Catastrophic future tripping.

Saying it may sound cool, but doing it’s the opposite. It raises your internal temperature by taking stray thoughts and slight concerns and turning them into worry and anxiety.

David Robson calls this catastrophizing in a 2022 BBC article and provides the following example of how it can occur.

You’re a passenger on a plane, hear a slight rattle, and interpret it as a “technical fault.” One that, the more you think about it, could lead to a crash.

You become so fixated that the plane could go down you fail to notice no one else, flight staff included, seems concerned. The noise continues, and soon you’re imaging all “the awful ways [you] might die.”

Losing your mental cool like this regularly can make you more vulnerable to illnesses like post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and certain types of psychoses, as well as exacerbate feelings of physical pain, Robson notes. What he doesn’t mention, though, is why we tend to think this way.

It’s a primal holdover inherited from your animal-skin wearing ancestors, the caveman’s equivalent to an Early Warning Detection System. For a slight rattle back then could mean a poisonous snake is approaching; a slight a rustle, that a saber-toothed tiger is nearby.

In other words, catastrophic future tripping is part of your DNA and never going away. And at times that can be — though not quite as frequently as two million or even 20 thousand years ago — a good thing.

Provided that when it does occur you recognize it and manage it.

Here’s a time I did. But first, why doing so is important.

Because the Buddhists are spot-on to say expectation is the cause of all suffering. While I acknowledge and accept that, there are still times when I expect a given result from a specific action, and guess what happens when it doesn’t?

My mental health takes a hit. I suffer a bit.

For instance, because I invest an inordinate amount of time to eating right, exercising, and researching every aspect of life that’s connected to both, I expect to feel, foolishly enough, really good all the time. When I don’t, I look for reasons why.

Which if I’m not careful can lead to catastrophic future tripping.

Two Octobers ago after feeling less than myself for a few weeks, I came across an article listing the eight signs that you may be developing type 2 diabetes. Increased thirst, increased urination, persistent hunger, and general fatigue began the list.

All four seemed to be, based on recent memory, applicable to me.

I had no recent memories, however — or, for that matter, forever — of the next four listed: blurred vision, slow-healing sores, frequent infections, and numbness or tingling in the hands or feet.

But that didn’t matter. The mental seed had been sowed and I watered it.

Every little bit of malaise during the day, every workout that didn’t work out perfectly, every trip to the bathroom that I thought came a bit to soon made me believe what I was experiencing would be diagnosed by a doctor as prediabetes, the precursor to type 2 diabetes.

Having written a health and column for more than 35 years — and you know the title — made this thought even more distressing. Especially when the general consensus is up to 90 percent of type 2 diabetes results from a poor diet and lack of exercise.

I needed to know if I was guilty of catastrophic future tripping or being a fraud.

Could the “Fitness Master” could actually have prediabetes? In the immortal words of that small boy upon learning his baseball idol had bet against his own team in the World Series, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

It wasn’t.

Blood work showed my blood sugar level to be smack dab in the middle of the range deemed to be normal.

But I only learned that because my catastrophic future tripping caused something else — and a good something else at that. After nearly 30 years of neglect, I scheduled a health and wellness checkup.

Afterwards, the GP said nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. When the blood work also indicated that, that episode of catastrophic future tripping came to an end.

So take from this story what I find myself having to time and time again relearn. In essence, it’s the same thing Arthur C. Brooks, says about unhappiness.

Brooks is a Harvard professor who writes what’s essentially a self-help column for The Atlantic and has authored a number of bestselling books, such as Build the Life You Want, written in the same vein.

He believes one of the biggest mistakes we all make is trying to eliminate unhappiness from our lives. That it’s not only a fool’s errand but also foolish to even attempt for it’s ultimately counterproductive.

One reason why is that, in the long run, good is often a byproduct of unhappiness.

If, just like catastrophic future tripping, we learn how to manage it.