72 | Why Your Brain Always Assumes the Worst

• Why does your brain jump to the worst case?
• Why do small things feel so big?
• What if your thoughts are not the real problem?

In this episode, Jessica Davis breaks down why catastrophic thinking keeps coming back, even when you journal, use positive self-talk, or tell yourself to stop spiraling. The problem is not that you are too negative or irrational. It is that your brain is acting like a fire alarm, trying to protect you from danger, even when the threat is not actually an emergency.

Jessica explains how catastrophic thinking is often driven by an overactive alarm system, perfectionism, negativity bias, high-alert mode, and the relief trap. You’ll learn why reassurance, overpreparing, researching, and avoiding may calm anxiety for a moment, but keep the loop going over time. This episode will help you understand what is happening underneath the spiral and how to start turning down the alarm.

What You’ll Learn in this Episode:

• Why catastrophic thinking feels so hard to stop
• How your brain acts like a fire alarm
• Why perfectionism can become emotional armor
• How negativity bias keeps worst-case thoughts loud
• Why reassurance and overpreparing feed the relief trap
• How to remind yourself of the whole truth, not just the worst moment

RESOURCES:
Get your FREE Anxiety Survival Toolkit to help you when your anxiety is overwhelming!

JOIN our NEWSLETTER! Get weekly emails about upcoming podcasts, but also how to fight against anxiety!

📱 Follow Us:

Instagram | Facebook | Threads 

🎙️ Presented by Davis-Smith Mental Health

This podcast was created by Davis-Smith Mental Health, offering counseling for teens & young adults in Illinois (only). We accept BCBS PPO, Aetna PPO, and self-pay clients.

Links: 
Anxiety Survival Toolkit:
https://www.blockoutthenoisepodcast.com/anxiety-survival-toolkit/

Newsletter:
https://blockoutthenoisepodcast.substack.com/welcome

Davis-Smith Mental Health:
https://www.davis-smithmentalhealth.com/

1:1 Confidence Coaching:
https://tidycal.com/blockoutthenoise/confidence-coaching

⚠️ Disclaimer:  Block Out the Noise provides personal insights and practical stra...

Transcript

The Late Night Overthinking Spiral

Jessica N. Davis, LCPC 0:07

You already know your brain does this. The spiral that starts from nothing, the 2 a.m. replay of conversations that ended three days ago. The way your mind can take one unanswered text and build an entire case for why someone is pulling away for you. You've Googled it, you've journaled about it, you've told yourself to stop, probably a hundred times. Here's the thing nobody tells you. The reason it keeps coming back has nothing to do with your thoughts. Every advice you've been given about catastrophic thinking is aimed at the wrong target. Once I show you what's actually driving the loop, the thing underneath the thought, you're going to understand why nothing is stuck and what to do instead.

Welcome to Block Out the Noise

Speaker 0:52

Hi, and welcome to Block of the Noise, the space to quiet the noise of anxiety, self-doubt, and overthinking. I'm Jessica Davis, licensed therapist, mindset coach, and the creator of the Courage Method, a framework designed to stop letting fear define your identity and decisions. If you want extra support while you're listening, go download the anxiety survival toolkit in the show notes. It includes coping skills, audio tools, a full breakdown of the courage method, and a guided meditation, all completely free. Also, quick reminder: this podcast is here to support and guide you, but it is not a replacement for talking to someone in real life. If you're struggling with your mental health, please reach out to a therapist. And if you're in crisis, contact emergency services for a local health line. You don't have to go

The Cost Of Catastrophic Thinking

Speaker 1:35

through this alone. Here's what's making it so exhausting to live with your catastrophic thinking. It's not just the nighttime spirals. It shows up before a presentation you've given a hundred times. It shows up when a friend takes too long to reply and your brain starts building a case. It even shows up on the good days when things are genuinely fine, and your brain decides that's the exact time to start looking for what might go wrong. People describe it in almost identical language, no matter where they're from. I catastrophized everything and it's driving me nuts. If that sentence landed a little succor home, this message is for you. Most people spend years trying to think their way out of this, journaling, positive affirmations, telling themselves to be rational. It doesn't work. Not because they're not trying hard enough. Here's what it actually costs you if this days on autopilot. It's not going to feel dramatic. It's going to be quiet. The text you rewrite six times and never send because you've already decided how it goes wrong. The friends you don't text back first because you're sure they're a math. So you wait and they don't text either. So now you're even more convinced that they don't like you. The dinner where you're sitting right there with people you love and your brain has already left the table. That's the cost of doing nothing about this. Not a crisis, just less of your own life, one moment at a time. All of that comes down to one thing, one pattern, one mechanism that shows up in almost every person I work with who struggles with this. It has nothing to do with what you think is causing this bridal. Once I show you what's actually driving the worst case loop, two things are going to happen. The way you've been managing this is going to make complete sense. And so will why it hasn't worked

Your Brain's Fire Alarm

Speaker 3:14

yet. So what is actually driving it? Here's what most people believe about catastrophic thinking: that it's a pessimism problem. That if you could just be more positive, more rational, more grateful, the worst case scenarios would stop showing up. That's not wrong, but it is incomplete. Your brain isn't making up worst case scenarios just because something's wrong with it. It's doing its job, the job it has done since the beginning of time, keeping you alive. So it's actually scanning, scanning your surroundings, your relationships, your future, looking for anything that could hurt you. When it finds something or even just thinks it might, it sounds the alarm loudly, over and over. Think of it like a fire alarm that goes off every time you make toast. The alarm isn't necessarily broken, right? It's doing exactly what it was built to do. It just can't tell the difference between burnt bread and an actual fire. So it treats both like emergencies. Your brain is that alarm. It can't tell the difference between a real threat and an unanswered text from someone you care about, between an actual emergency and your boss pausing too long before replying, or a look on a family member's face that you can't quite read. So instead of hearing what someone actually said, you start reading their expression for something that isn't there. Same alarm every time. This is probably where journaling and positive self-talk come in for you and where they stop working, telling it it's just toast. Doesn't turn it off. Don't ask me why I did that voice, but it just made sense. What's actually works is turning down the sensitivity on the alarm itself. Yelling at the noise won't make it stop. Turning down the alarm will. Mel Robbins built a whole approach to this around six words. What if it all works out? Not because you know it will, because your brain has spent so much time rehearsing the worst case. It never once considered that one. That's what we're doing today. And here's what it actually looks like when it

When Perfectionism Becomes Armor

Speaker 5:13

works. I want to introduce you to someone I'll call Caleb. He's not one person, he's a combination of clients I've worked with over the years, mostly high achievers and perfectionists who all hit the same wall. Caleb is 22, the person in the friend group who always has a plan, always has an answer, always seems like he has it together. He's composed, reliable, the one people come to when things go sideways. Underneath that, though, Caleb hasn't had a full night's sleep in four months. Every time he sends an important email and he spends the next two hours replaying it, looking for the sentence that might have landed wrong. Every time his boss doesn't get back to him in a reasonable amount of time, his brain has already built the whole story. He's about to get fired, he's about to lose everything he's worked for. Every time that spiral starts, Caleb does what works. He overprepares, he researches everything twice. For about an hour, the anxiety quiets, except the bar keeps moving. The relief never lasts. Renee Brown has a line I think about with clients like Caleb. Perfectionism is a defense move. The belief that if we do things perfectly and look perfect, we can avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame. Caleb's overpreparing isn't him being extra responsible. It's armor. He isn't catastrophizing because he's weak or irrational. He's running a coping strategy. His nervous system learned a long time ago. If I can just get ahead of every possible threat, I'll be safe. It used to work all the time, but now it's like a prison. Here's the part that keeps him in it. Somewhere along the way, the alarm starting to feel like it's part of who he is. If it stopped going off, some part of him is scared of what it would mean. Will he get lazy? Will he stop being motivated? Will he turn into someone he doesn't recognize? I've seen that exact fear in almost every high achiever I've worked with, and it's backwards. Take the constant alarm away, and people don't fall apart. They think more clearly, they prioritize better. They stop running themselves into the ground. They get more motivated, not less. It's just hard to believe that when the alarm is the only operating system your brain has really ever known.

Three Locks That Keep You Stuck

Speaker 7:28

That prison isn't random. There are three things keeping the door locked. Notice which one hits closest to home for you. The first is the negativity bias. Your brain pays way more attention to negative information than positive information. That's just how brains come built. Think about the news. Turn on any news channel and watch how much airtime the bad stories get compared to the good ones. That's not accidental. Scary stories keep you watching. Your brain works the same way. Ten people could say something kind about you. Your brain lands on the one comment instead. That's your brain doing what it thinks is its job, watching for danger first. It just hasn't learned yet how to tell a real danger from a small thing that isn't actually a big deal. For some of you, there's a second thing layered on top of the first one, the high alert note. The alarm system gets turned up louder than it needs to be. Here's how that happens. If you grew up somewhere unpredictable, maybe you had to stay on alert to avoid conflict or things going wrong caught you off guard a lot. Your brain learned to stay on high alert all the time. That's your brain trying to protect you the best way it knows how. But the problem is your brain doesn't automatically turn the volume back down when your life got safer. It keeps running that same level, even when there's nothing to be afraid of anymore. I see this all the time in my practice. Someone's life is genuinely better than it used to be. And their anxiety hasn't caught up yet. Their body just hasn't gotten the message that it's safe now. So it keeps sounding the alarm out of the habit. This doesn't mean you're broken. It means the volume got turned up a long time ago for a good reason, and nobody ever showed how to turn it back down until now. There's a third thing. This is the reason the first two keep winning. The relief trap. Remember, Caleb? Of course you do. The over-preparing, the researching everything twice. That's the relief trap. Every time you respond to a catastrophic thought by seeking reassurance, over-preparing, or avoiding the trigger, you get short-term relief. The relief teaches your brain the one thing: the threat was real and the strategy works. So next time the brain escalates faster and demands the relief strategy sooner. Best-selling novelist Jody Picotte put it well. Anxiety is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you very far. Relief traffic is the upgraded version of the rocking chair. You research harder, you prepare more, and you rock faster. You're still in the same

Breaking the Relief Trap

Speaker 9:58

spot. The shift, and this one is the one that changes everything, is learn to sit with the discomfort of not running the relief strategy. Not because the anxiety isn't real, but because tolerating it, even briefly, teaches your nervous system the threat is survivable. You don't have to eliminate the worst case scenario thought. You have to stop treating it like an emergency that requires an immediate response. This is how the volume starts to turn down. I want to tell you how I know that's

My 2 A.M. Reframe

Speaker 10:26

true. Not from a textbook, but from my own life. There's a specific situation in my own life where I felt like I had done something wrong. I still think I did something wrong. The worry took that one real thing and built a worst-case scenario out of it. Not just the mistake itself, everything that could unravel from it. I was up at 2, 3 in the morning running through how bad it could get. Certain it was about to get worse. It didn't get worse, though. It rarely ever does. Not the way the 2 a.m. version of it plays out anyway. What actually brought me down that night wasn't arguing with the alarm. It was going back to who I am. Not my biggest mistake, but the whole picture. I tried my best. I made a genuine mistake I couldn't undo. But it doesn't change the fact that I'm someone who's trying to be a good person, not a perfect person, not someone who never messes up, just someone working on herself every single day, trying to live a life that I can be proud of. My Aunt Willow said something close to this once, describing how she made peace with her own past. You did what you knew how to do. And when you knew better, you did better. And her, she says, when you know better, you do better. But I kind of like it that way anyway. Not that the mistake didn't happen, just that it doesn't get to be the whole story. That's what actually turned the volume down. Not fighting the alarm, remembering the whole picture of who I am, not just the worst five minutes of it. Think about it this way: the news amplifies the worst things that happened today and plays it out on the loop. We need to do the opposite. Amplify the truth of who you are the same way your brain amplifies the worst case scenario. Most of the time, it's not even close to the same size. Now, I know that some of you are thinking, this sounds right, but my anxiety is different. It's been this way my whole entire life. And I hear that. When something's been part of your experience for years, it genuinely feels like it's just who you are. That turned alarm system is something you learned, even if you don't remember learning it. You can't just erase that, but you can learn something new on top of it. Something that changes how loud it runs. Not overnight, not perfectly, but it can change. Some of you are thinking, I don't have the energy for a whole framework right now. You don't need all of that either. You don't need to fix all three of those things today. Understanding, though, is what gives you an opportunity to change things. You don't have to solve the negativity bias, rewire high alert mode, and dismantle the relief trap by tonight. That was never

A Simple Practice For Proof

Speaker 12:58

the assignment. The assignment is to remind yourself of who you are. Think of the good things that you've done. And if you're struggling doing that, start to write down on a piece of paper or somewhere where you can visually see the good things. It could be small then, such as putting up the groceries, cleaning up something in the house. It could be taking your pets out for a walk. All of those things show a good sign of who you are. And then you can build from there to maybe, hey, I took on a project that I didn't have to take on at work, or I helped someone where it would really put me out by doing so, but I still decided to help my neighbor or my friend in that situation. Picture the next time the spiral starts. Instead of reaching for your phone to research every possible outcome or replane the conversation for the 10th time, use the tool that we just went over. Maybe it takes once, maybe it takes 50 times before it sinks in to remind yourself over and over about who you are. That's genuinely where it starts. Not a new morning routine, not a total personality overhaul, and not a one-time fix either. A tool you use every single time that alarm goes off for as long as it takes. Here's what I want you to actually remember: most of the time, the worst case scenario never happens. Not close. If you've recognized yourself anywhere in this replay loop and the shame that runs underneath anxiety, and the thought that said, this probably won't work for me either. I want you to hear this. You are not alone in it. The fact that you're still trying to understand what's happening inside you, still listening to this podcast about your own mental health, that's not weakness. That's one of the more courageous things a person can do. You don't have to have this all figured out. You just have to be willing to see it differently. You already did that by listening

Share The Show And Leave Review

Speaker 14:43

this far. If this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you haven't yet, please leave a review. I would love it if you took two minutes to do that. It helps more teens and young adults find this show. Thank you so much for being here. I truly appreciate everyone who has listened to this podcast. It means the world to me. Until next time, keep moving forward. Trust yourself and never forget, you have what it takes to block out the noise.