It was a Sunday night, and I was thinking about something at work that I couldn’t do anything about until the next day—and honestly, couldn’t do much about even then. It was a decision that was above my pay grade, an outcome I had no real say in. I knew that. And I still spent most of the evening turning it over, running through scenarios, working out what I’d say if it went one way, what I’d do if it went another. By the time I went to bed, I’d lived through about six versions of something that hadn’t happened yet and might never happen the way I’d imagined it.
The part that I didn’t register as strange: this was just Sunday night. This was just what my mind did with unresolved things, with uncertain things, with anything I couldn’t see the outcome of clearly. I’d been doing it so long it didn’t feel like anxiety. It felt like thoroughness. It took the whole thing lifting, a few years ago, for me to understand what it had actually been about—not the work situations or the conversations or the outcomes I was rehearsing for, but something older and simpler underneath all of it.
It was so consistent, I thought it was a personality trait
That’s what happens when something is present long enough—it stops feeling like a symptom and starts feeling like a self. The hum was always there: a background current of watchfulness, of keeping tabs, of maintaining a running assessment of everything that could go wrong and whether I’d prepared for it adequately. I wasn’t falling apart. I was functioning, often well. That’s exactly why it never occurred to me that something was off.
I read it as diligence. My friends probably would have described me as someone who had things together. And in a lot of ways, I did. But underneath the having-things-together was a constant, quiet effort to stay ahead of whatever might be coming—to think far enough forward, prepare thoroughly enough, anticipate carefully enough, that nothing could catch me genuinely off guard. That effort never took a day off. Not when things were going well. Not when there was nothing particular to worry about. It just redirected to the next available concern and kept running. Real vigilance responds to actual threats. This didn’t distinguish. It ran regardless, because it wasn’t really about the specific things. It was the operating system.
I wasn’t controlling anything—I was just exhausting myself
The controlling looked like this: something might happen—a conversation that could go badly, a situation that might develop in some unwelcome direction—and I’d run it through mentally, sometimes dozens of times. Working through scenarios. Rehearsing responses. Identifying the version of events I most wanted to avoid and figuring out what I’d do if it came. This felt like preparation. What it actually was, I see now, was a way of sitting with anxiety while telling myself I was doing something about it.
The outcomes I rehearsed rarely materialized the way I’d imagined. And when things did go sideways—as they sometimes do—my months of mental preparation did almost nothing to make them easier. I moved through the hard things the way anyone does: imperfectly, doing what I could with what I had in the moment. The rehearsal hadn’t actually helped. It had just given the anxiety something to do. And the running of that whole machine—the vigilance, the preparation, the constant low-level scanning—was quietly costing me more than I was willing to add up for a long time.
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What I was actually afraid of
It took me a while to get underneath the specific worries to find what they were all covering for. The worries themselves changed—my health, my kids, money, work, relationships—but the thing underneath them was always the same. I was afraid of being caught off guard. Of something happening that I hadn’t seen coming, hadn’t prepared for, couldn’t manage. Of that particular helplessness when life moves faster than your ability to respond.
That fear made sense once. I grew up in a house where things happened without warning and where being unprepared carried real costs. The vigilance was a reasonable response to an environment that was genuinely unpredictable. What I never got around to updating was that I’d left that environment a long time ago. I became an adult and kept running the same system in circumstances where it no longer applied. The threat assessment stayed calibrated to conditions that had changed. I was still scanning for the thing that used to come—and there’s always enough uncertainty in any life to keep a scanner like that busy indefinitely, if you let it.
Something changed, slowly, then all at once
It wasn’t one moment. I’d been in therapy at different points, and some of that helped gradually. I’d gotten older, which meant I’d survived more than I’d once thought I could, and that accumulation had done something quiet to my sense of what I was capable of handling. And then a few things happened—things I couldn’t have prepared for no matter how many Sunday nights I spent in my kitchen rehearsing—and I had to move through them without a plan. Just showing up and doing what I could.
I got through them. Not gracefully, not without difficulty, but I got through. And something in the surviving of them started to loosen the old system. Not all at once—the hum didn’t just switch off. But I started to notice I was spending a little less time on the mental rehearsal. A little less energy on what might go wrong. And the world continued to unfold roughly as it would have anyway. The reduced vigilance wasn’t making things worse. It was just making me a little less tired. And after a while, on an ordinary Tuesday in the car, I noticed the hum was simply gone—and I sat with that for a few minutes, unsure what to do with the quiet.
The one thing I had to admit
The anxiety wasn’t preventing anything. That was what I finally had to sit with—the recognition that decades of vigilance had not, in any meaningful way, changed how things turned out. The things that went wrong went wrong whether or not I’d spent months anticipating them. The things that went right didn’t require that level of preparation. All those Sunday nights in the kitchen had not made my life safer. They’d just made my Sunday nights worse.
What the anxiety was actually doing was giving me the feeling of agency when I was really just afraid. As long as I was working on something, monitoring something, preparing for something, I felt less like someone waiting for life to happen to me. The control was a sensation, not a fact. And I’d mistaken that sensation for actual protection for so long that giving it up felt, at first, like giving up the only thing standing between me and everything I feared. It wasn’t protection. It was just a habit I’d had so long I’d forgotten it was a choice.
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I’m a different kind of worried now
I still get worried. I haven’t landed somewhere in a place that’s completely anxiety-free. What changed is the quality of it, and what I do with it. When something worries me now, it’s usually specific and present. It comes up, gets my attention, and then it moves through—or I do something about it, and it moves through. It doesn’t run in the background as a standing condition.
I still reach for the old habit sometimes. I’ll catch myself starting to rehearse something that doesn’t need rehearsing—running a scenario, building out a contingency—and then I notice it, and I put it down. The noticing is the new skill. Not the absence of the impulse, just the ability to see it for what it is and decide not to follow it all the way down. It’s quieter in my head than it used to be. Not silent, but quieter. I’m still getting used to that, still learning to trust that the quiet isn’t a warning sign. That some of what I was bracing for was never actually coming. That I was allowed, all along, to just drive.
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.
