To him who is in fear everything rustles.

Alarm does not just colour what you see; it manufactures signal out of noise. Once the alarm is up, an unanswered message becomes contempt, a change in tone becomes a verdict, and the ordinary background of a day fills with meanings that were never put there. The state feels like heightened perception, which is exactly what makes it hard to correct from the inside.

A workable check is to ask what a calm person would make of the same evidence, or better, to ask one. When the answer is that they would make nothing of it, that is information about your state rather than about the world. Wait for the rustling to stop before you decide what it meant.