Why Do I Dread Things Before They Even Happen?
Why Do I Dread Things Before They Even Happen?
I once had to handle a difficult tenant situation. I needed them to move out, but it had to be done carefully, worded right, planned right, or it could turn into legal action, upset other tenants, or damage the office suite itself.
For a full month, while I planned exactly what I’d say, I felt dread. Not nerves I could shake off. I slept horribly most of that month, waking up already thinking about it before I was even fully awake, and it got worse the closer the meeting got.
The meeting itself went fine. I felt great walking out of it.
Dread Is Real, and It’s Not Just in Your Head
There’s real research behind that month I spent feeling terrible before anything had even gone wrong. Psychologists call this everyday version anticipatory anxiety, the discomfort of waiting for something before it happens. Neuroscientist Gregory Berns and his team at Emory found that waiting for something unpleasant activates some of the same brain regions involved in actually experiencing pain (Berns et al., “Neurobiological Substrates of Dread,” Science, 2006). The waiting itself registers as real. In that study, a third of participants disliked the wait so much they chose to get a worse outcome immediately rather than endure a longer wait for something milder.
Other research on the brain’s threat-detection pathway (Öhman, “The Role of the Amygdala in Human Fear: Automatic Detection of Threat,” Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2005) has found it operates automatically, able to respond to danger before you’re even consciously aware of it. It’s built for speed, not accuracy, a better-safe-than-sorry system that fires first and lets the rest of your thinking catch up after.
Everyday dread like this is normal and usually passes once the event does. If dread or worry shows up often, feels constant, or interferes with daily life even without a specific event attached to it, that’s worth talking to a doctor or therapist about, since it may be more than the everyday version this post is describing.
Your Safety System Already Knows How to Dread
Here’s what that means for the month I spent planning that conversation. I didn’t choose to dread it. I didn’t rehearse the worst case on purpose. My safety system did that automatically, without asking permission, because scanning for danger and staying focused on it is exactly what it’s built to do. That’s likely why the dread was already waiting for me most mornings before I was even fully awake, an automatic system doesn’t need you conscious to keep running.
Hope doesn’t get the same free ride. There’s no automatic system quietly generating vivid, hopeful previews of a conversation going well while you go about your day. Dread runs in the background on its own. Hope has to be built, on purpose, one preview at a time.
What Changed the Second Time
A few months ago, I had a similar tenant situation. This time, every day for the month leading up to it, I used BEHAVE (the six-step nightly protocol from my book) before bed and again right after waking up, anticipation and visualization together, to picture the conversation going well, and I attached real positive emotion to that picture, on purpose, twice a day.
I never felt the dread. Not once. And the conversation unfolded almost exactly the way I’d been picturing it.
The Trailer Playing Without Your Permission
Your safety system already has a trailer running for worst-case outcomes, and it doesn’t need you to press play. It queues that one up on its own.
The hopeful version doesn’t queue itself. That one only plays if you’re the one who puts it there, on purpose, day after day, until it’s the trailer running instead of the other one.
Sunday Night Dread
You don’t need a tenant situation to feel this. Almost everyone knows the specific dread that shows up Sunday evening, sometimes called the Sunday scaries, that heavy feeling settling in while the weekend is technically still happening.
It’s the same mechanism at a smaller scale. Monday hasn’t happened yet, nothing has actually gone wrong, but your safety system is already running the worst-case trailer for the week ahead, and it does that automatically, the same way it did for a month before my tenant conversation. The only difference is the trigger is a day of the week instead of a specific hard conversation.
I’ve written elsewhere in this series about why Mondays themselves tend to feel long once they arrive. Sunday dread is the preview of that feeling, running before the day even starts, and it responds to the same fix. Lead it on purpose, even briefly, a specific, positive picture of one part of Monday, and there’s less room left for the automatic version to run the show uncontested.
Take the Lead Challenge
Next time you catch yourself dreading something weeks out, don’t just try to stop thinking about it. Replace it. Picture the version where it goes well, specifically, and attach a real feeling to it. Do it before bed and again when you wake up, until that’s the trailer playing instead.
F. Allen Scott is the author of From Safety to Success, where he explores the safety system framework behind why we stay stuck, and how to finally change that.
Related reading: Why Do I Feel Let Down After Something I Looked Forward To?