The Future Isn’t a Story | Five Questions for an Anxious Brain

By Jennifer Finch, M.A., LPC, ACS, SEP

September 30, 2026

Anxious minds are extraordinarily good storytellers. Down to every exacting and excruciating detail, playing out every cinematic Michael Bay explosive, triumphant spectacle celebrating victory. But somehow, anxiety notoriously twists these golden sunset opportunities where the hero survives, saves the world, and gets the girl into an ending where the human spirit is crushed by tyranny.

Our minds love a bleak, dystopian, Orwellian ending of despair and resignation, where the hero is completely broken, brainwashed, or dies defeated. So why do we live for a jubilant, victorious ending in movies when, in real life, we walk through even our ordinary days like doomsday?

An unproven, anecdotal theory.

Recently, I was watching a documentary about September 11, and something stayed with me. It was a discussion of the remarkable American innocence we held before the attacks and how we sustained this innocence even after the first plane hit the North Tower. We wanted to believe anything and everything but… our actuality.  We reached for any and all explanations that preserved the constructed world we knew and built.

I remember turning to a stranger beside me and saying, “Something must have gone terribly wrong with the plane.” And the stranger replied with, “The pilot must have had a heart attack.” I nodded. Others in the room came up with other possible endings, but we all unanimously agreed that there was no other explanation—it must have been a horrific accident. There was absolutely no way, even in Hell, that this was intentional. Then the second plane hit, and our collective innocence shattered into a million uncollectable shards on the floor. In a flash, a second reality flooded in, and we knew what kind of world we were standing in. And it wasn’t one we recognized.

From then on, our American sense of safety stood on a rickety bridge. Something in us became dysregulated on a mass scale, and a whole nation’s nervous system recalibrated. Culturally. Personally. Intergenerationally. Anxiety and fear became blueprinted and timestamped. And whatever remained of our untested innocence vanished.

I am not making any causal scientific claims here that need to be substantiated, but I was struck by how my own anxiety seemed to have imprinted in a bit differently since that day. I’ve never had a fear of flying, but now I can’t say with 100% certainty that I feel absolutely relaxed on a flight.

I also say this knowing that “innocence” was never equally available to everyone. In my job, as a trauma therapist, I know with certainty that millions of Americans have experienced violence, war, racism, poverty, terrorism, and profound personal loss long before September 11. With my clients, I often say that one of the costs of living through hard things is that we lose a certain kind of naïveté.

But prior to that day, for a majority of us, possibilities were still available and able to be tossed in as theoretical endings. Michael Bay was still rolling film, and the heroes continued walking in slow motion to a soaring musical score.

But post-9/11, our brains have learned to look for the second plane.

An anxious brain loves evidence.

Behind every true crime obsession lies an anxious brain. I speak from experience. I love a good catch and capture. A solvable situation. Where the bad guy gets caught, and justice is served. I tend to over-resonate with the detectives who retire ruminating over that one case that still remains cold.

Once we’ve been frightened, hurt, betrayed, or blindsided, our minds become very interested in preventing it from happening again. If you think about this, it makes perfect biological sense. Noting the earliest signs of danger could protect us this time around. So, we stand at the ready.

Humans were meant to evolve, not become serene bystanders. To evolve, among other things, we need to experience life, learn how to handle it, and survive long enough for evolution to transpire. Somewhere back in our ancestry, the relaxed ones who assumed the rustle in the grass was just the wind didn't always make it home. Serenity, evolutionarily speaking, was not always a winning strategy. Our ancestors who noticed danger early, startled, scanned, and responded quickly were the ones who lived long enough to pass that vigilance on. We are their descendants. We inherited their watchfulness, whether or not we're facing their tigers.

If we shine a search-and-rescue light on anxiety, we can see its underlying positive nature. Anxiety is, to some degree, trying to protect us from harm. It wants to know what is coming so we can get there first. And predicting safety takes a tremendous amount of energy. Yet, when so much of our attention is devoted to anticipating what might happen next, there is very little room left to simply experience what is happening now.

The other problem with our extraordinary capacity for prediction is that prediction can become confused with prophecy. We see something, and we interpret it through a clouded lens riddled with wiggly lines of anxiety. Our brains fill in the blanks with the next thing, and the next thing, and the next. Before long, we have etched in our defensible conclusion, and are no longer responding to what is happening, but to what we “think” is happening. And we are responding to the one and only absolute ending that we have subscribed to (one that has not yet occurred).

I’m not against rehearsing endings. There’s nothing wrong with playing out possible denouements.  We all can imagine how the story might resolve. In fact, it can even be useful to rehearse worst-case scenarios to help us feel prepared. It lets us consider what we might do, what resources we would need, and whether we could handle what we fear. There is a difference, though, between considering an ending and living inside of one.

It becomes problematic when all of our projected possibilities harden into rigid probabilities and inflexible certainties. And the real trouble begins when we attach ourselves to an outcome before the story has unfolded.

This is when our ordinary functioning starts to diminish. We start making decisions, changing our behavior, bracing our bodies, and feeling emotions in response to something that HAS NOT happened. At that point, we are no longer preparing for the future. We are experiencing an imagined future as though it were already here.

It’s a painful way to live—not only for those living in a state of anticipatory anxiety—but for the people who love them and find themselves living alongside a future where the sky is always falling, even though it hasn’t fallen yet. There is a collateral effect. And anxiety can be incredibly contagious.

Humans have a lavish capacity to suffer from futures that have not happened. Other mammals anticipate threats, show prolonged stress responses, and alter behavior based on expected future events. What appears distinctively human is the complexity and duration of our ability to mentally simulate possible futures…and then have a physiological and emotional response to those imagined scenarios.

***

Here’s how we know it’s anxiety and not reality: predictions about the future look suspiciously like stories. And we already know that anxiety is a phenomenal storyteller.

I know stories have certain requirements. For starters, they compress time. They simplify enormous amounts of information in the length of a great movie. They identify protagonists and antagonists. They establish causes, create emotional coherence, and they eventually arrive somewhere. There is a beginning. A middle. And an end.

Reality is not under any such formulaic obligation. It is messy, and because “life goes on,” it doesn’t arrive at an ending. It forever remains unfinished. Suffering rarely resolves itself as neatly as the stories we tell about it. What we call an ending is often simply the point beyond which we cannot yet see. Something changes. Something is lost. Something else becomes possible. Life, as we experience it, keeps moving beyond the conclusions our minds are so eager to write.

Even when a story formally “ends,” our minds understand that that ending is partly constructed. Even with our favorite television characters, we can mentally carry their stories beyond the camera. And there is hope that a season three might be coming. The ending only exists because someone decided where to stop the story.

Reality has no such director. It is just us and our own minds. Reality contains billions of protagonists and antagonists, which makes it quite complex and confusing—all of these people out here responding to one another simultaneously. It is all so gloriously unpredictable. Someone will, of course, change course. Pivot on a dime. Be unpredictable. Surprise you. Your Uber driver could arrive ten minutes early and change your whole Sliding Doors timeline. Someone will invent something that will alter the world’s trajectory (ahem, AI). Something you were certain would happen won’t. And something you couldn’t have imagined will.

Even the highly skilled anxious mind cannot hold all that with all of those possible feedback loops, coincidences (if you believe in them), adaptations, and consequences of consequences. There are just too many variables; it becomes incomprehensible to an average brain. So what does an anxious mind do? It compresses all those variables down, and then it tells a story. Ideally, one that tidies itself up in under two cinematic hours.

***

Here are five questions I have started thinking about for recognizing when anxiety has crossed the line from reality-based information into fiction.

1.   Does my story already have an ending?

 This might be the most important one because anxiety does not like not knowing what’s going to happen. Anxiety will want to say it knows exactly where this is going. It works in complete sentences like: everything is going to fall apart. It will say things like: my marriage is going to end. I am going to lose my job. My child is not going to be okay. This symptom means I have cancer. I’ll never recover from this. Now, even though some truth might be held momentarily in each sentence, notice what they have in common. There’s an ending. But you are standing in the middle. One of the simplest interventions for an anxious thought may therefore be: How did I get all the way to the end of a story that hasn’t finished happening?

2.   Have I made something enormously complicated very simple?

Ooooph, how catastrophic thinking loves a straight line of causality. Anxiety apparently took one physics class, learned that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and dropped out before anyone got to chaos theory. A happened, so therefore B will happen. Which means C. And then obviously D. I love a good cause-and-effect scenario, as I suspect most of us do. In this type of Newtonian thinking, we relax when we get to the ending. Except human life almost never behaves this cleanly. Even causality is vastly more complex than the anxious mind pretends it is.

If we look at chaos theory (briefly)—the idea behind the famous butterfly effect—it doesn’t suggest that a butterfly simply flaps its wings and causes a hurricane. The point is almost the opposite: between those two events are an unfathomable number of variables, interacting in ways no human being could possibly track or predict with certainty. Human life is no different. We cannot account for every person who will turn left instead of right, get on the train or miss it, make the call or change their mind. There are conversations that haven’t happened yet. Information we don’t possess yet. Choices other people haven’t made yet. Choices you haven’t made yet. Resources you haven’t needed yet. Changes already underway that you cannot see from where you are standing.

This is where I believe conscious awareness matters. If we can hold ourselves—and our brains—a little more accountable, we retain some power to influence what happens next. But when we continually cater to an anxious mind, anxiety strips away all those variables because uncertainty is uncomfortable. It draws a straight line from A to D and calls it destiny. But uncertainty is also where possibility and creativity live. “I don’t know” can feel frightening. But I don’t know also means the terrible ending isn’t known either.

3.   Is the intensity of my emotion convincing me that the thought is true?

 This one is tricky because fear feels like evidence. When we feel somatic symptoms, like a racing heart or a stomach dropping, it can be extraordinarily difficult to distinguish reality from perceived danger. We cannot discern with any real clarity whether this feels terrifying or whether this is going to happen! But they are not the same statement. Fear is real. I wouldn’t dare go to bat with it when it is happening in real time. But when we’re feeling fear about something that hasn’t happened yet, we need to remember that the conclusion fear has reached may not be true.

 I am absolutely against toxic positivity, so I am not saying to talk yourself into a rainbow kitten ending. I barf a little in my mouth when people insist everything will be fine, and I have learned that's often just another story. So, the practice here is learning to let the body say, I’m frightened, without requiring the mind to finish the sentence with, “and therefore I know what’s coming.”

4.   Is the story almost too compelling?

Doomsday is fascinating. “Things may be difficult, and humans will probably respond in complicated and unpredictable ways” isn’t particularly a gripping documentary that people will binge-watch. Our attention is naturally captured by danger, conflict, novelty, and emotionally charged information. And we have built a world now around clicks, views, alerts, breaking news, and algorithms competing for our attention. So naturally, the most emotionally activating version of events will have an enormous advantage. Not all frightening information is false, so we have to train our brains to suss out the complexity to get at the truth. But how strongly something captures your attention tells you very little about how accurately it predicts the future. A terrifying story can contain facts AND still be a story.

5.   What does this story reveal about me?

Lastly, this may be the most compassionate question of all. Gently start by asking: why is this the future my mind keeps constructing? If every unanswered text becomes abandonment, perhaps the story isn’t really about the text. If every physical sensation becomes catastrophe, perhaps the story isn’t really about today’s sensation. If every difficulty in your child’s life becomes evidence that their future is ruined, perhaps something in you is desperately trying to prevent a pain you’ve already known. Our predictions can often reveal our histories, to some degree. The mind doesn’t necessarily predict what is most likely. Sometimes it predicts what it fears the most and doesn’t want to experience AGAIN.

It keeps looking for the second plane it has already seen.

The dangers of certainty.

Fear isn’t the enemy. But the pursuit of certainty can become an obsession. A wicked little human habit: we keep thinking, rehearsing, investigating, convinced that if we follow every possibility far enough, we can finally put our fear to rest.

Anxiety can pull us into this pursuit. And it will condense the story, leaving out details and mistaking emotions and thoughts as evidence. It will have us jumping to conclusions before events have unfolded, and then become so committed to our ending that we are blind to other possibilities. Perhaps we have been chasing our whole lives—trying to get to the bottom of a future that hasn’t happened yet. Certainty has dangers, and anxiety’s sprawling tentacles keep pulling us toward them.

Certainty, in the moment, feels empowering, even satisfying. Because you have the answer, you don’t need anything more. It struts around in an over-confidence haze, letting us believe we can finally rest and stop searching. But that relief can cost us our curiosity, our imagination, our willingness to be surprised. We become less available to what is happening and less able to recognize where we still have human choice. We can become so occupied with anticipating life that we lose our capacity to experience it directly—to be surprised, moved, delighted, or touched by something we didn’t see coming. Even joy has to pass through an inspection: How long will this last? What will it cost me? What happens when it ends? We begin to meet each moment with a conclusion already in place, leaving little room for the unguarded experience of being alive. And that is what makes it such a dangerous notion. The ending we’ve imagined can obscure the life still unfolding.

I don’t think the answer to our increasingly anxious culture is optimism, because we all know that optimism can tell great stories too. Sometimes bad things happen. People get sick. Marriages end. Wars have gone on for centuries. Children struggle. People we love will die. “Everything happens for a reason” and “It’ll all work out” offer assurances we cannot always make, because we are still in the middle of the story.

So, we cannot return to innocence by convincing ourselves that the world is safe. Maturity asks us to hold a nondual relationship with our thinking: terrible things are possible, AND we don’t have to live as though every terrible possibility is already underway. There is an enormous space between naïveté and catastrophe. A space where reality is actually occurring. A space where we can acknowledge danger, respond to what needs our attention, and remain open to what we do not yet know.

Right here. Right now. Before the ending. Before the next conversation, the next choice, and all of the information we don’t yet have. Before your mind knows what will happen next.

Practicing uncertainty begins with noticing when we’ve turned a possibility into a conclusion. When we are telling a story with an unbudgeable ending and then asking our bodies to live inside that ending. The future isn’t a finished story. Not yet. We still have a part in what happens next.