Stop rehearsing disasters you would never willingly attend.

Imagined catastrophe feels like preparation, but the body cannot tell the difference between rehearsal and experience. So you pay the emotional cost of an event that has not happened, sometimes many times over, and arrive at the real moment already depleted. It is possible to live through years of disasters that never came.

Allow yourself one clear pass at what could go wrong, and turn it into an actual plan you write down. Then when the scene tries to replay, remind yourself that the useful work is already done. The rehearsal after the plan is not preparation; it is just suffering ahead of schedule.