Overpreparing Is Making You Anxious

Overpreparing might be the most socially acceptable safety behavior there is. It doesn't always look like anxiety, it looks like being responsible! In this episode I unpack what overpreparing actually is, why our brains love it so much, and the mental and physical cost we pay for it. Then we talk about how to gradually let go of it without flipping your whole life upside down, and what life looks like on the other side. If you're tired of running the worst-case version of every situation in your head before it happens, this one is for you!!

SOURCES: 

- LaFreniere, L. S., & Newman, M. G. (2019). [Exposing Worry's Deceit: Percentage of Untrue Worries in Generalized Anxiety Disorder Treatment](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32044024/). *Behavior Therapy*.
- Companion episodes referenced: "Safety Behaviors," "Reassurance-Seeking," and "How To Practice Acceptance" — The 18 Minutes Podcast.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Hey, welcome back to the 18 Minutes Podcast. I'm Amanda, and this is the show where we take everything that is scary, confusing, and isolating about disordered anxiety, and we turn it into something you can actually work with. If you've ever spent a Sunday night running through every possible worst case scenario of Monday and called it getting ready for the week, this episode is for you. Today we're talking about over-preparing the most socially acceptable safety behavior and why it might be doing exactly the opposite of what you're going for. A couple of housekeeping things before we get into today's episode. May is mental health awareness month, which is maybe a little bit weird if you're someone who experiences disordered anxiety. Every month is mental health awareness month for us. Still, it can be a really good time to share some information with people in your life who maybe don't live with daily anxiety. And if you've been putting off prioritizing your own mental health and your recovery journey from disordered anxiety, this might just be the perfect kickstart for you. Also, the day this episode drops is National Moscato Day. I'll let you do what you want with that information. Quick reminder before we get into the episode: I am not a therapist or a medical professional. Everything I share on this podcast is based on my own experience with disordered anxiety, my journey through recovery, and the research that I do for the show. This is not a replacement for therapy or medical care. Please take only what's helpful to you, leave what isn't, and listen to your doctors and mental health professionals first. If you're new here, hi, I'm so glad you found us. Please hit follow or subscribe wherever you're listening because a new episode drops every Friday morning and I would hate for you to miss the next one. If you're a regular, you know the deal. Thank you for being here. Okay, today we are talking about one of the sneakiest forms of disordered anxiety because it doesn't always look like anxiety. It looks like being responsible. It looks like being on top of things. It looks like being the grown-up adult that you want to be. And if you live with it, it might be slowly exhausting you and making everything harder. This episode is called Overpreparing is Making You More Anxious. And we're going to talk about what over-preparing with disordered anxiety actually looks like, why we do it, why it backfires, and how to start letting go of it without flipping your whole life upside down. I want to start with examples because over-preparing might be one of those things you're doing without realizing that you're doing it. One version of over-preparing might look like you have a slightly difficult conversation coming up with someone you care about. You rehearse the conversation in your head 40 times. You've practiced your tone of voice, the pacing, your body language. You've rehearsed it in the shower while you're trying to fall asleep, while you're driving, while you're actively in conversations with other people. Now you're thinking of a plan to get out of the conversation altogether. In another scenario, you're taking a weekend trip and you've packed as if you're going to be gone for a month. You have a backup for your backup for your backup. You have medication in your main bag, you have medication in your backpack, you have medication in your purse, you have the medication in your partner's bag just in case. You packed a fan in case it gets too hot, you have wool socks in case it gets too cold. You packed your own puke bag, even though you haven't thrown up in years. Maybe you have a doctor's appointment coming up next week, and you've already written down 20 questions, you've already researched all your symptoms for hours and hours and hours instead of working, and you've predecided which answers from the doctor are going to allow you to relax and which answers are going to make sure you panic. Or you're in your car about to go into a place you've never been before, and you're scanning for the exits, the bathrooms, the closest parking spot, and figuring out a plan for how you would leave if you needed to. If any of this is relatable, then you're in the right place. This is overpreparing, and now we can call it what it actually is. The thing that makes over-preparing so hard to spot is that it looks like being responsible. If I told you that I was sitting on the couch checking my heart rate 40 times a day, you would clock that as anxiety pretty quickly. But if I told you that I was rehearsing a hard conversation in my head, you might think that I was being thoughtful or responsible, maybe even impressively so. And our culture kind of rewards this. We praise people who plan ahead and who look at things from every angle and who have every detail figured out and who anticipate problems before they happen. So when our anxiety presents itself that way, it tends to get a free pass. The internal logic feels solid. If I prepare, I'm in control. If I'm in control, nothing bad can blindside me. And if nothing can blindside me, I'm safe. Preparation feels like the responsible adult thing to do. And anytime we step away from it, our brain goes straight to are you really gonna walk into that situation without thinking it through? What if something bad happens that you could have prevented? Here's the thing I want you to hold on to for the rest of this episode. Real preparation has a stopping point. Anxious preparation does not. Real preparation looks like having the meeting prepped. You know the things you want to say, the slides are done, and you close the laptop. The mental work has a finish line. And after that, you do whatever you want to do with your evening. Anxious preparation does not have a finish line. The preparation work is done, but you're still mentally rehearsing. You're still imagining what could go wrong and how your body might feel hours and hours from now. You're visualizing yourself in the room. The work has crossed over from productive to compulsive, and your nervous system is being kept in low-level threat mode the whole time. If you can't stop preparing, then you're not preparing. You are practicing a safety behavior and it's keeping you stuck with your disordered anxiety. So let's talk about why this gets worse the more we do it. We covered this in the safety behaviors episode and the reassurance seeking episode. So if you haven't listened to those, put that on the list. Uh the mechanism here is the same, it just looks a little different. Here's what's happening in our brains. Every time we over-prepare for a situation and the situation goes okay, our brains have to make a decision about why that situation went okay. And when we have disordered anxiety, our brains almost every single time are going to decide that that over-preparation saved us from a disaster. Not that the disaster was unlikely to happen in the first place, and not that we would be fine if we hadn't done the over-preparing. Our brains link the positive outcome to the over-preparation. And the next time a similar situation comes up, the urge to over-prepare is going to be a little stronger. So you do it again and it goes okay again, and that loop tightens. There's another piece of this that I think is really significant. When you rehearse a situation or a scenario that you're afraid of, your nervous system has a really hard time distinguishing between that imagined scenario and actually living it. You're activating a lot of the same circuitry. So the more you play out the worst case scenario version of tomorrow, the more your body actually kind of lives through it in a way, even if it never actually happens. This is crazy to me. Every time we imagine a disastrous outcome, we're essentially having a small version of that disaster in our bodies. The cost of imagining the bad thing is real. It shows up in our sleep, in our energy, and in our presence in our actual real lives. I have to imagine this is partly why people with disordered anxiety are so exhausted all the time, even though on paper their lives might not be that hard. We've been living through a thousand scenarios that have never actually happened. Like, of course, we're tired. So now I want to do the math piece of this because I think there's some relief here. Our brains do this thing where they conflate this could happen with this probably will happen. Possibility and probability get smashed together. Once an outcome has crossed the threshold to imaginable, our brains believe that they have to now plan for it. But just because something could go wrong doesn't mean that it will. And the truth is, anxious brains are biased toward over-detecting threat and negative outcomes. We're not bad guessers in some random way. We're bad guessers in a specific direction, which is the the bad version is probably the real version direction. That's the wiring. There's a fascinating study that was done in 2019 at Penn State that I think every anxious person should hear about. They had people with generalized anxiety disorder write down their worries every day, and then they tracked for the coming weeks whether or not those worries came true. The result was that about 91% of those worries did not come true. And of the remaining worries that did happen, the participants reported that those situations were more manageable than they had expected. Let me say that part again. Statistically, nine in ten things that you worry about will not happen. And of the one in ten of those things that actually does happen, you'll likely handle it a lot better than the version of yourself you had imagined beforehand. So this is one study on a specific population, and I don't want to overclaim anything, but the broader pattern here is that our brains are biased toward negative outcomes, and we usually get it wrong. That part is supported by a much wider body of research. And if you're interested in more info about that, there's links in the show notes. So here's what overpreparing is actually doing: you're spending real time, real energy, real sleep, real presence in your relationships preparing for disasters that will almost definitely never happen. And worse, the small percentage that actually do happen are probably not the ones you prepared for. Anxiety, in my experience, has very little to do with what actually shows up in our real lives. So the trade is not exhausting preparation for safety. The trade is exhausting preparation for the illusion of safety and exhausting and depleting your energy and your time and your presence. When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense why a certain podcaster is always telling you that you need to prioritize recovery from disordered anxiety because it's affecting every aspect of your life. Let's think about something together. The next time the urge to over-prepare shows up, ask yourself, what would happen if I didn't over-prepare for this? And move beyond something bad might happen. Walk it all the way through. Best case, you didn't prepare, but the thing went fine, and you get back the hours you would have spent planning. You use that time to be present with your kids or to read or to sleep, and the day was not worse for lack of preparation. Realistic case, which is also the most common, you didn't prepare in a catastrophic way. You did the useful version of preparation that has a stopping point, and the thing went mostly fine. There was a moment that was a little hard, you handled it in real time, like you always handle things in real time, and life went on. Worst case, you didn't anxiously prepare and something hard happened, and you didn't handle it as gracefully as you had hoped you would. In my experience, the version of you that you imagine handling situations is not the most graceful version. You just think she is. The pre-rehearsed version is rigid and can't read the room because there's no room to read yet. The unprepared version of you has context and is present. All three of these outcomes are survivable, and the first two are by far the most likely. Compare that to the cost of the alternative, which is spending hours of your life every day in the worst case scenario mentally for situations that will almost definitely never happen. When you stack those side by side, it gets pretty clear that this is worth the work. Okay, so you're with me, you're seeing the pattern, and you want to stop doing it. The answer is gradual, and not because gradual is easy or because that's the answer that's not going to scare you away. But because these patterns run deep and rooting them out one by one, in my experience, is the most effective. Here's how I would think about it: start by just noticing. For a few days, don't even try to change anything. Just note when that over-preparing urge kicks in. It could be the Sunday night spiraling, the uh bagpacking that takes way too many hours, the rehearsing, a hard conversation in your head. Just notice it instead of trying to fix it. Awareness is the first move, and you cannot drop a behavior if you can't see it. Then pick the smallest one, the lowest stakes one. You don't need to start with your biggest stuff. You start with something tiny. Maybe you always pre-Google the menu and reviews of a restaurant before you show up so that you can be prepared. That's a great example of a starter. Then the next time you would have done that, don't do it. Walk into the restaurant without having pre-decided what you're going to order and knowing what everything looks like in there. Notice what that feels like in your body and allow yourself to feel it. Even that rush of anxiety when the food is unfamiliar to you, or it's louder in there than you thought it was going to be, or you're feeling socially awkward because you're taking too long because you don't know what you want to eat and your mind is spinning and you don't know what to do. I'll tell you what's going to happen. You're going to feel uncomfortable. That discomfort is going to have a peak and it will pass, and you'll have ordered your food and had conversations, and the restaurant experience will have gone fine. And your brain will just have gotten a small piece of evidence that you can handle a little uncertainty without all of that mental over preparation, and life moves on. Those small pieces of evidence is what we're building. After maybe a couple weeks of starter level practice, you build up. Pack one fewer just-in-case items on your next trip. Um ask your doctor 10 questions instead of 20. Allow yourself one fewer rehearsals before that hard conversation. You're not going from anxious prepare to no preparation overnight. You're recalibrating what reasonable preparation looks like in real life. And a note that I don't want to shy away from the discomfort is the point. Not in a punishing way. This is the gym for your anxious brain. The discomfort of not preparing is when your brain learns that it doesn't actually need to. If you only practice when it's comfortable, you're not actually rewiring anything. Let the discomfort be there and be present in your life anyway. If this is your sticking point right now, we talked all about this in the episode called How to Practice Acceptance. So if you haven't listened to that one, go check it out. As you start letting go of over-preparing, you might notice yourself doing some weird new things. You might start reassurance seeking and asking other people how they think the meeting's gonna go. You might Google the weather 17 times. You might notice the anxiety showing up more in your body. Anxiety, unfortunately, likes to redistribute itself. So if you notice the urge to participate in a safety behavior moves from one behavior to another, you're on the right track. Practice acceptance in whatever its new form is as well. And I want to spend a minute on the freedom side of this because I don't talk about that enough. What does life actually look like when you're not over-preparing for everything? You wake up on Monday morning and you don't have a 45-minute rehearsal of the day ahead before you can drink your coffee. You drink your coffee and you enjoy it and you think about how fun the weekend was and how you can't wait to hang out with those people again. You pack a bag for a three-day trip in 20 minutes, and you have three outfits and a toothbrush and your favorite book. The bag is small enough that you can just sling it over your shoulder. You walk out the door, you enjoy the car ride, the conversation, getting to the Airbnb, and everyone's there. And you're not thinking about what items you might have forgotten that help you not feel anxious because you're not thinking about that now. You have a hard conversation and you walk into it without a script. You actually hear what the other person is saying because you're not thinking about your prepared responses while the other person is talking to you. You say something that you did not pre-plan, and it lands way better because it's actually responsive to the moment. The other person feels heard because you were there and showed up 100%. You have an unstructured and spontaneous Saturday. You don't fill it with contingencies of all the things that could go wrong, and you don't wonder how you're gonna feel in any of the situations that come up. You're curious, you're excited, and you have fun. And you have energy at the end of the day because you haven't lived through 12 worst case scenarios in your nervous system. And you sleep because your brain is not running through the next day at midnight, and you realize slowly that you've always been someone who can handle difficult things in real time. You didn't need the reassurance or the essential oils or the ice packs or the sour candy or the over-preparing. You just needed to trust yourself, and that's something you build by repeatedly walking into uncertainty and discovering again and again that you can. That is what fear to freedom looks like in this particular element of disordered anxiety. It's slow, it's a little messy, sometimes really messy. It's usually not fireworks and excitement and celebration. It's just this gradual reclaiming of energy that over-preparing has been stealing from you the whole time. So, key takeaways from our chat today. One, real preparation has a stopping point. Anxious preparation does not. If you can't stop, you're not preparing. Two, the math is not on over-preparing's side. Most of what you fear will not happen. And the small percentage that does is probably not the thing you prepared for. And three, start small. Pick the lowest stakes over-preparing behavior you have and try dropping it. See what happens. The discomfort is the work. And that's all for today. If you want to go deeper on the tools we talked about today, go listen to the episodes on acceptance, uh, safety behaviors, and reassurance seeking. They're all in the same family of work and they layer really nicely together. If you have questions or there's a topic you want me to do an episode on, send me an email at amandathe18minutes.com or DM me on Instagram or TikTok at the 18 Minutes. I read everything, and a lot of these episodes get shaped by what you tell me you're working on. If you haven't yet, grab the free recovery guide at my website, uh the 18minutes.com. It walks through some of the tools we talked about here today, and there's a section on acceptance that pairs really well with this episode. It's totally free, you just need to grab it. And if today's episode helped you in any way, please follow or subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. And if you have a second, please consider leaving a review. They're super helpful in other anxious people finding this resource. Thank you so much for being here, and we'll see you next time.