Ask Dr. Rick: Why Do I Always Feel Like Something Bad Is About to Happen?
Why your brain keeps bracing for disaster and what to do about it
A student in my Dealing with Anxiety course asks: “Why do I always feel like something bad is about to happen? Even when things are objectively fine, I’m anxious. I overestimate how likely bad things are, and I imagine them being worse than they’d actually be. Why do I do this?”
If you’ve ever felt this way, there’s an actual evolutionary reason for it, and understanding why can help you deal with it.
In my experience, most people move through their lives thinking that somehow it’s threat level orange when, objectively, right then and there, it’s threat level green. Or maybe threat level chartreuse... like a swimming pool of green paint with a drop of yellow.
(If you’re not familiar: threat levels are the security alert system: green means low risk, orange means high risk. Most of us walk around feeling like we’re in high alert mode when we’re actually safe.)
Why is that? Why do we move through our days overestimating the likelihood of bad events occurring and also overestimating how bad it would feel if they happened?
One of the deep roots of the answer to this question is found in our own biological evolution over the six hundred million year evolution of the nervous system.
Our ancestors could make two kinds of mistakes.
First, they could think that there was a tiger in the bushes about to pounce, some kind of bad thing was coming at them... but in fact, there wasn’t such a threat.
The alternative mistake was to think that everything’s fine, the coast is clear... but in fact, there really was a tiger in the bushes about to jump.
What’s the cost of the first mistake? Needless anxiety.
What’s the cost of the second mistake? No more mistakes forever.
As a result, we’re designed to make the first mistake hundreds and hundreds of times to avoid making the second mistake even once.
In effect, we evolved to be adaptively paranoid of paper tigers. A paper tiger is a metaphor for something that appears threatening but is actually harmless. We’re wired to treat harmless things as dangerous because the cost of being wrong was death.
That’s a good prescription for upping the odds of survival at significant cost to well-being back in the Serengeti Plains. And there are situations today in which yep, this paper tiger paranoia is actually really useful because it super keeps us on our toes.
But for most people, what it leads to is needless anxiety and also a needless swerving away from opportunities with an overfocus on threats.
Think about it:
You don’t speak up in the meeting because you overestimate how badly it could go
You don’t tell your partner what you really need because you imagine the worst-case scenario
You avoid opportunities because the potential downside looms larger than the potential upside
Your nervous system is doing what it was designed to do, but it’s miscalibrated for modern life.
So here’s the question: If we’re wired this way, are we just stuck with it?
No.
There’s a very simple and powerful method I’ve borrowed from cognitive therapy that you can start using immediately. It’s a technique for forming more accurate appraisals of threats, not underestimating them and not overestimating them either.
In the rest of this article, I’ll walk you through the exact step-by-step process I use, including a detailed real-world example of how to challenge your anxious thoughts with believable counter-arguments that actually calm your nervous system down. You’ll learn how to separate the paper tigers from the real ones and what to do about both.
