Rebuilding Rob

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Anxiety vs Reality

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As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

What is something you were very worried about, but the situation ultimately never occurred?

I have had A LOT of situations in my life that I was worried about that ultimately never occurred. As a child growing up in the 80s, people called me a “worry wart”. Now, in 2025, I know that I have issues with anxiety; and I have been getting help for it for many years.

There is a great article called “the three voices of anxiety“ that probably does a better job of explaining this experience and I can do here. In fact, I wrote most of this post before even looking into the article. But I will try to do this experience justice…

But I think it’s human nature to build up things worse in our heads than they actually are in real life. This is not to say that this is the case all the time. But I feel like the really bad situations in life completely blindside me. I feel that the things I become worried about are never as bad as I build them up to be internally.

I’ve got one that I’m dealing with at this very moment. I won’t get into that right now, though, as I have to talk to my HR rep at  work about it in two days. But, needless to say, when I’m getting “called out to the floor“ my mind goes to the worst possible scenarios. What I imagine in my head is, more often than that, even worse than the reality of a situation. 

In a really weird way, I kind of like the fact that my mind builds things out to be much worse than they really are. It keeps me grounded. Let me see if I can explain this.

Whenever I have to speak in public, I found over the years that if I am too relaxed and too casual about it, those are the times that my speeches are presentations go horribly. The times that I am a little bit keyed-up about it are the times that I end up doing Very well. It’s as if I do better because I am worried going into it. It keeps me on my toes. The fear, the anxiety if you will, forces me to be sharper. It is exhausting, especially once everything is said and done, and I finally come down, but it does help me perform better.

There’s a quote that I carry with me from, of all things, the 1990s movie hard to kill. In it, detective Mason storm (Steven Segal) is making his way through the main antagonist’s goon squad, not unlike most action movies of the late 80s and early 1990s. Before he takes out one of the aforementioned goons , Mason carves a message onto a wall for him to read. It says: “the anticipation of death is worse than death itself“.

Now, that is a little bit morbid, and the stereotypical 90s macho bullshit kind of way. But that’s one of those expressions where you could substitute a lot of different words for “death”. I think it’s natural for us as humans to build things up in our head to be worse than what the actual reality is. How many of us I’ve ever done something wrong his children and said “my parents are going to kill me”? No, I don’t know that any of us believes that our parents are going to literally terminate us; unless you come from a horribly abusive family. But even as children, we have a tendency to build things up to be worse than what they really are.

I realize this is probably not a healthy mindset – letting my imagination run away with me. But I find it does prepare me better for dealing with some of the heavier situations of my life. Usually, when all the smoke is clear, I end up using the third voice of anxiety from the featured graphic on this post “judgment”. 

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The art of “Anxiety vs Reality” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob.

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