high in the top 10, with illness and personal health ranking third and fourth (and putting on weight – which is, after all, a health problem, coming in eighth). It’s interesting that worrying about illness came right after worrying about not having any money, and that putting on weight is more of a worry than spending too much on shopping.
Other worries include the size of our bottoms (as in do ours look big in everything we wear?), going grey, getting wrinkles, drinking too much and, er, keeping the house clean (really, you worry about that?).
So riskfactorphobes rejoice, you are definitely not alone.