Anxiety is a master storyteller. It knows exactly how to build a plot around everything that could go wrong. It makes rehearsing disaster feel like safety—as if imagining the worst will somehow protect us from it. If we’re going to spend that much time worrying about the worst-case scenario, it’s only fair we spend time considering the best one too. We call it being realistic, responsible, prepared. But the truth is, anxiety rarely prepares us, it exhausts us. It convinces us that fear equals co