You're Already Living Worst Case Scenario EP 134

I want you to think about the last time you were in the middle of a jealous spiral. Your partner hasn't text back or they mention someone's name you don't recognize, or they came home a little later than expected and your brain just went there. Now you're in it. The spiral, the imagining, the constructing of the scenario that gets more detailed and more devastating the longer it goes.

You're picturing things you don't wanna picture. You're writing a story you don't wanna write, and you can't stop, and it feels absolutely terrible. What if I told you that what you are experiencing right now in that spiral, in that imagining is actually the worst part? What if the thing you are most afraid of happening would actually hurt less?

Then what you're putting yourself through in your own head. I know it seems hard to believe, but there's real research behind it, and today we're gonna dig into all of it. Welcome to Top South, the podcast for people who are jealous and insecure in their relationship. I'm Shanenn Bryant, and today's episode is about genuinely understanding why vague, unnamed fear is the most painful and destructive form of suffering and what to do about it.

Let me paint a picture for you, and this isn't a pretty picture, okay, so don't spiral with me, but tell me if this sounds familiar. It's 10 30 at night; your partner is out. They said they'd be home at nine. You've text twice, nothing. Your brain has now had 90 minutes to work with that information, and in those 90 minutes you have imagined at least a dozen scenarios.

You are imagining conversations they're having. You're imagining who they're with. You're imagining what it would feel like to find out the thing you're most afraid of is actually true. Here's what I want you to notice. None of that has happened, not one bit of it. Your partner is probably stuck in traffic or their phone died, or they got caught up in conversation and they couldn't hear.

It's too loud to hear. The most boring, innocent explanation is statistically the most likely one, but you're not in a boring, innocent explanation. You're in the story. The story feels completely real. Your chest is tight, your stomach hurts. You might be crying. You're definitely not okay. And all of this is happening in response to nothing.

A delayed text. An empty driveway. I remember, um, you know, my husband saying to me at one point, like, what do you think happens in the world? Like, when I leave this house, do you think that I walk out into some X-rated fantasy land that's going on? And you know, it, we were kind of chuckling about it, but I kind of did like, yeah, I kind of.

That's what I imagine when I'm in the spiral. That's what I think. I think every woman at the bar wants to talk to you. I think every chick at the grocery store is hot on your trail. We think that way. We think in one these very absolutes, but in this whole like full on alternate world that isn't really that way.

But that suffering that you're experiencing in that spiral, that is the worst case, not the thing that you're afraid might happen. The thing that is happening right now in your body, in your nervous system, in your relationship, that is the damage. That is the worst thing. You're not waiting for the bad thing to happen.

You are already in it. Once you really understand what the spiral is actually costing you, it changes the whole thing. It changes the whole equation. The question stops being how do I make sure the bad thing doesn't happen? And it becomes more of how do I get out of the bad thing? I'm already in the spiral, the imagination, the story.

I wanna walk you through some research here. So, there is a Harvard psychologist named Daniel Gilbert. He has spent decades studying how people predict their own emotional futures, how we think we're going to feel if something good happens, how we think we're going to feel if something bad happens. And his big finding and this like write this down.

His big finding is that we are consistently, dramatically wrong about both, and he calls it the impact bias. So, here's what means. We overestimate how good the good things will make us feel, and we overestimate how bad the bad things will make us feel. I find this so interesting because it is true on both sides the overestimating of how good the good things make us feel.

So, every year, my husband and I, we have, um, well, most years we have a 4th of July party and then we have a Christmas party, or you know, Christmas get together. And for both those, you know, mine is more the Christmas and his is the 4th of July party and. We both have these images of how we expect for it to go.

I, oh, I want the table to look like this, and this is how I want people to feel when they come in and this is what I wanna have happen. And I have this big like cocoa and fireplace and all that stuff. And usually, it's just like chaos and things don't go at all the way that I planned. Same thing with 4th of July party.

My husband, I mean he, we have at our house. It's very similar to like a small town's firework show. It's a pretty big deal and we invite quite a bit of people and, um, my hu like it's to music and the whole thing. And every single year my husband will be like, oh, did that land? Like, did that, you know, did it do that at that time that I wanted.

And you know, I've gotten used to being like, yes, it was like perfect. Um, even if it isn't exactly perfect, but it is still perfect. Everyone enjoyed it. Nobody knows that that's how it's supposed to go, but we definitely overestimate how good. We are going to feel about it when we're picturing it, when we're thinking about it in our heads.

The same thing happens on the other end. We overestimate how bad the bad things will make us feel, and we overestimate how long both of those feelings will last. So, when you're lying awake, imagining that your partner's cheating on you and picturing how completely destroyed you would be. You are almost certainly overestimating the actual damage, not because it wouldn't hurt.

It would hurt, of course, but human beings are far more resilient than we give ourselves credit for, and we consistently fail to account for that resilience when we're making predictions about our own emotional future. It's also what keeps us in relationships so long, like, oh my, it's gonna be horrible.

Usually, it's never as bad as what we think. Gilbert's research also looked at something called psychological immune system. This is our built-in human capacity to cope, adapt, reframe, and recover from hard things. And the finding is this, the psychological immune system only activates in response to real events.

So, a little bit different than our nervous system, right? We know our nervous system can kick off real or imagined events, which is what gets us into this spiral, which is what gets us here in the first place. But for this, it only activates in response to real events. It does not activate for imagined ones.

So, when something actually happens to you, a real loss, a real rejection, a real betrayal, your coping system kicks on. You call your best friend, you cry it out, you get angry. You make sense of it. You slowly and imperfectly start to process it and move through it, and your brain has something real to work with, and it starts doing the work.

When you're in a spiral, when the fear is vague and it's unresolved and you're just like turning it over and over in your mind, your psychological immune system has nothing to like grab onto. There's no real event to process. There's no concrete thing to adapt to, so it just doesn't activate and you stay in it.

Spinning with like no off ramp and we just keep re-injuring ourselves, re-traumatizing ourselves with the story. And this is why vague fear is the most painful kind, not because the imagined scenario is necessarily worse than the real one, but because the imagined scenario like gives you nowhere to go. It gives you all of the pain, but none of the tools that your brain would normally use to deal with pain.

There's also research specifically on anticipatory anxiety, which is like a fancy term for fear of something that hasn't happened yet. And studies consistently show that the period of waiting and anticipating a painful event activates your stress response as strongly and sometimes more strongly than the event itself.

I remember taking my son to get, um, his, like a wisdom tooth pulled and oh my gosh, the lead up to it from the time he found out to. Walking outta the dentist's office, or actually even having it done, even the process of it, that timeframe was so much worse, so much more stressful than the actual event itself.

So instead of, oh, I'm stressed as this is happening, a 45 minutes maybe, that it took total. Versus the whole week and a half or two weeks leading up to it where he was just miserable. Like, like fear and stories and how it's gonna go and you know, imagining pulling, ripping the tooth out. And I mean, the whole thing was horrible.

And I can certainly remember many instances, I'm sure if you look even outside of jealousy, there are many instances where you're like, yeah, the lead up to it was so much worse. Your body is responding to the threat the same way it would respond to something real, that elevated heart rate. Your cortisol flooding your system, your muscles are tense.

Your nervous system like lit up, fire that alarm except there's no fire. Like, wait a second. Unlike actual stress, which usually has a beginning, a middle, and then an end. Anticipatory anxiety can run indefinitely. If you could continue to make up stories because there's nothing to resolve it. The threat doesn't ever go away.

It just keeps looping. So, what's really happening when you're je, when you're in that jealous spiral, your body is experiencing the stress of a real event. Your nervous system doesn't know the difference between something that's happening and something that you're vividly imagining. It just responds to the signal.

That signal that it's sending is danger, and you stay in that stress response sometimes for hours and days and weeks without any relief that would come from an actual resolution. The real cost is a physical cost, an emotional cost, a relationship cost maybe, and none of it requires the thing that you're afraid of to actually happen.

You are already living the worst-case scenario. Every time you spiral, you are already there. So, let's talk about why the vague fear is so much harder to deal with than the named specific fear. And this might be one of the most useful things that I can give you today. So, think about the difference between these two experiences.

Okay? Experience one. You feel a creeping, unspecified dread, like something is just wrong, something's off. You don't know exactly what your partner seems a little off. They've been on their phone a lot. You know, a lot more than usual. You don't have anything concrete, but it's just the feeling and that feeling is just there.

It's hanging over everything. You can't confront it because there's nothing specific to confront. You can't examine it because it doesn't have edges, like there's nothing. It's just this heavy cloud of bad. Now, experience two. You have a specific thought. I'm afraid my partner is attracted to their coworker.

That's it. That's the fear. It has a shape now. It has words. It is a thing you can actually look at. So, which one of those is easier to work with? The second one every time. And there's neuroscience behind why. So, there's a researcher at UCLA named Matthew Lieberman, I believe, and he ran a series of studies where to like put people's, uh, people in brain scanners and showed images of faces expressing strong emotion like fear and anger distress.

And then he looked at what was happening in the brain when those people were asked to put a label on what they were seeing. Just name the emotion right. The person would be like, this person looks scared, this person looks angry. What he found was that the simple act of labeling, like of putting words to an emotional experience, reduced activity in the amygdala, which is the part of your brain that sounds, that alarm.

And it increased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Remember that is your like logical part of your brain, the part of your brain responsible for reasoning and perspective taking and making deliberate choices. So, naming the feeling literally shifts brain activity from reactive to regulated. Dan Siegel, a clinical professor at UCLA.

He coined the phrase, name it or tame it based on this research. And it's not just acute saying; it describes a real neurological process. When you put language to what you're afraid of, you are actually changing what's happening in your brain. So, here's why it matters so much for jealousy and insecurity.

Specifically, the nature of jealousy is that it. Tends to stay vague. It feeds on ambiguity, it thrives in fog and like not knowing, because in the fog it can be anything. It can grow; it can become whatever your worst moment believes it to be. When you name it, when you pull it out of the fog and say, this is exactly what I am afraid of, you do a few things at once.

First, you make it specific and specific fears can be examined. They can be useful. They can be tested against evidence; they can be challenged. A fear that lives in fog and just lives in your head can't be challenged because there's no. Surface to it, there's nothing to it. And second, you give your brain a task.

So instead of just sounding the alarm, and definitely your brain now has something to do with that information, it can evaluate it. Is there actual evidence for this? What are the other explanations? Remember, power of one ONE, open to new explanations and evidence and examination. How likely is this really your thinking Brain comes online and can help you work through it.

And then the third thing, and this one's maybe a bit more subtle, but it's important you separate yourself from the fear. So, when the fear is vague and sort of formless and just everywhere it is you like, you don't have the fear. Are afraid when you name it, you can create a little bit of distance. You are a person who has this specific fear, which means you are not the fear itself, and that distance, even if it's small, gives you room to move.

It gives you room to think. Not naming the fear doesn't resolve it, but it does move it from like a, a unprocessable background dread to something specific that I'm aware of and I can work with. It starts to close the loop, so I want you to try something. Think about the fear that drives most of your jealousy spirals.

Not a general, like I'm afraid of losing them. Get really specific. What exactly are you afraid of happening? What exactly are you thinking or feeling? What exactly is the scenario that your brain keeps going back to? Like, what exactly are you afraid it means about you? Name it. Just say it out loud right now, just like wherever you are, even if it sounds ridiculous.

Even if saying it makes you feel embarrassed or, or you know, silly or dramatic, just name it. Notice what happens in your body when you do that. For most people, there's a small but very real shift, a little loosening, a little like a slight exhale because your brain just for a moment has something to look at instead of something to just like run from.

That's just out there. And that's where we start. I say this all the time. When we run from our jealousy, when we have so much shame around it, it's really hard for us to look at it, lean into it, name it. What is it? So, think about like, have you ever been through something really hard, like genuinely hard, a breakup, a loss, a failure.

Like something that felt like, oh my gosh, this might actually break me. Like I don't think I could handle anything else. But it didn't break you. You're here, you got through it, not perfectly, not without scars. None of us do, but you got through it. Now, I want you to think about the jealousy spiral that you've been in over the last month.

The 2:00 AM like lying, awake, wandering, um, checking the location for the fourth time, the replaying of a conversation, looking for evidence of something you can't even name. You don't even know. You don't even know what you're looking for. The hours spent constructing worst case scenarios in your head, how much time have you spent there?

How much sleep? How much peace? How much presence in your relationship, in your work, in your actual life have you lost? You know, it's interesting, our brain can do so much comparison, but the one thing that it doesn't ever do is compare the cost of the fear. Against the cost of the thing that you're afraid of.

It never says like, okay, in the last six months, the spiral has taken roughly this much from you, this much sleep, this much joy, um, this much connection with your partner, this much mental real estate, and the thing that you're afraid of hasn't even happened yet. Is this trade off working? It never asks that.

It just keeps generating the fear because that's what it's wired to do. And here's the comparison that actually matters. If the thing that you are afraid of actually happened, if the relationship actually ended, if the betrayal actually occurred, you would grieve. You would hurt badly. And then because you are human with a resilient nervous system and people who love you.

You would start to heal. It would have like an arc, right? It would have a beginning, a middle, and eventually, even if not quickly, even if not easily, a movement forward, an end. The spiral has no arc. The spiral has no end. The spiral is just for as long as you stay there for as long as you. Stay in it.

That's potentially years of your life. I know I spent years of my life in the spiral, so I'm not saying that infidelity or rejection or loss is no big deal. It's a big deal. I'm not minimizing that. What I am saying is that the pain that you are generating in your own head. In anticipation of something that may never happen is also real.

It is also very significant and unlike the pain of an actual event, it doesn't come with any growth or clarity, or this forced resilience. Or worse, an eventual resolution. It's all the cost and none of the outcome. And most people who struggle with jealousy have never let themselves look at it that way, because looking at it then requires admitting that the fear itself, not just the thing that you're afraid of.

The fear itself is doing the damage, and that means the fear is something that you have to take responsibility for, for addressing. Not because it's your fault that you have it, but because it's your life and it's hurting you and something needs to change. You know? That's why that saying, you know, the only thing to fear is fear itself, and that is true here.

Like, yes, I get you are afraid of the thing. That thing, the emotions, all the stuff that you would feel if that happened, first of all, it may never happen, but even if it did, that feeling is uncomparable to the struggle that you're dealing with right now and how you're feeling right now and. Again, I mean, think about the time that, you know, maybe it was the relationship that you wanted the most and maybe it wasn't your decision to end the relationship, or they did something that made you end the relationship or whatever that scenario was, but you got through it.

There might be times here and there where like, uh, maybe I think about it, but you are not still in that feeling. You're not still grieving it and feeling sick of your stomach and having a racing heart. You went through it, but you are every day feeling anxious, every day, getting worried every day, putting yourself through these habits and, and this mental pain every single day because of the thing that probably won't happen.

It could happen, but it probably won't. Okay, so enough about the problem. Let's talk about what do we actually do. So, the first thing is you're not trying to never feel fear. This is not the goal, and that's not achievable. I will always tell someone, don't ever expect, just because you listen to this podcast or you're a client, doesn't mean you're never gonna feel jealous again.

That is maybe not achievable. Fear is a normal human experience. It is a signal from the nervous system that learned at some point that love wasn't safe, or connection wasn't safe. You're responding to old information with old tools, and the goal is not to eliminate the fear. The goal is to stop letting vague fear run unchecked, to develop the habit of pulling it out of the fog and giving it a shape.

Because once it has a shape, now you have options. So, here's a simple three step process. I call the fog lift. You can call it whatever you want. And you can do this in the moment when the spiral starts. You can also do it after the fact, like as a way of processing what happened. Either way works. Step one, stop and describe what triggered it.

I always tell people, if you're going to have a trigger, let's at least learn from it, right? If I'm gonna have a jealous meltdown, I better learn something from it. I better get some information. So, describe what triggered it. Not like I got scared, but specific. What actually happened right before the spiral started.

They didn't text me back for three hours. They laughed at something on their phone and didn't show me. They got a call and didn't tell me who it was or a text and didn't tell me who it was. They mentioned a name I didn't recognize, but just the facts. The facts of the trigger, what you actually saw, what you think you actually saw, heard or noticed.

This matters because it separates the trigger from the story. The trigger is a fact. The story is what your brain did with that fact. Like this happened. And I would even argue sometimes the trigger actually isn't a fact. Um, but for this case, we could say, okay, I, this thing happened, the trigger. And then the story is what your brain did with that information.

Those are two very different things. Step two, then name the specific fear. We talked about this a little bit, not the general dread, the specific thought. So, you can use this like fill in the blank. I am afraid that blank, and it has to be specific. Not I'm afraid that something's wrong, but what is the specific thing?

What are you specifically afraid is wrong? I'm afraid of losing them. What specifically are you afraid they're thinking, doing, feeling. Make it specific enough that someone else could understand exactly what the fear is. If you said it to them out loud, like, I'm afraid my partner is losing interest in me and looking for a way out.

I'm afraid they are attracted to their coworker and comparing me to her. I'm afraid this relationship is getting to the end the same way my last one did. It's named, it's specific. It's out now in the light. And step three, ask this question, just one. What actual evidence. Do I have for this specific fear right now?

Today? What evidence do I have? Not feelings, not your interpretations, not past history from other relationships. What is the actual evidence in this relationship based on this partner's actual behavior that the specific fear that you just named is true? If the evidence is thin, it's most likely interpretation and projected rather than consistent observed behavior like patterned behavior.

You don't have to pretend the fear isn't there, you just have to name it. I have this fear and I don't have real evidence for it. This is probably the old stuff talking. If there is real evidence, if there are actual patterns, actual behaviors, actual concrete things that are adding up to something, then the fog lift.

Has done its job too, because now you have something real to address. Not a cloud, but a specific nameable thing that you can bring to your partner or to a coach, or to yourself honestly. But you have something specific. And the reason this works is exactly what the neuroscience tells us. You are moving the experience from the part of the brain that just sounds the alarm.

To the part of your brain that can actually think you are giving your fear a shape that your mind can work with, and you're ending the loop, not by resolving the underlying issue necessarily that you know we can, that maybe takes more work, but by refusing to let it stay in the fog where it does most of the damage.

Now one more thing that I wanna add here. You might be going to do the fog lift and still feel afraid. You're gonna name the fear, you're gonna look at the evidence and still feel it in your body, and that's okay. That's completely normal. The goal is to not make the fear disappear. The goal is to stop the spiral, to break the loop that takes the small trigger and turns it into two hours of suffering, two days of suffering, two weeks.

Naming. It doesn't fix everything, but it gives you back a little bit more control. And when you're in a spiral, little control is everything. Until next time, take care. And remember, you're not alone. I.