I once lost sleep over a scrotum pain I was sure was the end of me.
It turned out to be some orthopedic nerve impingement, and the doctor barely made fun of me for equating my pain level to an 8, when on his scale 10 meant literally dying. Fun times, aka “fever egg times”!
One Penn State study of people diagnosed with generalized anxiety put the share of false alarms at 91%: the disasters their minds render in such loving detail almost never make it to the world.
The obvious move is to call worry irrational and try to switch it off.
But look at what you’d be switching off. The mind that rehearses the layoff is the same mind that planned the career. The one that runs the breakup in advance is the one that imagined the marriage in the first place.
Foresight, the trick that let a naked ape store grain, build cities, and save for a retirement it cannot see, is just the ability to make an unreal future feel real before it arrives.
Worry is that exact ability, turned to face the dark.
You can’t keep one and bin the other; they’re one muscle.
The false alarms are the running cost of being a creature that can live in tomorrow at all. All you get is self-reflection, mid-catastrophe: the thing mugging you is a rendering.
Related: How ’Bout Zero Neuroticism? – the case for the prosecution.
