One of the biggest drivers of anxiety is the mind’s tendency to tell negative stories — especially when we don’t have complete information. And there’s actually a good evolutionary reason for that.

If we go far enough back in human history, we can imagine our ancestors out gathering food, hunting, and trying to stay alive. Picture two groups of people picking berries when suddenly a twig snaps nearby.

The first group stops and thinks, “What was that?” Maybe it’s a sabretooth tiger. They check it out, stay alert, and respond accordingly. If it’s nothing, they go back to picking berries.

The second group hears the twig snap and says, “Eh… probably nothing,” and keeps picking berries without much concern.

The problem? That second group probably didn’t stick around long enough to become our ancestors.

So, good news and bad news: we’re largely descended from the cautious ones — the people whose minds were wired to anticipate potential danger.

Even though our modern world looks very different — cars, buildings, jobs, international commerce — we’re still operating with essentially the same neurological hardware. That means our minds are naturally designed to scan for problems and imagine what could go wrong.

Left alone, the mind often defaults to negative possibilities. Not because something bad is guaranteed to happen, but because historically, being cautious helped people survive.

There’s another piece to this. The mind doesn’t like gaps in information. When something is unclear, we instinctively fill in the missing parts. If you hear the beginning of a story and the ending but not the middle, your brain automatically creates the missing section.

And because of that built-in negative bias, the version we invent is often the worst-case scenario.

Understanding this can be surprisingly freeing. It means those anxious thoughts aren’t necessarily insight or intuition — often they’re just your mind doing what it evolved to do: look for potential threats.

Here’s the important shift:

It takes no more mental energy to imagine a positive or neutral outcome than a negative one.

If your mind is going to fill in the blanks anyway, you can gently guide the story instead of letting it default to fear.

This doesn’t mean ignoring reality or pretending everything will always work out perfectly. It simply means recognizing that until you have more information, any story you tell yourself is partly speculation.

So you might as well choose a version that helps you feel calmer rather than more distressed.

As new information comes in, you can always update the story.

And importantly, the story you tell yourself rarely changes the eventual outcome — but it can have a significant impact on how you feel leading up to it.

A simple exercise:

When you notice your mind filling in missing information with worst-case scenarios, pause and ask:

“Is this fact, or is this my mind filling in the blanks?”

If it’s the latter, try deliberately imagining a more neutral or positive possibility. Not forced optimism — just an alternative story.

You may find that anxiety softens when you stop assuming the worst by default.

If anxiety has been showing up more than you’d like lately, talking it through can help. If you’d like support, feel free to reach out.