Fear is a magnifying glass with a terrible sense of scale.

Fear does not invent much. It takes something real and enlarges it until it fills the frame, so a possible outcome starts to look like a certain one and a bad week looks like a ruined life. The information inside it can be accurate while the size is completely wrong.

When a worry gets loud, separate the fact from the magnification. Write the plain version of what might happen in one sentence, with no adjectives in it. Then ask what you would say to a friend who brought you that same sentence, and notice how much smaller it sounds in your own mouth.