« Why are we so worried? Is this due to our long prey history? It is not that long since we took over the planet as an animal species. When it was not us who ate the other animals, but them (or a few of them) who fed on us, our ability to worry was then a guarantee of survival: being careful allowed to live longer, thus making more children, to whom we also learned to be careful. And the "not-enough-worried" disappeared; at least they did it happily... That's why, evolutionary psychologists say, there are so many anxiety skills in humans: we are descendants of ancestors who survived through anxiety. However, beyond our genes, there is our brain and our intelligence. We are able to anticipate in the long term, which has no doubt done great service to our species (think about stockpiling provisions, imagining where the enemies might end, etc.). But this function of anticipation, which originated in the desire to predict where trouble might have happened, contains in it the ability to skid in a suricipation: concern. This tipping phenomenon can be found in neuroimaging: different brain areas are called upon when we leave the simple anticipation (state of mind without too much emotional load, and with a feeling of possible control) to go towards worry and anxiety. Animals also anticipate, but in the shorter term, in relation to their immediate future, they remain in the "future of the present". Humans are capable of much more virtual time extensions: they can project themselves into the distant future. It is the phrase "what if...?", so characteristic of moods related to anxiety. What if it's the end of the world? What if no one loved me anymore? What if I lose my job? What if I miss my train? What if I arrived late for the movie screening? »

« In the anxious anticipation, we make a kind of conjugation error: we confuse the conditional with the future in good faith... »

« We don't just make predictions, but we stick to them afterwards. The sequence has been well studied by cognitive psychotherapists: 1) we continually produce hypotheses on the possible future dangers, 2) we take the hypothesis for a certainty, 3) we react as if it were reality. In the body and brain of the anxious, there is no difference between thinking about a problem and having it. If I start to think about my death, little by little my body and my mind will react as if I were to die soon. »