Your dream job begins to stress you out, your perfect soulmate reveals its flaws, your achievements become insufficient… Sometimes, it’s as if we carry a fault finder inside us, as if our mind refuses to leave us alone, always looking for an incongruity, a shortcoming, a new “problem” to solve.
In fact, one of the most disconcerting paradoxes of our mind is that, in the absence of real threats, it’s capable of generating worries, problems, and, in extreme cases, even full-blown panics and dramas worthy of Shakespeare. In other words, the mind creates problems that don’t exist. And it fuels them with irrational fears, pessimistic thoughts, and catastrophic anticipations.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that we go around the world consciously inventing problems or that they’re just unimportant imaginings. What happens is that the psychological and biological mechanisms that should protect us are often activated disproportionately or out of context, generating completely unnecessary tension that in some cases can even lead to mental disorders.
The Brain, an “Expert” Threat Detector
To understand why the mind creates problems that don’t exist, we must first understand biology. The human brain is, above all, a survival machine. It is programmed to anticipate dangers because in prehistoric times, it was better to overreact to a suspicious rustle in the undergrowth than to risk it being a real predator.
This tendency to “exaggerate” risk and project ourselves into the future imagining the most bizarre scenarios kept us alive as a species. However, this ability comes at a price: the risk that imagination overtakes reality.
This same mechanism is still active today, in a world where most threats are no longer tigers or snakes, but bills, demanding bosses, or the fear of social rejection. Despite this, our brains don’t distinguish very well between real and imaginary danger, so they sound the alarm and continue to see problems and dangers where there aren’t any. In fact, the very notion of threat is quite relative.
Problems Are Relative
In 2013, psychologists at Princeton University asked a group of volunteers to look at a series of faces and point out the ones they found threatening. The researchers had carefully chosen different faces ranging from very intimidating to completely harmless.
The curious thing was that when people ran out of threatening faces, they began to rate faces they had previously considered harmless as “intimidating”. As the threatening faces disappeared, the participants expanded their definition of “threatening” to include a wider range of faces.
These researchers concluded that our concept of problems and threats actually depends on how many problems or threats we have faced recently. Therefore, the brain doesn’t carefully decide how dangerous or problematic a situation is, but rather compares it with what we’ve experienced previously.
This means that when we don’t have major problems, we invent them. Or as the researchers explained: “In a sea of peaceful faces, even slightly threatening ones can seem frightening.”
Negativity Bias: Why Does The Bad Always Outweigh?
Cognitive psychology has also shown that our minds are neither objective nor neutral. In fact, the thought process is full of mental shortcuts and biases that, while useful for survival, distort our perception of reality.
The negativity bias is precisely one of the most important factors in fueling nonexistent problems and seeing dangers where there aren’t any. It’s our tendency to pay attention to, learn from, and use negative information to the detriment of positive information.
It’s an asymmetry in the way we process events and understand the world. In fact, an experiment conducted at the Universities of Texas and Chicago found that the brain reacts more intensely to stimuli we consider negative and that trigger emotions like fear or anger.
In practice, this means that negative events capture our attention more than positive ones and generate greater brain activation. Obviously, on an evolutionary level, detecting potential danger was more important than enjoying the scenery. But sometimes we get carried away, and seeing so many problems leads to a pathological state of stress and anxiety.
Anxiety: The Dubious Art Of Worrying About Things That Don’t Happen
In a way, anxiety is the epitome of a mind that creates problems that don’t exist. It’s not simply a passing emotional state, but a mental pattern in which the future itself turns into a threatening scenario. Living in anticipation of difficulties that rarely occur – the project that could fail, the illness that might appear, the rejection that seems unbearable – generates a diffuse apprehension that lingers all day, as if we had a radar permanently scanning for invisible dangers.
In the most extreme cases, this anxious mechanism escalates into panic attacks, a disproportionate reaction in which the body abruptly enters emergency mode without reason.
The irony is that “panic attacks often occur without an obvious trigger,” as the specialists at Mental Health Providers explain. Even if there is no real threat or specific problem, the experience is very real for those who suffer from it. The difference between what is imagined and what is tangible disappears because the body and mind react as if danger were right in front of us.
This is precisely where the difficulty lies, but also the key: understanding that anxiety and panic are not indicators of imminent harm, but rather expressions of an overactive mind that invents problems and sees risks everywhere. Understanding this difference is essential to overcome panic attacks and anxiety.
What might have been a slight dizziness after a stressful day is interpreted as a collapse, and a simple criticism becomes a prophecy of dismissal. The brain unleashes a spiral of uncontrollable fear.
In fact, the challenge isn’t to silence the mind or minimize worries, but to learn how to separate genuine dangers from mental constructs. This awareness makes the difference between living in constant alertness or being able to inhabit the present more calmly.
And remember, if worries overwhelm you or anxiety interferes with daily life, a psychologist can give you the tools to regain control and find calm. You don’t have to face this process alone.
References:
Todorov, A. et. Al. (2013) Validation of data-driven computational models of social perception of faces. Emotion; 13(4):724-738.
Cacioppo, J. T. et. Al. (1998) Negative Information Weighs More Heavily on the Brain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; 75(4): 887-900.
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