A Dose of Negativity as a Strategy

"Fear-setting" is the counter-intuitive but useful practice of articulating the things that could go wrong. Counter-intuitive because it sounds inherently negative. 

Useful because deciding upfront how (and that) you could live with the worst realistic scenario removes a heavy load. At the very least it makes failure less scary.

Over the ages, stoics have set aside days (or longer) during which they lived under the most minimalist conditions, all the while asking, "Is this the condition I so feared?"