THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO TRAP: ANXIETY, TEENS AND THE EMPTY NEST SPIRAL | MINDSET TRAP #7
Welcome back to the mindset traps of the Empty Nest series. This is trap number seven, the worst-case scenario trap. The worst-case scenario trap, anxiety, teens, and the emptiness spiral.
The worst-case scenario trap. The worst-case scenario trap, anxiety, teens, and the emptiness spiral.
Welcome to the Almost Empty Nest podcast with Small Jar Coach. This show is for moms of teens who are ready to let go with love, release anxiety, and rebuild connection with their teen and themselves as they approach the empty nest.
I’m your host, Jennifer Collins, a Master Certified Coach and a fellow mom walking this path right alongside you.
You don’t have to navigate this season alone.
This episode is all about the mindset trap of worst-case scenario thinking, and today I'm going to show you how this habit isn't just about worry. It's actually costing you peace and the connection you have with your teen or adult kid. Today you're going to learn three valuable lessons.
First, you'll learn why your brain defaults to imagining the worst, especially during this almost-emptiness chapter. Second, you'll discover how this anxiety-driven mindset Second, you'll discover Second, you'll learn how this Next, you'll learn how this mindset trap is showing up in very subtle ways in your life, in your parenting, your relationship with your teen, and even how you think about yourself and your own future. And finally, and most importantly, you'll learn how to stop this spiral, so you can stop living in fear of what might happen, and start showing up from a place of calm, confident, and unconditional love.
This episode will help you understand what's really going on in your anxious mind, and how to take your power back. So let's get into it.
Hello my friend.
It's actually unbelievable how quickly time goes. One minute you're watching your somewhat awkward teen navigating their freshman year of high school, and in a blink, you're touring colleges and putting their graduation date on the calendar. That first year with your first kid away at college, it's an adjustment.
And amazingly, you get used to that too, their absence. But then they still come home. They still need you.
You still find yourself navigating the balance between holding on and letting go, even with your now baby adult kid. This almost empty nest time isn't just about the last few months before your kid goes to college. And if you have multiple kids, it can feel like a long, messy stretch of time where you're having to parent each of your kids very differently based on where they are.
What I've discovered in my own journey, and what I've definitely seen in conversations with so many of my clients, is that as much as we focus on how best to raise and launch our kids, really, this time of our lives brings up a lot of really hard questions about who we are. First and foremost, who we are as moms. Really, the kind of mom we want to be for our kids as they grow up.
But even more, we start grappling with the kind of woman we want to be as we notice that our kids are increasingly becoming their own independent people. And for some of us, this means a lot more space to be in our own heads about our life, whether that be about our kids and what's going on with them, or any number of things going on with us in our lives. We can find ourselves stuck thinking about everything from whether our kid is happy and being responsible to what's happened to our friendships, and whether or not we should be working or finding some new hobby, whether we should make a career shift.
You know, it's funny, you rarely hear anyone talk about this almost emptiness space as a midlife crisis, but this is exactly what it can feel like. The truth is, everything feels like it's changing, whether we want it to or not. Our roles, our relationships, our sense of identity, even our day-to-day routines.
So why is it exactly that we don't call this phase of life a midlife crisis? Maybe because the word crisis feels too dramatic, like something big and flashy and external, like having a meltdown. You hear that stereotype of a midlife man in crisis buying the red convertible. A crisis feels like it should be reserved for something dramatic, some life of people.
But for us in this almost empty nest, this crisis is quieter. It's internal. If you're like many of my clients, you're going about your day-to-day as if nothing's really wrong.
Everyone else you know on the stage seems to be managing life just fine, so you can feel this pressure to be fine. Or you might know someone who's really outwardly struggling with something about this transition, and we can judge that too. We don't want to be dramatic about this.
We don't want to feel like this transition to the empty nest is a crisis. But even though on the outside we might be acting like everything is great, it's fine, we can have this internal sense of feeling unsettled. Am I doing the right thing? Did I do it wrong? How do I prepare? How can I help? How can I feel better? I wonder also if as moms, we're just geared up to put ourselves and our own needs last.
We're kind of used to sucking it up. So it's like we don't want to be dramatic. We're used to just taking it.
And so we're really working hard to push away some of these negative feelings, almost not giving ourselves permission to feel what we need to feel. And I think particularly when it comes to the mindset trap I'm going to talk about today, we can feel afraid that letting ourselves feel it means we're going to go down an endless spiral of misery and pain that we can't pull ourselves out of. So my friend, today as I talk about this mindset trap, this spiral into the worst-case scenarios, I want to offer you this.
If you find yourself falling into this trap, there is nothing wrong with you, and you are not in any way alone in feeling this way. But instead of just pushing away or pushing through these painful feelings, I want to offer you a different way, a different path to take power over your emotional well-being so that you don't have to feel stuck in pain. In fact, so you can actually get back a sense of peace and confidence, which can honestly feel fleeting in this stage of life.
Before I dive into this mindset trap, I want to take a moment to recap where we've been in this series so far. At the very start of the series, in a multi-part introduction, I talked about the idea that these mindset traps are not a sign that there's something wrong with you or something inherently in our personality. We can often think that we fall into these mindset traps, and so that means something about who we are.
With this trap in particular, my clients will tell me, well, I'm just an anxious person. I always go to the worst-case scenario. But with each of these traps, I invite you to explore how these traps aren't a sign that you're broken or doing something wrong, but they're simply automatic, habitual patterns of thinking.
And they've become habits because your brain has learned to think this way in an effort to protect you. So the first mindset trap we explored was emotional reasoning. This is the trap that tells us our feelings are facts.
That if I feel anxious, it must mean something's wrong. If I feel guilty, I must have done something wrong. This trap is like being on a roller coaster of your emotions, where the highs and the lows feel completely out of your control.
But what we explored in that episode is that emotions aren't the truth of our lives. They're just signals. Our feelings are just a reflection of the thoughts running through your mind.
And so the invitation with this trap, and really why I felt it so important to cover this trap first, is that you create agency over your emotional well-being by understanding the thoughts creating your emotional experience. The second trap we explored was all-or-nothing thinking. This is our brain's way of simplifying life into extremes, either good or bad, success or failure, perfect or disaster.
It's interesting to consider how all-or-nothing thinking is a way our brain tries to protect us because it offers certainty. If there are only two possible outcomes, we know what we're working for, and we know what we're trying to avoid. But the downside is that this way of thinking keeps us from seeing the nuance in life, the possibility of our lives.
And this often keeps us stuck in unproductive ways of showing up, both with our kids and with ourselves. The third trap I explored was the comparison trap. And this one might also feel very familiar to you, because we all compare, we all judge.
It's actually our brain's way of assessing how we fit in. The problem is that the comparison trap isn't really about the other people we're comparing ourselves to. It's about the meaning about ourselves that our brain creates in response to those comparisons and judgments.
It is so normal for us to compare. But the trap is when we interpret these judgments as meaning something about how or whether we belong. If we're falling behind or just not good enough.
You can start to see how these traps layer on top of each other. Because if we're taking our emotions as facts, in other words, if we feel anxious, then we believe that there must be something to feel anxious about. Then it's like we're adding fuel to the fire of all-or-nothing thinking in the comparison trap.
Because we're not even questioning the underlying thinking causing our feelings of anxiety or insecurity. We just assume that because we feel this way, it must be true. The next two traps I explored were more about how these mindset traps can lead us to respond or act in a way that doesn't serve us.
First was the mindset trap of the illusion of control. This one hits hard for us because for years we did feel like we had a lot of control over our kids' lives. What they ate, who they spent time with, where they went.
But then there's some point in time, and for every kid it's different. But we're supposed to just know how and when to let go. There is no manual here.
No one tells us how to do this. So we're left to just figure it out. And every instinct in us is telling us to hold on.
We feel convinced that the solution is to try to figure out how to say or do the right thing so we can make everything okay. The problem is this ability to control is just an illusion. And so getting out of this trap is really about understanding where we have control and where we don't.
Most recently I explored the trap of perfectionism. And this is another one that can feel a lot like a personality trait. But the really interesting thing to understand about this trap is that it's not at all about being perfect.
It's truly about fear. The fear of getting it wrong or not doing it enough. The fear of failure.
But even more, regret. I think this trap of perfectionism masks itself as responsibility and love, but it is truly based in fear. So all of these traps come together with this next trap, the worst case scenario.
Because there's so much about all of these traps that set us up to feel fear. These traps make us feel like we're not doing enough, or that we've already messed up, or that we can't control what's happening, but that somehow we should be able to. So it's no wonder that our brain is susceptible to spiraling into worst-case scenario thinking.
As I was preparing for this episode, I asked ChatGBT a question about worst-case scenario thinking, and it actually suggested calling this trap future tripping. Which I think is actually a really interesting way to think about it. Because so often when our brains go to the worst-case scenario, what we're really doing is mentally living in the future.
We're envisioning this future version of our lives where we feel fear and regret and pain. This version of life hasn't in any way happened yet, but it can feel so real in this moment. When your teen is struggling, whether it's with school or friendships or motivation, your brain doesn't just notice the problem.
It launches itself into a painful future, the implication of whatever you see in front of you right now. Like if your kid is struggling in school, you can start thinking, what if he doesn't pass this class? What if he doesn't graduate? Or what if this hurts his chances for success getting into college or getting that next job? What if he ends up living in my basement? Or if your teen struggles socially, you might spiral into thinking, what if she never finds real friends? What if she gets depressed? What if she always feels left out? We can also spiral in our thoughts about our own lives. We wonder what's going to come next for us in our empty nest chapter, and we start thinking, what if it's too late to start something new? Or should I have been keeping up with a career or hobbies while I was raising kids? Or what if this is all there is? These are all examples of worst-case scenario thinking.
Your own flavor of this thinking might be different, but notice how in all of these examples, our brains are taking evidence from something happening in life right now and making it mean something terrible about the future. I know I've been in this spiral myself so many times, and I can't tell you how many of my clients have said this to me. Like, is it just me? Am I the only one who struggles with this? This is why I can't say this enough.
These traps can feel so real, but they're also so common. Sometimes these worst-case scenario spirals start as just a little bit of worry, but then you find yourself waking up at 2 a.m. and your brain is churning about things, thinking about what you don't want to be happening, thinking about the implications of these things happening into the future. You replay conversations in your head or find yourself thinking about all the ways you could or should respond, just to feel a little bit more of control.
As much as the anxiety can feel really overwhelming, this mindset trap often doesn't look like us panicking. Although, of course, sometimes it could. But more often, what it feels like is that we're just stuck.
Stuck in this feeling of discomfort and worry, this constant hum of anxiousness. And of course, we try so hard to get over it or shove it down. We try to talk ourselves out of feeling this way.
But that also doesn't work. So we're left, again, just feeling stuck. But with these traps, what's so fascinating is that they aren't a sign that there's something wrong with us.
It's actually about how our brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do. And this is the part where, for me, I remember back when I found this work, that I started to see how maybe the way I was thinking and feeling wasn't a sign that I was broken or helpless, but truly that it was just a sign that my mind was falling into an unproductive pattern of thinking that was, in fact, my brain's way of trying to help and protect me. It was a solution for my brain.
So if you've been following along with this series, you've heard me talk about the motivational triad. Essentially, that our brains are wired to do three things. Avoid pain, seek comfort, and conserve energy.
It actually makes perfect sense when you think about it from the perspective of early man and woman living in caves. They needed to react instantly to avoid threats. To survive, they had to find food and shelter and safety.
And they couldn't afford to waste energy in the process. These instincts helped humans survive. And when you think about it, the motivational triad still helps us in the modern world.
It's why you instinctively duck if something flies in your head or why you feel drawn to rest and take care of yourself. But when you think about our brain's motivation to avoid pain, when you think about it, pain isn't just physical. Pain is also at times emotional.
It's uncertainty. It's vulnerability and fear and sadness and guilt and anxiety. And our brains interpret all of these emotions as pain.
And of course, it's no surprise that these emotions come up a lot when we're raising and watching our kids. I remember when I first became a mom, I had the sense that my heart existed outside of me. It can feel like your sense of peace and well-being is tied to whether your kid is okay.
And when we worry they're not okay or that there's some potential for them to be not okay, our brains interpret this as a threat. Really, it's the threat of emotional and maybe even physical pain. It's scary enough when our kids are young, but as they start to grow up, I think it can feel even worse.
Our brain sees the threat of pain in the uncertainty of our kids' choices, in the changes in their moods and the way they relate to us. We see the potential for pain in our own loss of control and influence with our kids, the pain of letting go, maybe even in the loss of our role as a mom with kids at home. We may each have a different perspective on where we see the potential for pain in our lives.
And even with each of our kids, this is going to look different. But what's really happening is that our brains are trying to protect us. We interpret the world around us really as stories about what the facts of our lives mean.
And when these stories involve the potential for danger, this is where we have the potential to react to these stories by going down into the spiral of anxiety. As painful as this feels in the moment, there is a real purpose to this trap. When our brains go to the worst-case scenario, they're trying to avoid pain by anticipating what might go wrong.
Because look, if you can anticipate something bad happening, then it seems reasonable that you should be able to do something about it, something to prevent it. Believe it or not, this type of thinking is also a way to help us seek comfort. Consider that there's comfort in certainty, even if it's negative.
Even the worst news gives you something to hold on to. It's like, okay, at least now I know what to expect. I know what I'm dealing with.
Interestingly for our brains, uncertainty feels far more threatening than a known outcome, even if that outcome is bad. Finally, our brains think that going to the worst-case scenario is a way to conserve energy because just going to that one terrible outcome is at least instinctually easier than having to entertain all of the possibilities. But what you can already start to see is that our brain's instincts, while it feels really committed to this concept that it's trying to help us, those instincts are flawed.
But what you can already actually see is that although our brain really thinks it's trying to help us, this doesn't always work out to be the case. Because going to the worst-case scenario doesn't always help us avoid pain. In fact, it often has the opposite effect.
It actually keeps you stuck in pain, which is truly the worst-case scenario when you think about it. So the first part of this conversation is seeing that, one, this mindset trap is common to all of us, not just moms, but all of us. It's a very human instinct to try to avoid pain by thinking about the possibility of pain.
But the other part of this conversation is really seeing the negative impact of this basic instinct. And let's spend a moment on how this mindset trap shows up in our lives as moms. I'm sure I don't even need to point out the obvious ways our brains go to the worst case, like when your kid gets a bad test grade and you worry they'll fail.
Even if you rationally don't think that's true, your brain will go there. And it only gets worse if those bad grades continue or if you sense a bad attitude. Now your brain doesn't just stop failing the class, it starts to wonder if the kid's lazy or if they're never going to be successful in life.
Or what happens when your kid is moody or distant? They might stop sharing things. At first, you wonder if you did something wrong, but as time goes on, you start to worry that they really want to pull away from you. Maybe even that they don't want a relationship with you anymore.
You can start to fear that this is only the beginning and that you're only going to get further apart once they're out on their own. Maybe when these things happen, like a bad test grade or a bad attitude, if they happen once or twice, your brain can discount them. They might have that negative worst-case thought, but it moves on pretty quickly.
But then when the evidence of a risk piles up, this is when we can find ourselves stuck in that worst-case scenario thinking. And the problem is it can feel so true. This mindset trap also shows up in much more subtle ways.
It can be those times when you're driving your teen somewhere and you feel this wave of dread. You think this might be one of the last times we do this particular thing together. It can sneak up on you, this feeling.
It's like your brain flips a switch from being with them to losing them in an instant. Instead of being in that moment with your kid, you find yourself mourning the time even before it's over. We can also fall into worst-case scenario thinking because we feel this responsibility to protect our kids, even when nothing is clearly wrong.
It happens in those times when you text your teen and you don't get that text back. Time goes on and you jump to conclusions that something must be wrong or that they don't want to talk or they don't care about connecting with you. All that's really happened is that your kid hasn't responded, but your brain can fill the silence with fear.
We want reassurance that they're okay, but the only reason we're needing that assurance is because our brain is telling us a story about the worst case instead of just assuming that they're okay but maybe just living their lives and too busy to respond. I've also worked with women who feel stuck as they think about what comes next for them as their kids leave home. They feel hesitant to make plans or even get started to figure things out and they're not really sure why.
But believe it or not, worst-case scenario thinking can be a culprit here too. It's your mind saying to you, what if I'm too sad to have the energy to do something new? Or what if I start to do something and it's the wrong thing? What if I don't like it? Or what if my kid needs me and I won't have the flexibility to help them? It's like your brain is imagining an emotional reality that hasn't happened yet, but you start to live in anticipation of grief and loneliness and emptiness. And because it can actually feel like this future emotional pain is really possible, your brain actually convinces you that it's safer to just not do anything.
The opposite can be true too. You can keep yourself really busy trying to fill your calendar to avoid that empty feeling, that quiet house. But underlying the busyness is the thought, if I stop moving, these painful feelings are going to catch up with me and I won't be able to handle them.
This is worst-case scenario thinking too. But here's something important to notice. In each of these examples, you're not reacting to what's happening now.
You're reacting to the story your mind is telling you about what might happen. And that story isn't true just because your brain offers it to you. Look, as we've talked about, when your brain falls into these mindset traps, they're actually doing exactly what they're designed to do.
Uncertainty feels like a threat, and so your brain is trying to prepare you so you're not caught off guard. Your mind is literally thinking, if I can imagine the pain now, maybe I can avoid it. But that imagined pain isn't actually protecting you.
It's just a story in your mind. Granted, sometimes that story feels like it's really true, but it's still just a story. But the trap isn't actually the story.
The trap is that we believe the story, and we hold on to it. We let the story run on repeat in our minds so that we drive ourselves crazy with this fear of the imagined future, which again hasn't even happened yet. The cost of this trap isn't just the pain and the anxiety of thinking all of the worst-case scenario, which is bad enough in itself.
The cost even more is that we spend so much mental time in this terrible future that we miss what's happening in our lives right now. We miss the truth of what's right in front of us right now. Our teens are growing up as complex, resilient, messy humans.
They're figuring out who they are. They're learning. Sometimes they're getting it right, sometimes they're getting it wrong.
We can be so sure of what we think is right for them that we miss allowing them the space to figure out what they think is right for them. My friends, sometimes this looks really messy. Often, it doesn't look like what we want.
It can look like our kids not trying in school or being depressed, gaming too much, or dating someone we think is the wrong person. Or any number of things we think are not at all signs they're on the right path. But when we fall into this mindset trap, spinning in worst-case scenarios, we're already living mentally in a reality where they're likely to fail or live unhappy, unproductive, terrible lives.
So everything in us wants to slam on the brakes and get them to change course. We feel so responsible to help them avoid these terrible futures. But just think about how you often react to your teen when you're showing up from a place of fear and anxiety.
What it can look like is panic and nagging. Telling them they're wrong. Telling them what to do.
Judging them. Not giving them any credit for figuring it out. Not giving them the space to be who they need to be right now.
We say we love them unconditionally, but my friends, sometimes the way we react to our kids can make it seem like our love is conditional. That we need them to act in a certain way so that we can be okay. And the truth is, that's not our kid's job.
I think the other part of worst-case scenario thinking that we need to face is that we can be so focused on avoiding the pain of one specific outcome in the future, that we stop seeing ourselves as capable of navigating whatever comes. It's a fact of life. We will be faced with challenges.
And if you really think about your past, you've already faced them. You've already gotten through a number of challenges in life, one step at a time. Clients will sometimes say to me they've had really hard challenges in the past and they don't ever want to feel that way again.
Or they don't want their kids to repeat their mistakes. Whatever the situation, we can fear going back to that place. So this can become even more motivation and justification to try to predict and prevent and control the future.
Or control our kids' lives. The truth is, you did get through your experience in the past, one step at a time. You're not the same person you were back then.
You've grown in ways you may not even be giving yourself credit for. The power of the tools I teach my clients is that they learn how to trust themselves to be the person who can handle whatever comes. Imagine not having to fear or live in the pain of this terrible imagined future, but rather simply being able to be here now and trust yourself to do what you need to do in this moment.
The moment where your power actually is. So if this episode has been resonating with you, maybe you even notice how often your mind jumps to the future, spinning in stories that make you feel anxious or overwhelmed, I want you to take a deep breath for a minute. Just take one deep breath.
Because you're here right now. You're safe. Nothing is going wrong in this moment.
And yet I know how hard it is to feel present and grounded in this moment when your brain wants to take you to that imagined future. Because here's what makes this mindset trap really hard to escape. It feels productive.
It feels like love. It feels like being a good mom. Your brain is telling you, if I worry about it now, I'll be ready when it happens.
Or if I can figure out how to change this, we can avoid this worst case scenario. I can protect my kid or myself from pain. If you really think about it, it kind of makes sense.
Your brain is trying to avoid future pain. But what it's really doing is making you feel that pain ahead of time. It's causing you to live in anxiety right now, just in case.
It's like an emotional fire drill. But this way of thinking isn't making you stronger or helping you prepare. It's just wearing you down.
And the longer you stay in that loop, the more your nervous system starts to treat every moment like a potential threat. Clients will often tell me how often particular situations trigger them to feel anxiety and they go down a spiral. It's like we learn to fall into the habit of pulling the fire drill lever again and again and again.
Breaking free of worst case scenario thinking isn't just about telling yourself everything's going to be fine. When you try to do that, your brain will call BS. Your instinctual primitive brain does not want things to be probably fine.
It wants certainty. It wants control. It wants to know you'll be safe, no matter what.
Of course, none of us can promise that. So the only real path out of this trap is to build the internal capacity to feel safe, even when the future is uncertain. It's about understanding the patterns in your mind so that you can interrupt the spiral and, in place of anxiety, create self-trust.
And this is the work we do in coaching. It's not about you being broken or doing anything wrong. The fact is, no one ever taught us how to work with our minds.
We learned how to plan and how to prepare. Maybe we even learned how to worry. But no one ever taught us how to be with our thoughts, to be with our feelings in a way that allows us to actually create peace.
This is why I created my Mom 2.0 coaching program, because I've been in that place, living in fear of what might happen, constantly scanning my kids and my life for threats, for danger, and missing the beauty of my actual life. Peace doesn't actually come from trying to control your life or your kids, and it definitely doesn't come from white-knuckling through anxiety. Peace comes from understanding your mind as it is now and learning how to create new thought patterns that create calm confidence.
This gives you the power to show up from a place of unconditional love and connection with your kids and also with yourself. Mom 2.0 isn't therapy, and it's never about giving you advice. This program is a partnership where you'll gain new tools to understand your mind and I'll personally be there to guide you every step of the way so that you can show up to your life in a very intentional way.
This work is about finally seeing that you don't have to be at the mercy of your emotions, or your teen’s choices, or the uncertainty of life. With the tools you’ll learn in Mom 2.0, you stop reacting to fear and frustration, and know how to show up to your life with clarity, courage, and purpose, not just a mom launching her teens but as woman approaching the next chapter of her life.
My friend, if you see yourself going doing down the spiral of the worst cast, please know you’re not alone, and you’re not doing anything wrong. This is just your beautiful, protective brain doing its best to help you navigate a chapter of life that feels really uncertain. But just because your brain is telling you scary stories doesn’t mean you have to live them. There is another way and you don’t have to do this alone.
If you’re curious about what that journey might look like with support, I’d love to talk with you. You can email me a [email protected] and we can set up a time to talk about how Mom 2.0 can help you.
In the meantime, be gentle with yourself. You’re doing something very brave just by being here. By being curious. By starting to consider that maybe the problem isn’t you, and that you have a power within you that you haven’t yet tapped into. Maybe you’re starting to believe that it’s possible. When you’re ready to explore it, I am here for you.
You’ve spent enough time doubting yourself. It’s time to take your power back.
Until next time friend.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, Mom 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
