Jemma Spake
speaker
1,071 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 23 Apr
Jemma Spake’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Anytime you have a negative assessment of the future, anytime you find yourself catastrophizing, write down five alternatives that end with a positive what if.
You know, your brain is, again, having this negativity bias whereby it's going to amplify the what if, insert worst case scenario here.
You are still allowed to have the what if.
Your brain is still allowed to have that preference for imagination or that preference for hypotheticals, but make them positive hypotheticals.
Turn the what if into something that's a bit more positively imaginative and vibrant.
It might not change your reality, right?
But that is not the objective.
The objective is, again, not to suffer twice.
The objective is to keep yourself more mentally prepared and physically prepared and emotionally prepared for if the worst case scenario does happen.
Because you haven't already exhausted yourself and exhausted all your mental resources as you were imagining it.
The only objective of this is not to change the reality.
Again, it's just so that you don't suffer twice.
This strategy was taken a step further by this researcher, this behavioral research scientist called Alison Wood.
who suggested that a way of coping with our fears about the future is to relabel our anxiety as excitement.
And we've spoken about this before, but in her work, Alison, she investigated people's responses to tasks that made them really fearful, made them really scared, nervous, things like public speaking, meeting with a boss, a first date.
And what she found was that in most cases,
As people were entering this situation, the most effective thing they thought they could do beforehand was to calm down and was to intensely try and ignore the uncomfortable feelings that they were feeling.
When they faced this situation, when they faced this anxiety about the future, they really did believe the best thing I can do is ignore it.
And what her research found was that actually, that actually made us think about the anxious feeling more.
It's like, I think, what is it called?
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