You’re getting ready to go to a concert with a friend, and they start listing everything that could go wrong. The venue is outdoors, and it might rain. The parking is going to be a nightmare.
The sound is never good at that stage. What if they can’t see from where they’re sitting?
They’ve done this before. Every outdoor concert, every road trip, every wedding where they don’t know anyone. Before anything that feels like a big deal, the list comes out.
You chalk it up to pessimism, tell them to relax, and move on with the night.
But that list they were running through wasn’t pessimism. It was doing something specific in their brain, and the research says it works. The catch is that it only works if nobody tells them to stop doing it.
Some of the most anxious people in the room perform just as well as the calmest ones
Your friend’s habit looks like worrying, but it’s closer to preparing.
They’re listing what could go wrong because running through the possibilities is how they get ready. That distinction matters, and a psychologist named Julie Norem has spent decades studying why.
Norem, a psychologist at Wellesley College, noticed something that didn’t match what the research at the time predicted. There were people who reported high anxiety before a test or a performance and then did just as well as people who went in calm and confident.
That wasn’t supposed to happen. Anxiety was supposed to get in the way. The more worried you felt going in, the worse you were supposed to do. But these anxious people were matching the calm ones, and Norem wanted to know why.
When she looked closer, she found a pattern. The anxious high-performers were all doing the same thing before the event: setting low expectations and mentally running through everything that could go wrong.
Not in a spiraling, panicky way. In a specific, almost methodical way. What if this happens? What if that happens? What would I do?
Norem called the strategy defensive pessimism. Not a personality type. Not a disorder. A strategy, used by people who are anxious, that turns the anxiety into something useful.
The rehearsal turns anxiety from a feeling into a set of problems you can solve
When you’re anxious about something coming up, the anxiety usually sits in your chest as a vague, shapeless dread. Something bad might happen. That thought doesn’t give you anywhere to go.
You can’t fix “something.” You can only sit with the feeling and hope it passes.
What defensive pessimists do is take that vague dread and break it into specific scenarios. Not “something might go wrong at the concert.” Instead: “It might rain.” That’s a solvable problem. Bring a raincoat. Check when the rain is supposed to start. See if there are any covered seats available.
“The sound might be bad.” Okay, move closer to the speakers. “Parking will be terrible.” Leave early.
Each imagined problem becomes a problem with a solution, and each solution shrinks the anxiety a little.
By the time the event arrives, the defensive pessimist has already handled most of what scared them, just not out loud. They handled it in their head, which is where the anxiety was living in the first place.
And they know how it looks. They can feel the room shift when the list starts. They’ve been told to relax more times than they can count, by partners, by friends, by coworkers who think they’re being helpful.
Most of them have tried stopping. They’ve walked into events telling themselves to just be positive. It didn’t go well, and they couldn’t explain why.
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If the strategy works, you’d expect that encouraging a defensive pessimist to relax would either help or have no effect. Norem tested that, and the opposite happened.
In one study, defensive pessimists were split into groups before a task. One group was asked to imagine how they’d handle things going wrong, which is what they’d normally do on their own.
Another group was told to relax, think calm thoughts, and not worry about the outcome.
The group that was allowed to think about what could go wrong performed well. The group that was told to relax performed significantly worse.
For the naturally confident people in the same study, relaxation helped. It fit their strategy. They go in feeling good, and feeling good works for them.
But for the anxious people who normally use worst-case rehearsal, being told to relax didn’t remove the anxiety. It just removed the tool they use to manage it.
The anxiety was still there. The plan was gone. And without the plan, the anxiety had nothing to do except get in the way.
Think about what that feels like from the inside. You’ve spent years managing anxiety by giving it a job to do. Someone tells you to stop, and now the anxiety has no job.
It doesn’t leave. It just sits there, formless, taking up the space that the plan used to fill.
Norem has put it plainly: anxious people do better when they use defensive pessimism than when they try to be optimistic. Talking yourself into feeling cheerful doesn’t work if the anxiety is still underneath it.
That’s what happens when you tell your friend to relax before the concert. You’re not calming them down. You’re taking away the thing that was calming them down.
If they do this about everything, that’s not a strategy; that’s an outlook
There’s an important line here, and it’s worth drawing clearly.
Defensive pessimism is tied to specific events. It shows up before a test, a presentation, a big trip, a social situation that feels high-stakes. The person imagines what could go wrong, plans around it, and then shows up and does well.
General pessimism is different. That’s the person who expects bad outcomes across the board, not just before big moments but all the time, and doesn’t do anything with the expectation.
They don’t plan around the worst case. They just expect it and feel stuck in it.
Norem’s research drew a sharp line between the two. Over a four-year study following college students, she found that defensive pessimists started with lower self-esteem than the naturally confident students. By graduation, they had nearly caught up.
Anxious students who didn’t use the strategy saw their self-esteem drop over the same period. The difference wasn’t whether someone felt anxious. It was whether they did something productive with it.
If your friend is listing worst-case scenarios before a concert but not before a Tuesday lunch, that’s the strategy working. If they do it about everything, regardless of the stakes, that’s a different pattern, and it might be worth a different kind of conversation.
So the next time they start listing what could go wrong, let them finish
Your friend at the concert wasn’t being a downer. They were running a system their brain has learned to run, and it works for them the way positive thinking works for you.
The worst thing you can do is wave it off. The best thing is to let them finish, maybe help them solve one or two of the things they’re worried about, and then go. They’ll have a better night than you expect. They usually do.
