Your brain loves you so much that it literally acts as a bodyguard for you!  It’s whole job is to keep your body ALIVE! (So you can do stuff like watch movies, hang out with friends, dance, eat…. You gotta have a body for that stuff!)

The trouble is that your bodyguard brain takes itself a liiiiiiitle too seriously in this day and age when we aren’t actually foraging for food and running from tigers anymore.

Your brain wants to do a good job for you, but times have changed and your brain has nothing to do but run POTENTIAL scenarios. Then it wants to sit you down on the couch and tell you all about what could happen, theoretically, according to imaginary future situations it’s making up.  

You can understand that it would helps your brain keep you alive if you BELIEVE all those projected, dangerous “what ifs.”  It helps your brain if it can scare you into being super cautious.  So your bodyguard brain paints a vivid, totally believable picture.  There you are, quaking on the couch because OMG, someone COULD jump out of a bush with a purple balloon that pops and then somehow you could choke on, so you really SHOULD be afraid of bushes!  And balloons! And, well, PEOPLE!  Right?!  Nah. It’s just your way overprotective bodyguard taking itself way to seriously and trying to do a good job for you. 

Theoretically, bodyguards are hired to worry about us so that WE don’t have to worry about stuff.  Bodyguards have it covered.  So does yours.  Don’t worry – those scenarios aren’t real. But if you ever step out in front of a car you didn’t see coming at first, your bodyguard will reflexively get you out of the way – FAST – even if that wasn’t one of the dangerous scenarios it imagined. 

Your brain knows what to do and it will do it. You can count on those reflexes when they are actually needed in each, unplanned moment.

Whew!  Now you can say to your brain, “Thank you, my marvelous, annoyingly overprotective bodyguard!  You can go back to making up possible situations so that you are “prepared.” You go ahead and worry and do your job (and I’ll just kinda not listen next time you are running all those “what if” scenarios by me!)  Thanks! Good job!  I’m gonna go dance with my friends now!”