A little anxiety is a good thing. It’s the nagging feeling that maybe you should complete that pre-flight checklist.
I forecast a lot of doom, but try to bother only with the dooms I can prevent or mitigate. This is useful for going “I should replace that pipe before it bursts” or “I should fill up on gas here as it’s 300km to the next station”.
Where it goes wrong is doom we either cannot control at all, or cannot control without inflicting greater dooms - what someone else might think, whether the sun will rise tomorrow.
I feel we are trained (thanks, marketing. Thanks, social animals) to sensitise ourselves to a great many fears, most of which are beyond our control, and it does us little good.
Case in point: a little over a week ago I was having apoplectic paroxysms over the amount of stuff I have to do at home before winter - foundations to dig, brush to clear, firewood to gather. Then, a forest fire ripped through our land, which was somewhere in my mind as “definitely one day, probably not today, don’t sweat it, but have a plan”. The former anxiety I was letting grow out of all proportion - so fucking what if I don’t dig foundations this year? No deck. Boo hoo.
The latter, if I’m honest, occasionally kept me up at night, and occasionally hovered around the edge of my field of imaginary view, like a particularly irritating fly, but after I would reassure myself that we had go-bags packed, that we had the ability to run without hesitation, it would subside. It’s that whole agency thing - being able to take what actions you can to alleviate an anxiety. If there’s no meaningful action to be taken, it’s a useless anxiety, best forgotten.
If anything, more positives have emerged than negatives - the fire service fixed our road, which we’d been begging the council to do for years, the flammable brush is cleared, and we discovered we have a great many friends.
Sometimes it takes the manifestation of one of our anxieties to remind us what is and what isn’t worth worrying about. Watching a friend or family die also has the desired effect - but unfortunately from experience, it isn’t permanent, and we (I mean I) seem to need a slap in the face from time to time to remind us what matters.