Worry and the what-ifs

There's nothing specific you can point to. Just a persistent feeling that something is about to go wrong, and the quietly maddening discovery that knowing you're overthinking it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.

The frustrating thing about this kind of anxiety is that it doesn't need a reason. It isn't waiting for something to actually be wrong. It just turns up, usually in the small hours or in the middle of something completely unrelated, and begins running through possibilities. What if this happens. What if that hasn't been sorted. What if the thing you said last week was taken the wrong way. It's thorough, this kind of thinking. It covers its ground.

You probably know, on some level, that the odds of all these things actually happening are low. You may even be quite good at talking other people through exactly this kind of worry with perfectly sensible perspective. The difficulty is that none of that helps when you're in it. Knowing you're overthinking it is one of those insights that arrives with absolutely no practical application attached.

Sometimes there's an identifiable theme: health, money, the children, a relationship, work. Sometimes it's completely free-floating and attaches itself to whatever happens to be available. Sometimes it's worry about other people, the particular flavour of anxiety that comes from caring very much about someone you can't actually control, which is, unfortunately, everyone.

The part of your mind running this isn't trying to make your life difficult. It learned somewhere along the way that staying alert kept you ahead of problems. The trouble is it hasn't quite updated on the difference between useful vigilance and running a 24-hour news cycle about things that haven't happened yet.

The reason it's hard to think your way out of this is worth understanding. Worry is a cognitive process. Trying to stop worrying by thinking harder about whether you should worry is a bit like trying to put out a fire by adding more fire and hoping for a different result. The pattern isn't running at the level where rational reassurance reaches it. It's running somewhere further down, where it's been quietly doing what it understands to be its job for quite some time.

People often notice first that the 3am thinking gets quieter. Not absent, but quieter, and shorter-lived when it does arrive. The loop that used to run uninterrupted for an hour starts to wind down in minutes. This sounds modest; it is not modest at all.

After that, people tend to notice a kind of groundedness they'd forgotten they had. Not an absence of concern, but a return to something like proportion. The what-ifs don't disappear, but they stop feeling like a reasonable basis for running your life around.

What tends to change

If this sounds familiar, I'd like to hear from you.

A free 30-minute call is the simplest way to find out whether this is the right kind of help for what you're carrying. There's no obligation and no hard sell. If it's not a good fit, I'll say so, and I'll do my best to point you somewhere more useful.