The Conversation You’ve Had Four Times and Nobody Else Was There
Mind · The Reading Room, Vol. 76 · 7 min read · What a controlled study found when it made anxious rehearsal compete with distraction, and the two-line brief that caps the loop
Based on the published research of David M. Clark, CBE — Emeritus Professor of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, who developed the anticipatory-processing model of social anxiety with Adrian Wells. Faculty profile
Rehearsing conversations in my head before they happen is not preparation. What one controlled study found, plus the two-line brief that caps the loop.
You are on the stairs to the car park, saying it again. If the timeline is the concern, I can walk you through where it moved. Not out loud. Almost out loud. Then you take out the concern, because it sounds like you are managing her, and put in where things stand. Then you build her answer, and it comes back short and cool, so you sharpen yours. You have had this conversation four times today and nobody else was there.
The meeting is Thursday. It is Tuesday.
The short answer: rehearsing conversations in my head is what researchers call anticipatory processing, and it reliably makes the real conversation harder rather than easier. In a controlled study, people who ran an upcoming event this way stayed more anxious through the wait and hit a higher peak of anxiety once the event actually started, compared with people given something else to think about. That held for the low-anxiety participants as much as the high-anxiety ones.¹
The skim version
- Mentally running a conversation before it happens has a name in the research literature: anticipatory processing.¹
- Measured against distraction, it kept anxiety elevated beforehand and raised peak anxiety during the event — in calm participants too.¹
- The rehearsal is assembled almost entirely from your own predictions. The other person contributes nothing to it.
- People also overestimate how closely they are being watched, and how long a bad outcome will keep feeling bad.²³
- The practice is a two-line brief, written once, which caps the rehearsal instead of arguing with it.
In this article: Why your brain drafts it · Whether it counts as preparing · Why the imagined version is worse · The two-line brief · FAQ
Why does my brain draft a conversation that hasn’t happened yet?
Because prediction is the job, and you have spent thirty years being paid well for arriving early. You are the one who reads the board pack the night before. Who finds the number that will not survive the second question. Who walks in having already answered the thing nobody has thought to ask. That is not a nervous disposition. That is a professional skill, and it has been covering your mortgage since your twenties.
The trouble is it has no stopping rule.
Preparing for a meeting is a finite task. You check the figures, you know your position, you close the folder. Rehearsing a conversation is not finite, because you are writing the other person’s lines as well as your own, and there is always a worse version of hers available. So the loop stays open. It follows you to the car, into the shower, into the twelve minutes before the alarm.
The term for it comes from a cognitive model of social anxiety developed by David Clark and Adrian Wells, which is worth saying plainly rather than burying. The habit was studied in a clinical setting. It does not only live there. Most women running scripts on a Tuesday evening would not meet a clinical threshold for anything, and do not need one to recognise what they are doing. A pattern can be well documented in a clinic and still be ordinary outside it.
Does rehearsing conversations in my head actually help me prepare?
No, and that part has been tested directly rather than assumed. Hendrik Hinrichsen and David Clark ran two pilot studies on it. In the second, participants were waiting to give a speech. Some spent the waiting period doing what you do on the stairs: running the event, monitoring their own performance, predicting how it would land. The others were given a distraction task instead. The rehearsers stayed anxious right through the wait, and then reached a higher peak of anxiety once the speech began. The effect turned up in the participants who scored low on social anxiety too, which is the finding that matters most for anyone who has never thought of herself as an anxious person.¹
What the research found
Hinrichsen and Clark’s study compared people who mentally rehearsed an upcoming speech against people given a distraction task during the same wait. The rehearsal group stayed more anxious through the anticipation period and reached a higher peak of anxiety once the speech began — and the pattern held for participants who scored low on social anxiety, not only those who scored high.¹
The limitation: this was described by its own authors as two pilot studies — small samples, a laboratory speech-giving task rather than a real workplace or family conflict, and published in 2003. It establishes that rehearsal raises anxiety relative to distraction; it wasn’t designed to measure how large that effect is for a specific woman rehearsing a specific difficult conversation decades later.¹
Preparation and rehearsal feel identical from the inside. They are not the same activity.
Preparation gathers information you do not yet have. Rehearsal generates it. One lowers uncertainty; the other manufactures certainty about sentences nobody has said. And because the manufactured version arrives in your own voice, with your own reasoning attached, it does not present itself as invention. It presents itself as briefing.
Definition: anticipatory processing is repeated mental rehearsal of an event that hasn’t happened, built mostly from your own predictions rather than from anything the other person has actually said or done.
| Preparation | Rehearsal | |
|---|---|---|
| What it works with | Facts, figures, the actual brief | Imagined lines, imagined tone |
| Who writes the other person | Nobody. She speaks on Thursday. | You do. Repeatedly. |
| When it ends | When you close the folder | It doesn’t. It just gets interrupted. |
| What it leaves behind | A position you can defend | A version of her you now half believe |
| Effect on the real event | Steadier | Higher peak anxiety, measured¹ |
The meeting is Thursday. It is Tuesday.
If you rehearse because the real version once went badly, the Quiet Audit is ten minutes on when the rehearsing started. Start here.
Why is the imagined version always worse than the real one?
Because you cast it, and you are a hard casting director for a room you will not stand in until Thursday. Two well-documented errors turn up in the same pass, and they compound.
The first is about attention. In a set of studies at Cornell, people were asked to wear a T-shirt with a potentially embarrassing image on it and then estimate how many observers would be able to say what was on it. They guessed roughly half. The real figure was closer to a quarter. The researchers called it the spotlight effect: we anchor on our own vivid experience of ourselves and then adjust, badly, for the fact that other people are mostly thinking about their own Thursday.³ The audience in your rehearsal is watching you far more carefully than the real one will manage.
The second error is about aftermath. Daniel Gilbert and colleagues ran six studies on how accurately people forecast their own feelings, across events including a job rejection, an electoral defeat, and being turned down for tenure. Participants consistently overestimated how long the bad feeling would last. The reason they named it immune neglect is that the mind doing the predicting cannot see the mind that will do the coping. Your resilience is invisible to your forecast.²
So the rehearsal overestimates how closely you are being watched, then overestimates how long the damage would last, and then hands you the result as though it were reconnaissance. If that pattern is familiar from the other direction, the loop that starts after a conversation rather than before it, the replay that runs once the meeting is already over works by much the same machinery. And underneath both sits the same quiet assumption worth naming: a thought can arrive with total confidence and still not be evidence.
The source for this piece
David M. Clark, CBE
Emeritus Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. With Adrian Wells, he developed the cognitive model of social anxiety that names anticipatory processing as a maintaining factor.
What we read: Hinrichsen & Clark’s 2003 pilot studies on anticipatory processing in social anxiety, which underlie the comparison this piece describes.¹
Where to follow his work: Faculty profile
Who else has measured this
The pattern Clark’s research named has been extended and corroborated from other directions too.
Adrian Wells, PhD, Professor of Clinical and Experimental Psychopathology at the University of Manchester, co-developed the cognitive model of social anxiety with Clark and has published extensively on how self-focused attention and anticipatory processing keep anxiety running long after the trigger has passed.¹ Faculty profile
Daniel Gilbert, PhD, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, ran the affective-forecasting studies that found people consistently overestimate how long a bad outcome will keep hurting — the finding named immune neglect and cited above.² Faculty profile
Thomas Gilovich, PhD, Professor of Psychology at Cornell University, led the spotlight-effect studies showing people overestimate how much others notice them, cited above.³ Faculty profile
How do you stop, without just telling yourself to stop?
Not by arguing with the script. Arguing is still running the meeting, and you will lose on time. What helps is giving the rehearsal somewhere to be filed, the way you would file anything else that keeps resurfacing because it has no home.
The practice: the two-line brief (two minutes to set up)
- Next time you catch yourself doing both voices, which is the reliable tell, stop where you are and write two lines. On your phone is fine.
- Line one: the one thing she needs to know from you. Not three things. One.
- Line two: the one thing you need to find out from her.
- Then add four words at the end: read once before, Thursday. That is the whole brief.
The rule that does the work is the one you apply afterwards. Anything that is not line one or line two is not preparation, and it does not need writing again. You are not banning the thought. You are demoting it from briefing to noise, which is a distinction your brain will accept far more readily than an instruction to stop.
Two honest notes. The brief will feel insultingly small the first time, particularly if the meeting is genuinely difficult; that feeling is the habit objecting to being capped, not a sign you have under-prepared. And you will still rehearse sometimes. The point was never to never do it. The point is that when you notice, there is now a piece of paper with two lines on it, and you can go back to that instead of back to the stairs.
If your version of this runs on a timetable rather than an appointment, arriving every Sunday at the same hour whether or not anything is scheduled, the dread that turns up on schedule is a slightly different animal and takes a different move.
Frequently asked questions
Is rehearsing conversations a sign of anxiety?
Not on its own. Anticipatory processing was first mapped in research on social anxiety, but the same study found the effect in participants who scored low on it. If the rehearsing is constant, spread across most interactions, and paired with weeks of low mood or avoidance, that is worth raising with a professional rather than a search bar.
What if the rehearsal helps me find the right words?
The first pass often does. Passes two through eleven are where it turns. A useful test: is this producing a new sentence, or a new worry about an old one? If nothing new has arrived in ten minutes, the drafting finished a while ago.
Why do I rehearse conversations that will probably never happen?
Because the brain rehearses what it has filed as unresolved, and a conversation you have decided not to have is still unresolved. It has an open question in it. The two-line brief works here too, with the second line usually being the one you would rather not write down.
Does writing it down make me think about it more?
Briefly, and then noticeably less. The loop persists because the thought has no confirmed destination. Once there is a note, with a time attached, the rehearsal loses its main job.
Is this the same as overthinking?
Overthinking is the general word. This is one specific shape of it, running forwards rather than backwards, aimed at an event that has not occurred. Naming the shape matters because the forwards version responds to a brief and the backwards version responds to something else.
The one move
Most of the rehearsing is not really about Thursday. It is about a standard you have been holding yourself to since roughly 1998, without anyone reviewing whether it still applies. The Quiet Audit is about ten minutes of questions about where that standard came from and what it is currently costing you. Nobody sees your answers.
Thursday will take about eleven minutes. You have already given it two days. Start here.
On the researcher. David M. Clark is a clinical psychologist and researcher, not a personal counsellor: his model describes how anticipatory processing maintains anxiety at a population level, and is not a diagnosis or prescription for any one relationship or conversation.
Sourcing, disclosure and disclaimers
This is not medical or therapeutic advice. Blue Leaf Journal publishes general information for a general readership. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a treatment recommendation, or a substitute for care from a licensed professional who knows your history.
We are not clinicians. Blue Leaf Journal is an independent publication. We read published research and translate it. The findings belong to the researchers named and linked above; the plain-English rendering is ours, and so is any error in it.
No affiliation and no endorsement. Blue Leaf Journal is not affiliated with David M. Clark, Adrian Wells, Daniel Gilbert, Thomas Gilovich, the University of Oxford, the University of Manchester, Harvard University, or Cornell University. None of them has reviewed, approved or endorsed this article, and none of them is responsible for it. They are cited because their published research is the basis for what it says.
No commercial relationship. Nobody named above paid for or was paid for this coverage. There are no affiliate links, no sponsored placements and no gifted products in this article.
How this was checked. Every figure above is drawn from the primary sources, each linked in the references, and can be verified there. Sources were checked on 7 September 2026. If you find something we have got wrong, write to norawhitfield@blueleafjournal.com and we will correct it and say that we did.
References
1. Hinrichsen, H., Clark, D.M. (2003). Anticipatory processing in social anxiety: two pilot studies. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 34(3-4), 205–218. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14972668
2. Gilbert, D.T., Pinel, E.C., Wilson, T.D., Blumberg, S.J., Wheatley, T.P. (1998). Immune neglect: a source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(3), 617–638. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9781405
3. Gilovich, T., Medvec, V.H., Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 211–222. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10707330
Nora Whitfield writes for Blue Leaf Journal, where the working rule is that a mechanism you can name is easier to live with than one you cannot. She reads the limitations section before the conclusion, and passes on what she finds there.
Written by Nora Whitfield for Blue Leaf Journal. Updated: 7 September 2026.
