All I’ve come up with is: I was born that way. I have a brain that expects calamity and is easily overwhelmed. If I had to guess my biologically determined psychological set point, I’d locate it somewhere between “on high alert” and “consumed by dread.” One theory of chronic worry is that people like me have an overactive fear circuit in our brains, set off not by anything specific, but operating more like constant background noise: There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong. The hyperactivity of this circuit produces a vague feeling of anxiety, leaving our imaginations to figure out
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