Do you worry too much?
I am not talking about once-off panic. I am talking about that low-grade, constant mental pressure—the quiet scanning, the worst-case rehearsals, the running tally of what might go wrong. You are in the middle of a task, but your brain is already in the future, calculating risk, playing out scenarios, trying to brace for something you cannot quite name.
That is a worry. Moreover, I know it well.
In South Africa, it often feels as though worry is an integral part of the national rhythm. We have normalised hyper-vigilance. We plan around load shedding, we watch our backs in public, and we calculate every financial move twice. A staggering 73.8% of us have lived through trauma, and we now live in a social climate thick with uncertainty—economic instability, high crime rates, and political volatility. This is not hypothetical. It is personal. It is daily.
The hidden cost of worry
Worry is rarely loud. It does not scream. It presses. Quietly. Daily. It weighs down your thinking, shortens your fuse, and tightens your body.
I have had days where I have gone from client meetings to strategic sessions to answering emails—and by the time I get home, I am not tired from the work itself. I am tired from what I have been carrying alongside the work. The mental checking. The contingency plans. The constant readiness for disruption.
That is what worry does—it steals energy you did not know you were spending.
It is also sneaky. It convinces you that you are being responsible. That if you just think about the problem enough, you will solve it. If you prepare for every outcome, you will protect yourself from disappointment or failure. However, in truth, chronic worry rarely provides protection. It depletes.
Why do we struggle to let it go?
Worry, at its core, is a survival response. Our mind attempts to manage uncertainty. Moreover, we are surrounded by uncertainty.
We worry about money, but also about the meaning of our children’s safety, and whether they will thrive. We worry about what might happen—and about what it might mean about us if we fail, if we fall short, if we are seen as not enough. It is exhausting.
A recent study found that economic uncertainty alone is a strong predictor of anxiety and depression. However, it is not just about macro-trends. It is the micro-moments: the delayed payment from a client, the strange look in a meeting, the sense that you are always one decision away from things going sideways.
The Offload Room – why I built it
I did not build The Offload Room because I wanted to create another coaching product. I built it because I got tired of holding it all in.
Worry has a physicality to it. It lives in the body. I needed something physical to release it. Not another strategy. Not another motivational talk. No more mindset reframing. I needed an actual place to lay it down.
The Offload Room is precisely that—a place where people can come to offload what they have been carrying. No fixing. No sharing circles. No pressure to explain. You write down what you no longer want to carry, and you destroy it. That is, it. The act is symbolic, but the relief is real.
Men, especially, need spaces like this—where they can step out of performance mode, even for a moment, and stop solving everything silently.
A different way forward
Worry will not disappear. However, it can be disarmed.
Not by pretending it is not there, but by creating practices and places where it loses its grip. Where it no longer defines how you lead, how you parent, how you live.
That is what I have found in The Offload Room—and what many others are discovering, too. It is not therapy. It is not emotional labour. It is a private, quiet, concrete act of letting go.
So, if you feel like you are always on alert… if you are constantly preparing for the next curveball… if you are tired, not just from doing too much, but from holding too much—then this might be your cue.
It is okay to offload.
You do not have to carry all of it. Not today.
Curious about the Offload Room?
Find out more: cobuspienaar.co.za/offload-room