Your brain doesn’t wait for the world to happen before responding to it. When your arm brushes against a hot stove, your brain doesn’t just register the heat. It predicts pain based on past experience and the incoming sensory information. This prediction system usually works remarkably well; it keeps us safe. For roughly one adult in five, though, the system stops protecting and becomes the problem itself (Geneen et al., 2017). The brain continues predicting pain long after an injury has healed, or even when there’s no injury at all. The question, therefore, is why a healthy protective system would keep sounding an alarm when there is nothing left to…