"I couldn't cope if it did"

If you look inside almost any worry, you'll find two predictions and not one. The first is that the bad thing will happen. The second is that when it does, you won't be able to bear it. Chapter 4 dealt with the first. The second gets less attention and I suspect it does more damage.

You can see it in how a round of worry ends, or fails to. Worry runs the film up to the worst moment and stops it there. The manager says "we're letting you go", and the film freezes on your face. Then it rewinds and plays again. It never shows the next morning, or the week after, when you've rung two people you used to work with and rewritten your CV. It never shows month four, in the new job, which may be better or worse than the old one but which you're getting on with. If all you ever see is that frozen frame, it's not surprising you conclude you couldn't cope, because in that one frame nobody is coping yet.

There's good evidence that people get this prediction wrong in a consistent direction. Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues ran six studies in which people forecast how they'd feel after a bad event, and then the researchers looked at how people who'd really been through it felt. The events included the end of a relationship, being turned down for a job, and failing to get tenure at a university. In every case people expected to feel bad for longer than people actually did. Gilbert's explanation is that we have a set of mental processes that go to work after a blow. We find reasons and new plans, and we find what else there is in life. These processes work quietly. Since we don't notice them working, we leave them out when we predict how we'll feel.

I need to be careful here. None of this means bad events don't hurt, or that you'd be fine within a week. Some losses are terrible and stay with people for years. My claim is that your forecast of your own collapse is unreliable, and it errs on the side of pessimism.

You have evidence of your own on this. Think back to the hard things that have already happened to you, the ones you'd have said in advance you couldn't get through. You had no rehearsal for most of them. You got the news, and then you did the next thing, and the thing after that, often rather capably, and people may have said they didn't know how you managed. You managed because a real problem, unlike a what-if, gives you things to do.

That points to a practical difference, and I think it's the most useful thing in this chapter. A what-if can't be coped with, because nothing in it is fixed. You can't phone anyone about a redundancy that hasn't been announced. A real event, however bad, comes with particulars, such as a date and a sum of money and a name to ring. People are much better at coping with particulars than at coping with fog. So the sense that you couldn't cope comes partly from trying to cope in advance, with nothing to get hold of.

When you catch the frozen frame, try running the film on. Ask what you'd do the next morning, and then what you'd do that week. Ask who you'd ring, and what you'd say to a friend in the same position. Write three lines. You'll usually find that you have a rough plan, that it took four minutes, and that the scene loses some of its grip once it has a next morning. Then stop. Do this once for each fear, because if you repeat it nightly it has turned into a round.