One thing happens. Then your brain builds the rest.
Someone takes longer than usual to text back.
A person's tone feels different.
Your boss says, “Can we talk tomorrow?”
Nothing else has actually happened.
But somehow, you're already three floors up.
I call that stacking.
Stacking is when you take one real moment and start building assumptions about what it means, what caused it and what is going to happen next — until you're reacting to the story you've built instead of what you actually know.
It happens fast.
And most of the time, you don't even realize you're doing it.
Think of it like a building.
Every stack starts on the ground floor.
That's the thing you actually know.
Ground floor:
They haven't texted me back.
Then you start building.
Floor one:
They're ignoring me.
Floor two:
They're upset with me.
Floor three:
It must be because of what I said yesterday.
Floor four:
Something has changed between us.
The higher you build, the further you get from what actually happened.
And here's the part that matters:
Your brain and body can start reacting to the fourth floor as though someone handed you proof that it's true.
But they didn't.
The only thing you actually know is still sitting downstairs.
They haven't texted you back.
Stacking doesn't have to be dramatic.
Sometimes it's a huge imaginary future disaster.
But a lot of the time, it sounds more like this:
She seemed annoyed.
I think I made that awkward.
He probably took that the wrong way.
My boss wasn't happy with that.
Something feels different.
Any one of those things could turn out to be true.
That's not the point.
The point is that you don't know yet.
Stacking happens in the space between what happened and what you've decided it means.
Is stacking the same as catastrophizing?
Not quite.
They can absolutely overlap.
Catastrophizing usually refers to expecting or imagining a very negative outcome.
Stacking describes how you got there.
One observation becomes an interpretation. The interpretation becomes another conclusion. That conclusion becomes the foundation for whatever comes next.
And a stack doesn't have to end in catastrophe.
You can stack your way into believing someone is irritated with you, that you embarrassed yourself in a meeting or that a relationship feels different.
No catastrophe required.
Just several floors built on information you don't actually have yet.
That's why the word became useful to me.
I could finally see what my brain was doing.
The goal isn't to stop stacking.
I don't think that's particularly realistic.
Your brain is going to notice things.
It's going to look for patterns, fill gaps and try to predict what happens next.
Mine certainly does.
The difference is learning to recognize when you've left the ground floor.
Sometimes I catch it on floor one.
Sometimes I'm standing on floor six before I realize I've built an entire structure.
But once you see the stack, you can come back down.
Not by telling yourself everything is fine.
Sometimes it isn't.
Not by replacing one made-up story with a happier made-up story.
Just by asking:
What do I actually know right now?
That's the ground floor.
And that's where reality still lives.
Why I wrote a book about it
For a long time, I would have just called all of this overthinking.
But “stop overthinking” never helped me much.
Once I could see the floors, I had something much more useful to work with.
I started noticing where the story changed from what I knew to what I assumed.
I started catching myself earlier.
And I got much better at not living emotionally inside things that hadn't happened yet.
That's where Most Likely, You're Fine came from.
It's not a book about convincing yourself that everything will work out.
It's about recognizing the stories you build when you don't have all the information yet — and learning how to come back to what's actually real.
Most Likely, You're Fine
Stop Stacking and Start Living in What's Real
If you've ever reread the text, replayed the conversation, noticed the change in tone or lived through an entire imaginary future before anything actually happened, I wrote this for you.
Recognize yourself in this?
Stacking is one example of what can happen in the space between an event and your response.
My work goes beyond the book. I work with people who want to understand how they operate under pressure, recognize the patterns affecting how they respond and make small, practical changes in what they do next.