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Research suggests that anxious people tend to overestimate risk and underestimate the ability to cope.

Some call a fearful outlook "threat bias," "threat misappraisal," or a "risk-resource model of anxiety."

Cognitive restructuring can reshape how an anxious mind sees situations.

If you have lived with severe anxiety at some point in your life, you can probably relate to the two statements below:

An anxious person spends an exorbitant amount of time thinking about the future.

The “future world” created by an anxious person is often filled with an ongoing series of catastrophes.

In other words, anxiety is almost always about what could happen, not about what is actually happening. An anxious person often lives in the world of “what-ifs.”

What if I say something weird and embarrass myself in front of people at the party?

What if these heart palpitations are the beginning of a heart attack?

What if I don’t get that promotion because I was late yesterday?

What if I say something at the meeting and my colleagues don’t think I sound smart?

What if my child gets into a car accident on the way to the field trip?

What if people don’t think I look pretty in this picture I posted?

What if this sudden swollen lymph node is the first sign of cancer?

What if my spouse loses interest in me because I’ve gained weight?

With this type of thinking, the possibilities are endless because anything can happen in one's mind. An anxious person might live through half a dozen worst-case scenarios on any given day. It can be quite exhausting.

In cognitive therapy, we call this “catastrophizing.” When we catastrophize, we take ordinary everyday life experiences and blow them out of proportion. If there are a thousand possible outcomes in a given situation, an anxious person will focus on the one or two negative possibilities and ignore the hundreds of neutral or positive ones.

But there is something else to keep in mind.

Overestimating Threat and Underestimating Coping

Extensive research shows that people with anxiety tend to overestimate both the likelihood of a threat happening and the intensity of that threat if it were to happen.1 Let this sink in.

Basically, the very thing an anxious person is worried about is less likely to happen than something neutral or even positive. Equally important, if the very thing an anxious person dreads actually does happen, it will likely not be nearly as terrible as they imagined.

Let’s look at an example. Sophia is afraid of public speaking. Before giving a speech or class presentation, she conjures up dramatic images of her saying something stupid and the audience subsequently bursting into laughter or looking at her like she is a complete idiot.

Overestimating threat: Sophia’s anxiety keeps her from seeing that it is much more likely that she will get through the presentation or speech without saying something stupid. It also keeps her from understanding that she is giving way too much power to the consequences of her saying something stupid.

Underestimating coping: Even in the worst-case scenario of her saying something stupid, it is likely that people would either not notice or not give it much thought if they did. The speech or presentation would go on, and people would forget about it as quickly as it happened.

An Important Caveat: Negativity Isn't Intentional

Now, it is important to note that anxious people don't want to see things this way. They aren't just being "pessimistic" or "negative." Again, this tendency is driven by fear and by an underlying assumption about the likelihood and severity of a given threat. The distinction is necessary to point out because people with anxiety are often misunderstood in this way. They want, more than anything, to believe that everything will be OK. But the fear can be very convincing.

Anxious people give too much attention to things that are not likely to happen. They also assume that these feared events are much more powerful and impactful than they are.

This thinking pattern can be changed with intentional, consistent effort:

Spend more time focusing on the present than on the future. No amount of overthinking or worrying can change future events. The more one focuses on the present, the less one tends to experience anxiety.

If you catch yourself thinking about the future, reframe your thoughts and practice thinking about all of the possible positive or neutral outcomes that could happen in each scenario. Start engaging in more realistic thinking.

Take our Generalized Anxiety Disorder Test

Find a therapist to overcome anxiety

Learning new ways of thinking can take a lot of practice and time. It has likely taken an anxious person years to develop unhelpful thinking patterns, so it will take time to unlearn this way of thinking. But with persistence and consistency, it is possible to develop a less anxious and more adaptive perspective on life.

1. Valadez EA, Pine DS, Fox NA, Bar-Haim Y. Attentional biases in human anxiety. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. 2022;142:104917. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104917

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