For a long time, I thought my anxiety was helping me prepare for life. I thought that if I imagined the worst thing in advance, if I mentally went through rejection, failure, shame, or loss before it happened, then when something actually happened, it would hurt a little less.
That was the private logic of it. If I could rehearse the pain early enough, maybe I would not be destroyed by it later.
But after six months of talking to a therapist, I started to see something strange. Most of the time, my anxiety was not preparing me for the future. It was making me live inside a future that probably would never happen. I thought I was being realistic. I thought I was calculating risks. But in reality, I was treating my worst expectations almost like facts.
The body does not always understand the difference between a real problem and an imagined one. Nothing has happened yet, but the shoulders are already tense. The breathing is shallow. The movie has already started in your head. You have not been rejected yet, but you already feel rejected. You have not failed yet, but you already live as if the failure has happened.
And then, most of the time, nothing happens. The conversation goes fine. The message does not destroy anything. The video comes out, and the world does not collapse. But the relief does not last very long, because anxiety rarely says, “Look, I was wrong.” It says, “Okay, this time you were lucky. But next time might be different.”
The old protector
I do not want to talk about anxiety as if it is just a broken system. From a scientific point of view, anxiety looks more like an old protective mechanism. The body tries to notice possible danger before it happens, make us more alert, and prepare us for action, especially when the future is uncertain. In that sense, anxiety can be useful. It can make us look around, check risks, prepare, and avoid obvious danger.
The problem does not begin because anxiety exists. The problem begins when this mechanism works too often and too widely. When it is not preparing me for reality anymore, but making me live inside a possible threat.
For me, this idea is not theoretical. If anxiety is not an enemy, but an old protector, then the main question is not, “What is wrong with me?” The main question is, “What did this protector once learn to protect me from?”
I think mine grew around my stutter.
When you stutter, you slowly begin to control your speech before you even open your mouth. You check the sentence in your head. You look for words where you might get stuck. Sometimes you rebuild the whole sentence because of one sound. And sometimes you stay silent, because silence feels safer.
The strange part is that in my adult life, almost no one has ever said anything bad to me because of my stutter. Reality has become much softer than my brain still expects it to be. But my brain still lives as if danger is close.
There were moments in school when kids laughed while I was reading a poem in front of the class. For them, it was probably a small episode. Maybe they forgot it after a few minutes. But my brain remembered it for decades and made a simple conclusion: it is better not to stand out. It is better to control everything in advance, because otherwise it will hurt again.
Even though more than twenty years have passed, even though I live in another country and record videos by myself, somewhere inside me there is still this old protective mechanism. It behaves as if I am still standing in front of that class.
That is where the deeper question begins for me. What if my anxiety is not really about today? What if it is trying to protect me not from what could happen now, but from something that already happened many years ago?
Maybe I often react not to reality, but to memory. It feels like my brain is warning me about the future, but it is really showing me an old movie and saying, “Look, this can happen again.”
Rehearsing defeat
For me, losing control has almost always felt like defeat. Not just like an uncomfortable moment, but like losing some inner battle with myself. As if, if I could not predict everything in advance, then I was not strong enough or collected enough.
In my head, I understand that control is an illusion. I understand that mistakes are unavoidable. But understanding something in your head does not always become an experience in your body.
A normal situation: I park the car, close the door, and go do what I need to do. Nothing special. Millions of people do this every day and do not turn it into a philosophical crisis. But my brain quickly finds a scenario. What if someone hits it? What if I come back and there is a scratch? What if something happens while I cannot control it?
Usually nothing happens. The car is just there. I come back, get inside, and life continues as if there was no drama at all. But inside, I have already lived through a small defeat. Outside, nothing happened, but the energy has already been spent.
There can be dozens of these inner movies in one day. You walk into a dark forest and already expect danger. You publish a text and already hear judgment. You start a project and already see failure. You want to say something honest and already feel shame.
This is what caught me the most: reality almost never looks as perfectly terrible as anxiety makes it look. In reality, things are usually more boring, softer, and more random. Sometimes something really does go badly, but even then, it rarely matches the exact script that the brain rehearsed in advance.
So maybe my anxiety is not really predicting the future. Maybe it is rehearsing defeat.
It is almost saying: let’s lose this in advance, so it will hurt less later. But a defeat you rehearse in advance still feels like defeat. You have not done anything yet, but you are already tired. You have not been rejected yet, but you have already made yourself smaller.
This is a subtle trap, because anxiety often hides behind reason. It does not always come with the voice of panic. Sometimes it speaks with the voice of a responsible adult. I just want to be ready. I am just calculating risks. I am just being realistic.
But sometimes, behind that realism, there is not wisdom. There is a fear of feeling helpless again. Maybe that is why anxious people find it so hard to let go of control. For us, control is not just a tool. It is a way to feel safe, even when that safety is imaginary.
The opposite of curiosity
Another unpleasant thing about anxiety is that it creates a feeling of participation. As if, if I am anxious, I am already doing something. As if thinking about the problem long enough means I am doing important inner work.
But very often, it is not work. It is just running in place. I am analyzing, preparing, checking different options, but in reality I am still in the same place.
This is where another thought stayed with me: what if anxiety is not the opposite of calm? What if anxiety is the opposite of curiosity?
Anxiety acts as if it already knows what will happen next. It writes the ending in advance, and almost always, it is a bad ending. It does not ask, “I wonder what will happen?” It says, “I know how this ends. You will feel ashamed. You will fail. You will be judged.”
Curiosity is different. It does not need a guarantee, and it does not pretend to be confident. It does not say, “I know everything will be fine.” It says, “I don’t know what will happen, but I am interested to see.”
For me, this is an important difference. Curiosity does not remove the risk. It simply does not turn every risk into a sentence before reality has even started. It leaves space for reality, instead of filling that space with the expectation of defeat.
At some point, you cannot get a guarantee. You can only decide that the experience matters more than control. That is probably one of the hardest choices for an anxious person, because anxiety wants a guarantee before the beginning, while life usually gives understanding only after you act.
The small space
This does not mean anxiety disappears. Mine definitely has not. I can still leave my car in a parking lot and imagine a problem. I can still walk into a dark forest and feel tension. I can still start speaking and check the words in advance.
But now, at least, there is a small distance between the thought and reality. I can notice the anxious scenario and say to myself: this is not the future, this is an expectation. This is not a fact, this is a version. This is my nervous system trying to protect me in an old way.
Sometimes that is enough to not let anxiety take the wheel. Not always, of course. I do not want to pretend that this is simple. Anxiety does not live only in the head. It lives in the body, in the breathing, in the shoulders, in the stomach, in the way you tense up before a conversation, check the door, reread a message five times, and refuse opportunities because they feel too unpredictable.
So I cannot just tell myself, “Don’t be anxious.” It does not work. But I can start asking a different question.
Not, “What if everything goes wrong?” but, “How do I know that?” Not, “How can I avoid every risk?” but, “What is the real risk here, and what did I just invent?” Not, “How do I prepare for defeat?” but, “What if nothing terrible happens at all?”
Sometimes the most honest answer is exactly that: most likely, nothing will happen. I will leave the car, and it will still be there. I will walk into the forest, and it will just be a forest. I will say the word, and the other person may not even notice the pause.
Or maybe something really will go wrong. Maybe someone will answer coldly. Maybe the video will not do well. Maybe I will get stuck on a word. But even then, it will be something I can face, not the end of me.
I do not think the point is to become a person who is not afraid of anything. I do not have that goal, and honestly, it sounds unrealistic. I think I want to become a person who no longer treats every fear as a prophecy.
Because anxiety does not know the future. It knows old pain, old expectations, and old ways of protecting me. And reality is much wider than what anxiety can draw in the first few seconds.
Maybe life is not like an exam where you have to prepare in advance for every possible question. Maybe it is more like a walk through the forest. Sometimes it is dark. Sometimes it is strange. Sometimes you hear a sound and you do not know what it is.
But if you spend the whole walk waiting for danger, you will not see the forest itself. And maybe this is what anxiety takes from us most often. Not safety, but the ability to stay inside a moment before your mind gives it a bad ending.
The future has not happened yet. It does not have to be defeat. It does not have to be victory. Sometimes it will be something else entirely, something you cannot even imagine right now.
This, I think, is my small practice right now. Not to defeat anxiety. Not to become calm forever. Just to leave a small space between expectation and reality. Between the old fear and the present moment.
And maybe, in that small space, something like freedom appears.