Hi, I'm Melissa Urban, and you're listening to Do The Thing, a podcast where we explore what's been missing every time you've tried to make a change and make it stick.

Today I'm bringing back one of my favorite guests, licensed clinical psychologist Dr. Vicky Batia, to talk about something I've been doing inside my own head for years, making up fights with people and playing them out, in great detail.

I'll play out a fight with my child's father, with my mom, with Brandon Brandon or a total stranger at the grocery store.

I will make up a scenario that literally hasn't happened and then I will behave inside my brain and in my body as if it has and just start arguing with them inside my head for minutes at a time and I will do this until something inside me snaps and I remember this isn't

real and it hasn't happened and there is no real threat and I could just stop. Brandon is the one who first observed and named this phenomenon.

He calls it getting hypothangry, hypothetically angry. He first noticed it a couple years ago one day in the gym when I was going on and on

about how my child's father might react when I shared some news with him. He let me talk for like two or three minutes

because he's a good boyfriend and a good listener and then he kind of interrupted me and said,

so like none of this has happened though, right?

And you don't know that this is going to happen.

So maybe you could just wait and see what happens before getting all worked up.

Yeah, okay, he had a point there and it was in that. getting all And I didn't know why.

It's not like these fights were all fights I'd had before

and I was replaying them.

Most of these were actually brand new scenarios that had never happened.

And it's not like in my head,

I played these fights out until they resolved amicably and peacefully.

No, the longer I had imaginary fights with people, the worse the fight got.

And I could feel it in my body.

I would get tense.

I would get angry.

It felt like my breathing became more shallow.

...