You ever think about something that’s going to happen, and you can’t help but dread it or hype yourself up with anxiety, only to find out that it wasn’t nearly as bad as you thought it would be?

If you’re anything like me (and I’m inclined to believe most humans are), you get anxious at everything, even if the stress levels vary. Planning a party, performing on stage, going to events you doubt you’d enjoy, doesn’t matter.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. I’ve brushed on this before (though it was like seven months ago), but when we think about future events, our brains have a habit of romanticizing them, warping them and branching off into all the possibilities of how that scenario will go. Most often, they branch off towards either the worst or the best cases.

When you go on a date, pessimism will say you’re going to do any number of embarrassing things, say the wrong words, or run out of things to say and be left with an awkward silence. On the other hand, optimism will tell you that you’ll be incredibly charming, suave, take your pick of any positive adjective. You imagine it’ll go amazing and everything you could want to happen does.

Only, that’s not how the world works. In virtually every scenario you plan, the reality will end up being somewhere in the middle. It’s just a bell curve probability. If you’re a chronically anxious person, I want you to think back to all the situations and events you were particularly worried about. I’d be willing to bet pretty much all of them turned out okay. You might remember a particularly embarrassing moment from that event, but in hindsight, it was ridiculous to assume the apocalypse would happen that day, right?

Your gut will tell you any number of awful things occur if you go to that party. But your gut is a drama queen and blows up possible scenarios when the likelihood of most of them seeing fruition is zero.

The best thing to do is to shrug off your mind’s impossible pre-conceived notions of how something might fail catastrophically. This is why, when you’re planning on torturing somebody, you don’t tell that person what you’re going to do to them. Instead, you make sure they know they will be tortured, and you leave them to fill the blanks. The scenarios they will construct in their mind will be far, far worse than anything you could really do to them. As a side note, you probably shouldn’t be torturing people. Trust me, it’s a bad habit.

All that being said, try new things! Be adventurous! Even if nothing pans out spectacularly, you’ll come out of things with more insight into your personality and, in general, a more experienced person. Alternatively, if you never try anything because you’re too scared, what is going to stop you from being scared of everything? Don’t let your fear of what might be stop you from having to ask yourself what could have been.