The Send button click sounds louder than it should in a room this quiet. It’s a mechanical snap that echoes against the four walls of my office, a finality that I immediately want to retract. I just sent that proposal to the director, and within 3 seconds, the simulation begins. My chest tightens, and I crack my neck-a bit too hard, actually, a sharp wince-inducing pop that radiates down my left shoulder-and suddenly I’m not in my office anymore. I’m in a future that hasn’t happened yet. In this version of reality, she hates the font choice. In another, she thinks I’m incompetent. In the most vivid one, I’m clearing out my desk while 43 coworkers watch in pitying silence.

Your brain isn’t trying to make you miserable; it’s trying to keep you alive by simulating every possible way you could die-or, in modern terms, every way you could lose your social standing, which to the primitive brain, is effectively the same as dying.

The Surveillance System Inside

I think about Phoenix C.M. a lot when I’m in this state. Phoenix is a retail theft prevention specialist I knew back in the day, a person whose entire career was built on the foundation of professional paranoia. Phoenix didn’t look at a customer and see a shopper; they saw a series of tactical vulnerabilities. They spent 13 years behind a bank of 233 monitors, watching for the subtle twitch of a shoulder or the way someone’s eyes lingered just a fraction of a second too long on the high-end electronics. Phoenix’s job wasn’t to wait for a crime to happen; it was to predict it before the person even reached for the merchandise.

“

Your brain is Phoenix C.M. It is sitting in a dark room in the back of your skull, staring at 233 different screens of your life, looking for the ‘shoplifter’-the rejection, the failure, the embarrassment.

When you catastrophize, you are simply watching the feed and saying, ‘What if that guy in the red hoodie grabs the laptop?’ You aren’t losing control. You are attempting to gain control over an uncertain future by rehearsing the disaster. If you can imagine the worst-case scenario in 133 different variations, you feel, on some deep, lizard-brain level, that you won’t be surprised when it happens. Surprise, to a primitive creature, is usually fatal.

System Overheat: Wasted Energy

But we aren’t on the savannah anymore. The ‘predator’ is a passive-aggressive email or a slow response to a text message. The simulation is running at 100% capacity for a 3% threat level. This creates a massive systemic overheat. We are burning through emotional RAM, trying to solve problems that haven’t actually manifested in the physical world. I’ve spent at least 83 hours this month solving problems that literally do not exist outside of my own imagination. That is a staggering amount of wasted energy.

Observing the Feed, Not Being the Feed

This is where the work of people like Rico Handjaja becomes so vital. It’s about understanding the system. You don’t tell Phoenix C.M. to stop looking at the monitors-that’s their job. You don’t tell your brain to stop worrying; that’s its biological mandate. Instead, you change the relationship with the simulation. You recognize that the image on the screen is a digital representation, not the store itself. Rico’s approach to evidence-based practice and internal regulation focuses on this exact pivot: moving from being the person in the simulation to being the person observing it.

When we look at the methodologies shared within the Hypnotherapist, we see a similar thread-the understanding that the mind creates these loops not out of malice, but out of a desire for safety. The goal isn’t to silence the mind, but to retrain the response to the thoughts it produces. If Phoenix sees someone suspicious, they don’t necessarily call the police immediately. They watch. They wait for actual evidence. Most of us, however, are calling the SWAT team the moment we see someone in a hoodie.

The Paradox of Cognitive Power

We are the only species that can feel the physical symptoms of a heart attack just by thinking about a stressful meeting. Our bodies don’t know the difference between a real tiger and a thought of a tiger. When your heart rate hits 143 bpm while you’re sitting on your couch, your body is literally preparing to fight or flee. But there’s nothing to fight, and nowhere to run, so the chemicals just sit there, corroding your nerves.

Catching the Thief: Out of Place vs. Suspicious

Phoenix C.M. once told me that the best way to catch a thief isn’t to look for ‘suspicious’ people, but to look for ‘out of place’ actions. A person looking at a product is normal. A person looking at the ceiling to find the cameras is ‘out of place.’ We need to apply this to our anxiety. The thought ‘I might fail’ is normal. The action of ‘rehearsing my failure for 3 hours straight‘ is out of place. It’s an over-extension of the software.

Real Crisis vs. Hypothetical Strain

We often think that if we stop worrying, we’ll be blindsided. We think our anxiety is a shield. But… In a crisis, the simulation stops because the reality is finally here. The brain stops ‘predicting’ and starts ‘doing.’ Most of us are actually quite good in a real crisis; it’s the imaginary ones that break us. We are better at handling 13 real problems than we are at handling 1 hypothetical one.

Re-assigning Phoenix C.M.

So, what do we do with Phoenix? We don’t fire them. We don’t shut down the security room. We just acknowledge the report. ‘Thank you, brain, for the 23-page report on how I might embarrass myself at dinner tonight. I see that you’ve highlighted the potential for me to spill red wine on the host’s white rug. I’ve noted the risk. Now, let’s go back to actually eating the dinner.’

It sounds simplistic, but it’s a radical shift in internal power dynamics. I’m still working on this. My neck still cracks when I get stressed, and I still find myself 53 minutes into a mental spiral before I realize I’m even doing it. But the spirals are getting shorter. I’m starting to recognize the ‘hoodie’ for what it is-just a piece of clothing, not a threat.

The goal is to move from threat-simulation to reality-participation. The future is a series of probabilities, not a single inevitable disaster. By engaging with the present-the weight of the mouse in my hand, the sound of the heater, the actual words on the screen-I can pull the plug on the simulation. It’s not about being ‘fearless.’ It’s about being ‘present’ enough to realize that most of what we fear is just a ghost in the machine, a shadow on a monitor in a room that Phoenix C.M. left years ago.

We are safe right now. In this exact moment, as you read these words, you are breathing. The floor is holding you up. The sky isn’t falling. The simulation is just a story, and you are the one holding the pen. Or, more accurately, you’re the one who can choose to stop writing for a while and just look out the window.