Hello, and welcome back to Practicing Human, the podcast where every day we're

getting a little better at life. I'm your host, Cory Muscarra, and in today's

episode, I'm going to share with you the What If Exercise. More to come on that in

a moment, first let settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so the What If Exercise. This is a bit of a cognitive exercise that we can

use when we find ourselves caught up in fear and anxiety, specifically around an

anticipated negative outcome. I talked about this in the past on the podcast, but a lot

of times when something goes wrong or we perceive something that could happen negatively,

our mind goes to the worst case scenario. And a lot of times we're not even actively

reflecting on the details of that outcome, that scenario, or the realistic nature of that

scenario. We're just so caught up in the emotional charge, and then it seems to be running

subconsciously. And so we've talked about a lot of different tools to work with that,

but one way that I have found useful is just to meet it head on with a bit of a, I don't

want to say aggressive attitude, but just a very clear discerning attitude, which is

just like, okay, yeah, if that happens, so what? And then the mind goes, wait, what do

you mean, so what? It's like, yeah, no, that terrible thing that's going to happen, so

what? And what's great about this exercise, and I'll walk you through it more specifically

in a moment, is two things. The first of which is that we get to see that usually the

narrative and the story in our mind of what we think will happen, the What If That

happens is usually a bit ridiculous, and is the total catastrophizing of the situation.

But the next thing we get to see is that usually there's some common end point of, you

know, where we're dying, nobody loves us, whatever it might be. And you get to practice

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