Have you ever noticed the incredible degree of dread, uncertainty, anxiety, terror about an upcoming event?

You are waiting, you're ruminating, you're, it's all you can think about, and you are spiraling on what if, worst case scenarios.

Now if this is you, you're not alone and I know it can be so overwhelming.

And what's so interesting is when the event actually happens, we realize it wasn't as bad as we

thought it was. Has this happened to you? Because the truth is, this is actually really, really common. Sometimes the hardest

part about these events isn't the event itself. It's the actual anticipation of that. So by the

end of this episode, what I want to promise you is that you will know what anticipatory anxiety is

and why it is often so much worse than the

thing itself. Welcome, my name is Kimberly Quinlan. I am an anxiety and OCD therapist and I am on

a mission to help 10 million of you to help suffer less with anxiety. I feel like the one

thing I can really do is to speak a little louder than all of the internet craziness that

you're hearing about these quick fixes and, you know, solve it right now. I want to give you

actual effective skills, skills that have

been proven by research to help you manage your day-to-day anxiety. So let's get into it.

What is anticipatory anxiety? Anticipatory anxiety is an intense fear or uncertainty. It can also

be dread that shows up before the event or before the

trigger. And so what this means is you know something is going to happen. It has created anxiety for

you. And until that event happens, you spend a lot of your time. In many cases, people say they spend

their entire day and much of the evening worrying about this event, worrying about how it will go,

what could or could not happen, how they will cope, will it be as bad as they think it is.

This is what it's like to have anticipatory anxiety.

Now, anticipatory anxiety can show up in many areas.

...