Anxiety: why your mind creates problems that don't exist (The Overflowing Bucket)

You rest your head on the pillow and, out of nowhere, your mind starts listing every possible disaster that could happen tomorrow. Your heart races, your palms sweat and you lose sleep over a problem that hasn’t even happened. Sound familiar?

An anxious mind invents problems because the brain’s alarm system doesn’t tell a real danger apart from an everyday worry, like an email or a deadline. When we feed that alarm with lots of “what ifs”, it keeps going off and the body reacts as if the threat were already happening.

Before we go on, an important note: feeling anxious about life’s uncertainties is a natural response. However, when this state becomes chronic, uncontrollable and starts to paralyze your routine, we’re talking about a clinical disorder that needs professional care. This text is about everyday anxiety, the emotion all of us deal with.

Our brain has a very old alarm system, focused on just one mission: keeping us alive. The problem is that, these days, this system can get out of tune.

How does anxiety build up? The overflowing bucket

Imagine that your ability to handle stress is like a bucket under a faucet. Its job is to hold water so you can use it when you need it. Anxiety happens when you leave the faucet wide open, pouring in imaginary problems, until the water spills over.

Your brain can’t tell the difference between a real threat to your life (an actual flood) and everyday stress (an email from your boss or a tight deadline). The faucet opens, the water level rises, your body reacts, but there’s no storm at all. It’s just a leaky roof.

The illusion of the lens

Since anxiety is always focused on “what if?”, it lives in the future. And if it lives in the future, it’s a product of your imagination. We don’t need to take our minds so seriously all the time. The issue is rarely the problem itself, but the way we choose to look at it.

The philosopher Seneca put it brilliantly more than two thousand years ago: “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” If you change the lens, the storm goes back to being just a passing cloud. You don’t have to believe every scary thought your head produces.

How do you deal with everyday anxiety? The secret of people who handle tomorrow well

If anxiety freezes us over what hasn’t happened yet, how do people who deal well with uncertainty behave? They simply split life into two boxes: what they control and what they don’t.

While the anxious mind drowns in worry, spending energy on what’s out of reach, the problem-solving mind focuses on preparation. People who handle the future well don’t ignore problems, they just put their energy into what they can do today. It’s trading uncertainty for action in the present.

The pressure rises, the body reacts, but very often there’s no flood at all. It’s a frightening and very real feeling for the person going through it, but the source is almost always an illusion inside the head.

Here’s the thought to keep: you can’t stop the water from falling and your bucket from filling up every now and then, but you can choose whether to let everything spill over or to open the tap and release the pressure. Focus on what you control today.

To empty that bucket a little, here are three more reads:

• The bucket fills up faster after a short night, and here’s what sleep does for your emotions.
• Moving your body is one of the best ways to drain it, and here’s how exercise changes your brain.
• Sometimes the worry is about being behind, and that feeling might be a sign that you’re actually moving.

Editor’s note: You definitely know someone who spends so much energy trying to predict future disasters that they end up tripping over their own shoelaces today. Share this article to help them get their focus and peace of mind back.