Jason Ness, Ph.D.

Bears fans - over the last 40 years, have you ever truly felt like the Bears were the best team in the NFL? I mean the true No.1 team? I thought about it.

Pat Murphy had a heart attack on a baseball field in 2020. Now he’s managing in the World Series, telling everyone worry is a waste of time. He was the Brewers’ bench coach then, running a workout at their own ballpark, when an athletic trainer noticed something was wrong as he sat in the dugout. He was in surgery 15 minutes after reaching the hospital. When he came back, the Brewers had added a 270-pound designated hitter, Daniel Vogelbach. Murphy’s first words to him were a joke asking how Murphy was the one who’d had the heart attack. Vogelbach was stunned for a second, then cracked up. That’s who Murphy is. He spent 25 years as a college coach, including coaching Craig Counsell at Notre Dame, then eight more as Counsell’s bench coach in Milwaukee. He didn’t get his first full-time major league managing job until he was 65, and he won Manager of the Year in each of his first two seasons. The science is on his side, too. In 2020, Penn State researchers Lucas LaFreniere and Michelle Newman had 29 people with anxiety write down their worries for 10 days, then track what actually happened. 91.4% of the worries never came true. The study was small and only looked at people with anxiety, but it backs up what Murphy is saying: most of what we worry about never happens.

Good luck falling asleep after this one