Anxiety, Fear, and Truth: How to Stop Believing Every Thought

(object hisses) (mouse clicks) (peaceful music) Headspace Studios. Hi friends, it's Rosie here. Welcome to Radio Headspace. The other day, a friend sent me a reel on Instagram. It was one of those bold, dramatic clips set to intense music. You know the ones, it had big letters that said something like, "This is why therapy doesn't work." She texted me underneath and asked, "Is this true?" I had this moment where I was just staring at my phone thinking, what are we even basing truth on anymore? Because I could see how someone who doesn't have the training or the background, or is someone who's maybe had a bad experience in therapy, might watch that and think, yep, that's the whole story, but it's not, and it got me thinking about something we're exploring in my research methods class for my clinical psych program. How do we actually know something is true? How do we move beyond hot takes and emotionally charged headlines and get to something that's actually rooted in evidence, in context, in clarity. In my class, we're taught to ask, how was this claim tested? What's the sample size? Was there bias in the design? Is it reproducible? What's the source? But outside of academia, in everyday life, we need something simpler, especially when the truth isn't about numbers or data, but about relationships, feelings, and even our own self-worth, because it's not just reels and headlines. It's those little inner scripts we carry around. They don't like me. I always mess this up. I'm not good at relationships. And we accept those thoughts as facts, but are they true? Because if we don't question these narratives, we risk building our choices, our relationships, and even our identity on a foundation that was never solid to begin with. There's a story from Mexican folklore that I've been thinking about lately. It's one my abuelita used to tell me, and it always stuck. A man walks into a village and tells the people he saw death walking toward them, panicked the villagers prepared to flee. But then a young boy approaches death and asks, "Are you coming for us?" Death replies, "No, I'm only here to take one, but your fear will take the rest." What a metaphor, right? Fear creates stories and stories when left unchecked become our version of reality, we assume, we react, we spiral, and before we know it, we're organizing our whole life around something that may not even be real. So how do we check it? This is where mindfulness comes in, not as a spiritual bypass, but as a tool for discernment. One of the most powerful practices I use comes from a simple but profound place. Pause, name the thought. Ask is it true? Is it useful? Is it kind? Let's break that down for a second. Is it true, like objectively true? Not I feel like it's true, but can I verify this with actual evidence? Is it useful?...