How Things Play Out In My Head Can Be Way Different

How things play out in your head can be way different than what happens in reality. You imagine a situation bigger than it really is.

Maybe it's a Slack message from your manager saying "Can we talk?" and suddenly you're convinced you're getting fired. Or a production alert at 2am and your brain jumps straight to "the entire system is down and it's my fault."

Over-thinkers do this constantly.

This cognitive distortion leads to anxiety and, in my case, panic attacks.

I don't deal with full-blown attacks anymore (thankfully) and this is what helped me.

Treat your thoughts like logs, not alerts.

When a scary thought fires, I don't immediately escalate. I ask myself what the actual evidence is. What would I tell a junior engineer who came to me with this same worry?

Usually the answer is "let's look at the data before we panic."

Name the pattern.

Just recognizing "oh, I'm catastrophizing again" takes some of its power away. It's like knowing a flaky test is flaky. You stop trusting it blindly.

Zoom out on the timeline.

I ask myself whether this will matter in a week, a month, or a year. Most of the things I've lost sleep over, I can't even remember now.

This isn't clinical advice. I'm not qualified to give that. But these mental frameworks helped me go from regular panic attacks to rare moments of manageable anxiety.

If you're struggling, talking to a professional is worth it.

But if you're just an over-thinker looking for some guardrails, maybe this helps.

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