Anxiety and Worst Case Scenarios

Anxiety and worst case scenarios go hand in hand. Or, if you prefer, imagined catastrophic scenario by imagined catastrophic scenario.

You start to think about some upcoming situation, person, time or place. Your feelings of anxiety, dread and fear begin to kick in and rise. And that anxiety and fear drives your imagination into all sorts of potential disastrous places. You find yourself thinking of all the things that could go wrong and then your imagination moves onto the ongoing fall out as a result of it. Whatever the particular scenario, it always ends in immense disaster for you.

The more you feel that anxiety and overthink and dwell upon the worst case scenarios, the worse you feel and the more other negative things you can find yourself contemplating. You wonder how you will handle, deal and cope with things when they go wrong, as it seems in your head that they inevitably must. You start to associate anxiety with the things you are thinking about until just a fleeting thought or passing mention of that thing can set you on edge.

It doesn’t matter what the upcoming thing actually is. It could be something coming up at work, a social situation, getting on a plane, making a speech, seeing that person again, or any number of things.  And because anxiety can generalise, any other similar things get coloured by the same feelings of anxiety, fear and dread. Anxiety moves on from one thing to the next until soon you find yourself carried along on a wave of feeling worse and worse.

These movies in your mind can take over your thinking and fill you with dread. Even though you know things may not turn out the way you are imagining, you still feel anxious and think of all the worst case scenarios.

The Movies In Your Mind

Recently, with some time on my hands, I’ve been making fairly regular visits to my local cinema (which is handily only a ten minute walk away). Once you’ve been to the cinema on your own once, you realise that it’s a pretty common thing and that no one actually cares what you are up to anyway (which links nicely to previous articles about how people aren’t really giving you that much of their brain space and attention anyway).  I’ve seen some great films (like the Bob Dylan one, which is the only film I’ve ever been to watch twice at the cinema) and, to be honest, some stinkers (that I’ll leave you to discover for yourself).

Of course, there is a reason why cinema screens are big, bright and vivid and why the sound is always turned up a bit. It’s impactful, it occupies your focus, you get drawn in, you can experience various feelings and emotions, and the rest of life fades away for a couple of hours.

In some ways it is very similar with anxiety and worst case scenarios. You start to imagine the dreaded thing. Like a movie in your mind it is usually big, bright, bold, colourful and vivid. It’s like you are there now, in that scenario, with everything going badly and where you are experiencing all of the anxiety and negative thoughts, feelings and events. Your imagination feeds your unwanted emotions and that in turn directs your thinking. In this movie in your mind, you are the unwitting central character as it all spirals into doom.

It could be a past event that you relive in your mind and that makes you feel bad. And with anxiety, it will certainly be about future events and all the unwanted outcomes that it feels certain are destined to happen. You know things don’t usually turn out how your anxiety has you predict them, yet that doesn’t stop you feeling anxious and thinking the worst over and over again about the next thing.

Inside your mind, you imagine being there, seeing what you would see, hearing what you would hear and feeling all the anxiety, stress and fear as if you were actually there. Of course, you know you are not actually there but your imagination drives your anxious feelings and it feels inevitable that the worst case will happen this time. Your imagination can spiral down that rabbit hole of things getting worse and worse for you, until you are many, many steps into the future and away from how things actually are in the current moment.

Diffusing Worst Case Scenarios

There are a whole host of ways to quickly diffuse the anxiety from worst case scenarios. Getting good at feeling calmer is a core skill to master to manage your anxiety and how you feel. Worst case scenarios are so unpleasant because they make you feel anxious and fearful about the movies inside your own head. That association, between how you feel and what you are imagining, strengthens the link and the pattern between the two things. If you get good at feeling calm then it doesn’t matter what you imagine, whether it is the worst case or not, because the old anxiety won’t be there. It is also much easier to change your thoughts when you feel calm and to move them on to something more comfortable.

After all, the best thing about your imagination is that it is all made up in your head. Whether you are thinking of something that has happened, or something that could happen, if it isn’t happening now, then it is made up. Your thoughts are perceptions and habits rather than being facts. That means you can change your thoughts in any way you wish. Particularly with a movie in your mind, you can rewind it, edit it and play it out in a different way. You can run the movie on to a time after the dreaded event when it didn’t go so badly after all and you are happily getting on with life.

Another of my favourite approaches for changing worst case scenarios is to make it less impactful in your head to take away the anxiety. Right now you’re probably imagining being there, in the worst case scenario, as if you are right there and living it right now. So step out of it and make it like you are watching a movie of yourself in that situation, as if someone recorded it and is playing it back to you (so you are watching yourself in that situation). Then move the screen away into the distance and make it smaller and darker. Drain all the colour out to black and white and switch off any sound. Keep making it smaller and darker as you move it further away until it’s so tiny you can barely make it out.

Instead of a blockbuster, big, bright, bold disaster movie in your head, change it so it’s like being at the worst cinema you could imagine where the screen is small, dark, silent and black and white. Take the emotion and impact out of your own thinking.

Then leave that screen over there and imagine there is another screen next to it that contains something good. A scene, time or place where you feel good. Have this positive screen start to come towards you, getting bigger, brighter and more colourful. Let it come all the way until it is like you are there now, in the positive time. Make the colours, brighter and richer and add the sounds of this place in. Be there, in this positive time in your mind and start to feel all the good feelings (then turn them up!). It’s like you are the director of your own imagination telling yourself, not that old scene, this new one!

There’s a reason that cinema movies are big, bright, loud and colourful. It feeds your imagination, your focus and your emotions. It’s the same in your own thinking. That’s why anxiety driven worst case scenarios make you feel so bad and why you struggle to just stop thinking about it. So here you diffuse the emotions, lessen the focus and become the director of your own imagination.

Part of overcoming anxiety is about learning how to direct and orchestrate what you think, when you think, how much time you spend thinking it and then what you do in response to that thought. And, in so doing, anxiety and worst case scenarios start to loosen the grip they once had upon you.

And you can save the blockbuster movies for Cineworld. And maybe I’ll see you for a movie on my next visit there sometime soon!

To your health and happiness, 

Dan Regan

Ely Business Person of the Year

The Award Winning Anxiety Hypnotherapist in Ely & Newmarket

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