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I have pretty low expectations for this article. Oh sure, I spent a lot of time on it, and I personally think it’s a great read. But I’m kind of worried that you will hate it. Worse yet, I’m afraid you’ll hate me for writing it. You might take to Twitter and call me a featherbrained, elitist millennial. And then I’ll cry into my kombucha-flavored macaron. Or even worse, you might not read it at all. You might click away and go visit some lesser site, leaving me and my feathered brain to shout into the Internet abyss.

Or at least, that’s how I would start out thinking if I were prone to defensive pessimism, a phenomenon in which people imagine worst-case scenarios in order to manage their anxiety. But what defensive pessimists do next is key: They come up with strategies to avoid having all of those bad things happen, thus ending up better-prepared and less anxious in the long-run. In my case, that might mean topping this article with a clever title or even pre-writing some 140-character barbs to rout the haters.

This type of negativity might sound like apostasy by American standards. Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 classic, The Power of Positive Thinking, sold 5 million copies and was a New York Times bestseller for 186 weeks. One of the most common things to say when someone expresses worry is, “Just think positive!” Optimism does have its health benefits, but according to Julie Norem, a psychology professor at Wellesley College, trying to force positivity is a bad strategy for the truly anxious.

I recently spoke with Norem, a pioneer of the defensive pessimism theory. Her 2002 book on the topic is maybe not quite as famous as Peale’s, but perhaps it will catch on if the Debbie Downers among us manage to outshine the shiny happy people.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows, and you can take a test to find out if you’re a defensive pessimist here.

Olga Khazan: What is defensive pessimism?

Julie Norem: It’s a strategy for dealing with anxiety and helping to manage anxiety so that it doesn’t negatively influence performance. If you feel anxious in a situation, it doesn’t really matter if it’s realistic or not, you feel how you feel. It’s hard not to feel that particular way. If you feel anxious, you need to do something about it. Usually people try to run away from whatever situation makes you anxious. But there are other ways of dealing with it. Defensive pessimism is one way.

When people are being defensively pessimistic, they set low expectations, but then they take the next step which is to think through in concrete and vivid ways what exactly might go wrong. What we’ve seen in the research is if they do this in a specific, vivid way, it helps them plan to avoid the disaster. They end up performing better than if they didn’t use the strategy. It helps them direct their anxiety toward productive activity.

Khazan: How would I apply this in real life?

Norem: Public speaking is my favorite example. If I’ve got a speech I’m going to give, and I’m anxious about it, I start thinking, this is going to be a disaster. I’m going to walk onto the stage and trip over the microphone cord. And I’m going to knock over the pitcher of water that’s by the podium. And the audio-visual stuff isn’t going to work. I’m going to get questions from the audience I’ve never thought of.

So I define some very clear steps I can take. I’m going to bring duct tape to tape down the microphone cord. I’m not going to wear high heels. I’m going to email my PowerPoint to the AV director and have it on a flash drive. Once I do all those things, I’ve built in a lot of safeguards and I’m very likely to have things go well.

Khazan: How does this benefit the person, exactly?

Norem: They tend to be better-prepared. They may not be un-anxious, but they feel more in control. In some sense, they’ve peaked in anxiety before their actual performance. By the time they get to the event itself they’ve taken care of almost everything.

It’s living the Boy Scout motto of “be prepared.” But people need motivation for that, and they need to get over the initial panic and anxiety.

Khazan: What are some of the drawbacks? Can it ever become demotivating or be a source of obsession?

Norem: The biggest negative impact potentially comes from other peoples’ reactions. If you’re doing it out loud, other people tend not to like it. They tend to have questions about your competence. “If she’s so worried about this, maybe she’s not up to this.” If it’s a first impression, that can be one of the drawbacks.

The more internal drawbacks are if instead of thinking of negative possibilities in very specific terms, you start spiraling out of control. That’s what clinicians consider catastrophizing to be. Instead of thinking of specific things that can go wrong that you can prevent, you say, “This talk is going to be a disaster. My whole life is a mess. I’m going to lose my job and my partner’s going to leave me.” The specificity is key to having positive effects as opposed to negative effects.

You are getting worked up in the process. It takes energy. If you’re doing it for everything, you’re more likely to wear yourself out. That said, anxiety is exhausting anyway. It’s still better than just saying, “Oh, I’m just not going to be anxious," because that just doesn’t work.  The demotivating part comes if you think of things that go wrong and there’s nothing you can do about it. But in those cases people tend to get more specific and identify a few things that they can do—even if they’re silly things. One person I knew in college would buy cases of breath mints so he would never run out. He was extremely socially anxious. It was something concrete that he could do about a specific worry he had. It was one concrete step that he could take even though he was socially anxious. And there’s a lot of research that shows that taking the one concrete step is extremely important, because it tends to lead to the next concrete step. You’re getting closer to your goal.