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
You may have heard a specific word for this.
It's called anticipatory anxiety.
And it's essentially when we borrow stress, suffering, fear from the future by attempting to problem solve a hypothetical situation that hasn't happened yet in the present.
basically a complicated way of saying we think that we can avoid future anxiety by making it a today problem.
The issue is that that's entirely irrational.
No level of thinking about something can change what is going to happen, but that doesn't matter.
That's the reason it is a form of anxiety, because it is irrational.
Let me break down for you why.
Why, despite this irrationality, our brain likes to pursue this path of future fear and
even when it doesn't necessarily make sense or doesn't necessarily help us?
Like, why do we find ourselves worrying so continuously about things that we cannot change when that feels so impractical?
There are a few reasons.
Reason number one is just this illusion of certainty.
Essentially, constantly thinking about all the potential horrible ways or the horrible futures we could face
At least it gives our mind something to do.
At least it gives our mind a sense that we're doing something productive about our fear because we are being cognitively, mentally preventative.
As is the case with all overthinking.
We don't actually fear the situation.
We fear that we won't be able to cope with the situation.
And so to remove that primary fear in advance, we
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