An anxious mind spends the day making predictions, and almost none of them are ever checked. This theme is the checking: write down the feared outcomes that simply never arrived. The flight you dreaded landed safely, and for a few minutes above the clouds you even liked the view. The round of layoffs passed and your name was not in it. The conversation with your manager, rehearsed all night as a battle, stayed calm — or never happened at all. The test results came back clear. The presentation went fine. The gathering you almost cancelled turned warm, and someone was glad you came. Some days bring the opposite of the fear: an unexpected piece of good news you never thought to predict.
Each of these is a fact, and each deserves a line — a small grave with a date on it. One buried worry proves little. A page of them, collected over weeks in your own handwriting, becomes hard evidence against the next prediction: you have caught your own alarm system exaggerating, in writing, again and again.
The practice works on two levels at once. Writing the moment down forces you to have noticed it — to be present inside the hours the worry had promised to ruin, with your senses instead of your forecasts. And rereading the page builds the rational case that many of our anxieties are simply unfounded. The aim is not to chase good outcomes; it is to notice where your attention was, and what actually happened while you were busy fearing.
The same goes for real crises and worries that did happen: focus on how they ended. Think of a worry that resolved, faded, or turned out smaller than it seemed, or a crisis that has genuinely ended — write about crises too, but focus on their endings if possible, or about the toughness that carried you through.