When Anxiety Answers the Phone

Rewriting the Stories We Tell Ourselves When the Unexpected Happens

My phone rang at work today which is nothing unusual really, happens many times a day. Although, it was my daughter calling and she rarely calls, especially during the work day. She's at university interstate and our communication is predominantly a funny text or the occasional FaceTime, rarely is it a call during the workday.

Within a split second of her name appearing on my phone screen I was jumping to the conclusion that something was wrong and that was the only reason for the unexpected call. I didn’t notice it happening in that moment, but I was jumping way ahead and filling in blanks quicker than I could answer the call.

By the time I picked up I’d already concluded that something was wrong and she was calling for help. Surely that was the only reason she'd be calling me during the day?

So what was it she needed? Nothing. Just a chat and nothing remotely like what I'd speculated. We talked about her week, what she’d been working on and her recent marks on some assignments, which were great by the way! It was easy, relaxed and non-eventful.

After the call I sat for a moment, realising I’d rushed straight to assuming the worst, even though there was no reason compelling me do so.

That gap between baseless speculation and reality is where a lot of unnecessary stress resides. Dr David Burns calls it “fortune telling" and it's one of numerous distortions he writes about in his work on cognitive behavioural therapy¹. The idea is simple; we predict an outcome, frequently negative in nature, and then we treat that prediction as if it’s already true. We have no facts or anything at all that logically points us to the dire conclusion, but we land on it in nano-seconds. What makes it even trickier is how natural it feels, there’s no obvious line where you stop guessing and start believing. It just sort of happens, and once it does, everything else follows. Your mood shifts, your body tightens and you start reacting to something that hasn’t actually happened.

I catch myself in these small moments of fortune telling all too often. An unanswered message that someone has read or a conversation that seemed strained which I replay, looking for what I missed. In today’s example, my daughter calls unexpectedly and I instantly assume something bad has happened. None of these situations come with a clear explanation, especially in the absence of any real facts, so my mind provides one scenario and frequently that explanation is a negative one.

While I wasn't quick enough to catch my "fortune telling” today, I’ve found a few things help when I do. The first is just calling it out to myself, whether silently or even out loud; perhaps a simple statement like "I'm predicting the future again.” It sounds basic, but it changes my relationship with the negative thought. Externalising and calling out a thought is a powerful way to arrest it. Then, I check the evidence, asking what’s actually in front of me? What unknown facts am I replacing with assumptions?

Inevitably, there’s more than one explanation for everything, even if your brain has already locked onto a negative one. You don’t need to land on the most positive version, you just need to remember that your first explanation isn’t always the most realistic. Often I find the best thing to do is nothing at all, just for a moment, and I let the situation unfold before deciding what it means. You're not trying to stop those thoughts from showing up, that’s unrealistic, they’re part of how we’re wired, especially when it comes to people we care about. All you are trying to do is get a bit quicker at catching them, because when you don’t, you end up reacting to something that exists only in your head.

That call from my daughter was a good reminder that sometimes the story you tell yourself feels completely real, despite being divorced from reality. Often it turns out to just be exactly what it was at that moment, like a daughter calling her dad for a chat.

1. Burns, David D. (2000). Feeling Good. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Harper.