Your Brain Is Addicted To Worst-Case Scenarios (3 Ways To Break The Habit)

Hey, it's Jay. I don't know what your day's been like, but I was just thinking about you for a minute. And I hope you're being a little patient with yourself, because you deserve it. And yeah, I'll talk to you soon. Have you ever noticed that your brain is a terrible fortune teller?

Think about how many times it has confidently predicted the future, only to end up completely wrong. It convinced you the relationship was over because they didn't text you back for a few hours. It told you you were definitely going to embarrass yourself before the presentation, only for it to become one of the best meetings you've ever had. It kept you awake the night before your performance review, certain you were about to be fired when your boss was actually preparing to give you praise. If your weather app got tomorrow's forecast wrong, as often as your anxious mind does, you delete it immediately.

And yet every single day most of us continue treating our brains' predictions as if they're facts. The strange part is that our minds rarely predict average outcomes. Your brain almost never whispers, this conversation will probably be fine, or There's a good chance everything works out. Instead it jumps straight to catastrophe. One unexplained symptom becomes a serious illness.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (33 minutes, 5,233 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.