Life affords many opportunities to feel dread. It’s an emotion that is highly unpleasant, feels uncontrollable, and comes from getting stuck in your head. You become preoccupied with some experience you’re about to face and all you can think about is how bad it will be. You try to think optimistically that it won’t be that bad, but you’re not convinced. Your mind quickly reverts back to the negative; that you’ll be highly anxious, even panicky, and you’ll be embarrassed or worse, humiliated. We’re most likely to feel dread when we find the anticipated experience threatening.

The dreaded experience could be something important like the possibility of losing your job or starting cancer treatment, or it could be something as ordinary as shopping in a crowded supermarket or taking a trip to an unfamiliar place. Dread is an intense form of anticipatory anxiety, which is a feeling of apprehension, or worry, about a future experience that you expect will be distressing.¹ If you often feel anxious, you know it surfaces long before you’re confronted with the anxiety-provoking situation.

Reducing Anxiety Starts With Dread

Having high anticipatory anxiety, or dread, makes anxiety much worse. The more you think about how bad an experience will be, the more anxious you’ll feel. All you can think about is the threat you’re about to face, that it will overwhelm you, and you’re helpless to deal with it. Because avoidance seems like the only option, you invent ways to get out of the experience. This makes your anxiety worse.

Imagine you’re invited to a dinner party with an important person you hardly know. You want to make a good impression, but you’re terrified you’ll do just the opposite. You’ve received the invitation weeks in advance. As the date approaches, all you can think about is an impending disaster. Each time it enters your mind, the anxiety builds. At some point, the feeling of dread becomes unbearable, and you think of any excuse to avoid going. You know the anxiety is getting the best of you, that once again, it’s controlling your life, but what can you do? The answer starts with working on the dread, the anticipatory anxiety, that’s driving up your anxiety. In This is What Anxiety Looks Like¹ I discuss strategies you can use to reduce dread. The following is a brief introduction to two of these intervention strategies.

Practice Realistic Thinking

Start by pinpointing what it is that you fear most. In our example of the dreaded dinner party, maybe you’re worried your anxiety will be on display and people will think there’s something wrong with you. Next, write out three possibilities of what could happen at the invited dinner: a “nightmare” scenario of what you fear most as the worst possible outcome, a “fairytale” scenario of the best outcome, and something in-between, a more realistic scenario. The last scenario might be you’re nervous and rather reserved at the beginning but eventually settle down and contribute to the dinner conversation. Then, list all the reasons and the evidence why the realistic scenario is the most likely outcome. Every time you feel dread about the future experience, you work on building a stronger case for the more likely realistic outcome. In this way, you're changing how you think about the future and, in the process, reducing your anticipatory anxiety.

Create a Coping Plan

Feelings of dread are caused by too much thinking about the future; imagining how horrible an experience will be. A remedy is to shift your thinking to the present. Ask yourself, "What can I do now to get better prepared for this future experience?" You then devise a plan and work on building up skills you might need for the future event. For the important dinner party, you could consult resources and then practice conversational skills, do some role plays with a friend on being assertive and expressing a more confident body language, and work on improving your anxiety management skills. Focusing on skill development in the here and now will build your confidence and strengthen your belief that the situation may be uncomfortable but “I can get through this”.

Conclusion

When we dread, we become trapped in our fears and anxiety. Feelings of dread can erode your confidence and reinforce the belief that you’re vulnerable and unable to cope with the anticipated experience. Your anxiety escalates before you’ve even confronted the anxiety-provoking situation. In the end, avoidance seems like the only plausible solution, causing you to again feel defeated by anxiety. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Changing how you think about the anticipated experience and shifting your perspective to the present can diminish the power of dread and contribute to your victory over fear and anxiety.

References:

1. Clark, D.A. (2024). This is What Anxiety Looks Like. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications.

This blog was originally posted on Psychology Today.