Everyone focuses their energy on something. The question is, do you know what you are focused on?
Recently, I encountered a statement that has remained in my mind ever since. He said:
“It is not a matter of if we are worshiping. It is a matter of what we are worshiping.”
It rang true to me immediately, because the moment I heard it I thought of the things I
worship, how each one affects me, and to what degree does it affects me. Some were
easy to name. I worship God. I am a practicing Christian and that devotion is conscious,
chosen, and central to who I am. Then came the more challenging thoughts. I worship a football team. Manchester United, to be specific. And for years I watched SportsCenter
religiously and could rattle off stats on random sports and random athletes who had
absolutely no bearing on my life whatsoever. I was eventually able to change and edit that worship. Sitting with this idea, I realized there are many more things that I and we
need to honestly look at.
So, the question I want to sit with in this article is not “Am I someone who worships?” The question is “What do I worship?”
When most people hear the word “worship,” they think of religion. Pews, hymns, prayer. But that is too narrow a definition for what I am talking about here.
For this conversation, worship means giving your all to something. By “all” I do not just mean time, though time is part of it. I mean mental energy, emotional investment, and identity. I mean the thing that lives in the back of your mind even when you are doing something else. The thing you check on instinctively. The things whose outcomes affect your mood.
By that definition, everyone is worshiping something. It is just that most of us have never named it.
And then there are the altars we do not always recognize as altars. Politics is one of the most powerful of these, and one of the least conscious. People consume political content for hours a day, feel their mood rise and fall with election results and news cycles, and organize their social lives around who shares their views. It functions exactly like devotion. The difference is that very few people would describe it that way.
Sports teams, music artists, pop culture, social media. These might sound trivial next to religion or vocation, but they follow the same pattern. They get our attention, our emotional energy, our time. They shape how we feel on any given day.
Social media deserves its own mention, because it is the most seductive altar of themodern era. It mimics connection while functioning more like compulsion. People scroll not because it fulfills them but because the habit has become automatic. The platform gets their attention. They do not always get much back.
I will be honest with you because this conversation requires honesty. By my own definition, I worship Manchester United.
In the last ten years, I have missed approximately ten of their matches. Not ten percent. Ten matches, total. And after every single game, win, lose, or draw, I follow it up by reading the post-match analysis. The manager’s press conference. The player ratings. The tactical breakdown. I want to understand what happened and why.
That is worship. There is no other honest word for it.
This is where it gets uncomfortable, not just intellectually but emotionally. I consider myself a psychologically minded person. I think carefully about my inner life. I understand how emotions work and where they come from. And yet that football team still gets to me in ways that can genuinely surprise me. A bad result does not just register as disappointing. It can affect my entire day. There have been matches after which I have needed to sit down and meditate just to regulate myself. My WHOOP data tells a story I cannot argue with, my strain scores and stress levels during Manchester United matches are through the roof. A ninety-minute football game moves my physiology the way significant life events do.
I am getting better. Awareness has genuinely helped. I am learning to move on more quickly, to not carry a result into the next day, to keep the whole thing in proportion. The fact that it required deliberate work, meditation, biometric tracking, tells you something about how deep this worship runs.
At what cost? What else could have had that time, that attention, that emotional investment? What conversations did not happen? What projects did not get started? What rest did not occur?
I am not saying following football is wrong. I am saying I had never sat down and honestly asked myself what I was trading away for it. That question, at what cost, is the most important one in this article.
Here is something I believe to be simply true: no one is unfocused. You might feel scattered. You might feel like you are not making progress. However, your energy is going somewhere. The question is not whether you are focused. It is what are you focused on?
Think about the last week of your life. Not the version you would describe to someone who asked how you have been, the actual version. Where did your attention go when you had a free moment? What did you think about in the shower? What did you pick up your phone for, reflexively, before you had even decided to? What were you doing when you felt most alive, and what were you doing when you felt most drained?
That honest inventory will tell you, more clearly than any personality test or self-help framework, what you are worshiping.
Once you know what you worship, you can ask the real question: is it giving back what you are putting in?
This is not a moral judgment. Some things we give ourselves over to are genuinely beautiful, family, faith, creative work, and service to others. Some are hollow or were once meaningful and have quietly become habit. The point is not to condemn but to see it clearly.
Once you see it clearly, you have a choice. You can decide that yes, this is worth what I’m giving it. Or you can decide that it is not, and begin, deliberately, not through willpower but through honest awareness, to redirect your energy toward something that is.
You cannot stop focusing. You cannot stop giving your energy to something. That is just what it means to be a person living a life. But you can choose, consciously, with eyes open, what receives that gift.
I am not asking rhetorically. I mean it as a genuine invitation to sit with the question, honestly, without judgment.
What gets your attention without you deciding to give it? What shapes your mood without your permission? What would feel like a loss if it were suddenly taken away?
That is your worship. The moment you can name it, you have taken the first real step toward deciding whether it deserves it.
Board Certified in Addiction and General Psychiatry, ABPN
Dr. Phillips is the founder of C Psychiatric Solutions, dedicated to integrative and compassionate
psychiatric care.