My mother checked the locks twice before bed every night.
Not because anything had ever happened. Just because something could.
She’d do a full loop of the house—front door, back door, windows in the kitchen—and then pause at the top of the stairs like she was running the calculation one more time. I watched her do this so many times that I stopped seeing it as a habit and started seeing it as just part of what nighttime was. The checking. The pausing. The specific quality of alertness that never quite resolved into rest.
I thought I was just watching my mother.
What I was actually doing was absorbing a lesson about the nature of the world—that it required monitoring, that the good stretch was always the interval before something disrupted it, that the responsible thing to do with any situation was to find the place where it could go wrong and keep your eye on it. By the time I was old enough to recognize this in myself, it had been running for so long that it felt less like anxiety and more like clarity. Less like fear and more like paying attention.
It wasn’t a personality trait I’d been born with. It was a conclusion I’d reached—in childhood, in a specific house, watching a specific person move through the world in a specific way—that had quietly become the only way I knew how to see.
If you’re that way, too, these are the early experiences that shaped it.
1. The adults in your life were unpredictable
Not cruel. Just inconsistent.
The mood changed without warning. The warmth that was there one day and absent the next. The environment where you learned to read the room before you walked into it—to assess the temperature, gauge the energy, calculate the risk before committing to anything.
When the people you depended on were unpredictable, your nervous system learned to stay ahead of the unpredictability. To scan for signals. To anticipate the shift before it arrived. That skill—reading subtle cues, detecting early warnings, staying alert to what might be coming—was genuinely useful then. It runs automatically now, in situations that are nothing like the original one, in rooms full of people who have no intention of shifting on you.
2. Something happened that you didn’t see coming
A loss. A rupture. A sudden change that arrived without warning and rearranged everything.
It doesn’t have to have been dramatic to leave a mark. Sometimes it was a move, a divorce, an illness, a friendship that ended without explanation. Sometimes it was smaller—a promise that wasn’t kept, a moment of trust that collapsed, a thing you’d counted on that simply wasn’t there when you reached for it.
What those experiences instill, in a nervous system that’s still forming, is a specific belief about the nature of things: stability is provisional. The good stretch is the interval before something disrupts it. Anticipating the disruption feels, from the inside, like wisdom. It’s actually the nervous system trying to ensure it never gets blindsided again.
I was nine when my family moved without much warning. I don’t remember being particularly upset at the time—I was busy adapting. What I remember is the feeling of having the floor shift under something I’d assumed was solid. I’ve been checking the floor ever since.
3. Your worries were dismissed rather than reassured
You brought something to an adult—a fear, a concern, a thing that was troubling you—and what came back wasn’t reassurance. It was dismissed.
You’re fine. Stop worrying. Nothing bad is going to happen. You’re being dramatic.
The words were meant to help. What they actually communicated was: your read on the situation is wrong, your feelings are excessive, and your concerns don’t warrant serious attention. So the next time something worried you, you didn’t bring it out. You turned it over privately, alone, without the benefit of an adult perspective that might have put it in proportion.
And alone, without proportion, worries tend to grow. The catastrophic interpretation, unchecked, becomes the default. Not because you’re irrational—because no one ever helped you practice thinking through the alternatives.
4. You witnessed anxiety in the people closest to you
Anxiety is contagious in the particular way that early learning is contagious: you absorb it before you can evaluate it.
If the adults around you treated the world as a dangerous and precarious place—worried openly, catastrophized routinely, responded to uncertainty with alarm—you learned that this was what a reasonable response to the world looked like.
Not because anyone taught you to be anxious. Because you watched the people you trusted most, and this is what you saw them do.
The template gets installed early. And templates are hard to examine from the inside, because from the inside, they don’t look like templates. They look like reality.
5. Good things were often followed by bad things
There was a period when something good would happen, and something in you would wait.
Not consciously. Just a quality of alertness in the good moment—an inability to fully inhabit it, because experience had taught you that the good moments had a way of being followed by something that unmade them. The joy and the bracing happened simultaneously, until eventually the bracing became more automatic than the joy.
This is what catastrophizing often looks like from the inside: not pessimism exactly, but a learned inability to trust the good stretch. An anticipation of its ending that begins the moment it starts. The worst-case scenario isn’t irrational—it’s the pattern recognition of someone who has been keeping track.
6. You were given too much responsibility to carry
You were carrying something that wasn’t yours to carry.
The emotional temperature of the house. A parent’s well-being. The management of a situation that required adult resources you didn’t have. Whatever the specific shape of it, you were in charge of something that exceeded your developmental capacity—and the stakes of getting it wrong felt real and significant.
When a child is responsible for outcomes they can’t fully control, they learn to stay vigilant.
To run the scenarios.
To anticipate what might go wrong so they can prevent it.
The hypervigilance was adaptive then. The problem is that it doesn’t get filed away when the original responsibility is lifted. It keeps running—applied to situations where the stakes are considerably lower, but the nervous system doesn’t know that.
I spent a lot of my childhood managing my mother’s anxiety. Not dramatically—just quietly, the way kids do. Saying the right thing, not bringing the wrong thing, staying attuned to what she needed before she asked. It took me decades to understand why I still do the same calculation with everyone I care about, even when nothing is wrong.
7. You were blamed when things went wrong
Not always fairly. Sometimes, for things that had nothing to do with you.
But the lesson it left was specific: when bad things happen, you are likely implicated.
When something goes wrong in the environment, look first at what you did. The self-surveillance that follows from this—the pre-emptive audit of your own behavior, the search for what you might have done to cause the problem—becomes a particular kind of worst-case thinking. The catastrophe you’re anticipating is often, at its core, the catastrophe of being at fault.
8. Expressing fear made things worse, not better
Showing your fear produced a response you didn’t want.
Someone became annoyed. Or more anxious themselves. Or the situation escalated in a direction that seemed connected to your having named the thing out loud.
So you stopped naming it. You learned to manage the fear privately, to hold it quietly, to present a composed exterior while the interior continued to run its calculations.
The problem with managing fear privately is that private fears don’t get regulated. They don’t encounter the reality-testing that comes from saying the thing out loud and having someone respond to it. They grow in the conditions that private things grow in—unchecked, unexamined, increasingly convinced of their own worst predictions.
9. You were told your feelings were too much
Each time a fear or a worry was assessed as excessive, the message landed: your internal read on the world is wrong.
You feel more than is warranted.
Your nervous system’s response to things is disproportionate.
What didn’t get offered was the alternative: that the things you were afraid of were sometimes actually frightening. That the concerns were sometimes legitimate. That the nervous system registering alarm wasn’t malfunctioning—it was responding to real information.
Without that validation, the feelings didn’t disappear. They went underground. And underground, they continued their work—generating worst-case scenarios with an urgency that had never been proportioned to anything, because no one ever helped you proportion it.
