One of the most empowering things you can learn when it comes to overcoming anxiety is this: anxiety has a structure. It follows a pattern. And once you understand the pattern, you can interrupt it, reshape it, and ultimately take charge of your emotional state.

If you were teaching someone how to feel anxious, you’d simply tell them to push their mind into the future and imagine something bad happening.

That’s it.

That’s the core structure of anxiety.

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux explains it perfectly:

“Where fear is a response to a present threat, anxiety is a more complex and highly manipulable response to something one anticipates might be a threat in the future.”

In other words, fear is real, but anxiety is imagined.

It’s a projection of a “what if” scenario, a mental movie of something that hasn’t happened and may never happen.

And as Mark Twain put it with frustrating accuracy:

“I’ve had thousands of problems in my life, most of which never actually happened.”