Anticipatory anxiety is often worse than regular anxiety because it involves worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet. Our minds fill the unknown with worst-case scenarios, imagining outcomes that are often far more stressful than reality. This constant “what if” thinking leads to prolonged fear, making the anxiety build up over time. Unlike regular anxiety, which happens in the moment, anticipatory anxiety creates a cycle where the dread grows the closer we get to the event. This can make the fear feel bigger and more overwhelming because our minds focus on all the things that could go wrong, rather than what’s happening. In short, anticipatory anxiety magnifies fear by making us live through imagined scenarios again and again, before we even face the real situation. Most of the time, the worst fears we imagine never actually happen. Our minds tend to jump to worst-case scenarios when we feel anxious, but reality is usually much less dramatic. We spend so much time worrying about things going wrong like messing up in front of others, getting hurt, or something terrible happening—that we forget those outcomes are extremely rare. When we finally face the situation, we often realize it wasn’t nearly as bad as we feared. This shows that anxiety tricks us into believing the worst will happen, but in most cases, our worries don’t come true. By reminding ourselves of this, we can learn to trust that we’re capable of handling whatever comes our way, and that fear doesn’t have to control us.