Burning Cars: Why Your Brain Keeps You Anxious (And What Actually Changes It)

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman shared the following story in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow:

“On a Sunday evening some years ago, we were driving from New York City to Princeton, as we had been doing every week for a long time. We saw an unusual sight: a car on fire by the side of the road.

When we reached the same stretch of road the following Sunday, another car was burning there. Here again, we found that we were distinctly less surprised on the second occasion than we had been on the first. This was now ‘the place where cars catch fire.’

Because the circumstances of the recurrence were the same, the second incident was sufficient to create an active expectation: for months, perhaps for years, after the event we were reminded of burning cars whenever we reached that spot of the road and were quite prepared to see another one (but of course we never did).”

One of the most influential scientific frameworks for understanding how our brains work suggests that they are constantly searching for patterns in our experience¹.

Why?

Because patterns allow us to anticipate what events might mean and what is likely to happen next.

The ability to predict is a remarkable evolutionary gift. It underpins much of what our brains do: how we perceive, act, speak, feel, think, and experience ourselves.

Sometimes, though, this gift backfires.

Not because your brain is broken, but because it’s doing exactly what served our ancestors so well over millennia: learning from experience in order to protect and guide you.

Shocking or emotionally intense events can bias predictions so strongly that the brain continues to expect ‘burning cars’, even when the danger is long gone.

Even ordinary experiences, repeated enough times, shape predictions just as powerfully.

These unhelpful predictions aren’t disorders or malfunctions.

They’re what happens when a brain learns something that once made sense, but keeps applying it after circumstances change, or generalises it far beyond where it was ever useful.

When you understand the full context of someone’s life, these predictions tend to make complete sense.

They come from a healthy brain learning from experience², developing responses that fit the circumstances at the time, even if they no longer do.

This dynamic can help explain many common patterns we label as psychological “problems.”³

For example, with:

• “Anxiety”⁴: when we repeatedly predict danger out of proportion to the actual level of risk.
• “Depression”: when life is painful and we come to predict pervasive hopelessness and helplessness, biasing experience so that effort increasingly feels futile, even when others can clearly see solutions and a better future.
• “PTSD”: when we remain on guard, predicting that a frightening type of past event could happen again, or that it’s unfolding again right now.

These predictions may come with associated mental images, sounds, or words. Or they may stay entirely outside awareness, shaping how we feel and respond.

The same process of prediction shapes our beliefs, including those about ourselves. Whether someone believes they’re capable, loveable, “good enough,” or believes they’re incapable, unloveable, or “a failure”—unconscious predictions are shaping our experience.

These predictions can also create powerful self-fulfilling prophecies.

‘Panic disorder’ is a particularly clear example of this:

When harmless body sensations are predicted to signal imminent catastrophe, this can trigger a self-amplifying fight-or-flight loop that creates the very sensations being feared. The result is a vicious cycle in which we can feel as though we’re dying, losing control, or “going crazy”, even though the entire pattern is driven by the brain’s well-intended attempt to protect us. (See my Panic Free TV work.)

Importantly, since predictions are generated unconsciously, to reduce uncertainty and guide action, they’re not easily changed through conscious effort.

This explains something many people find deeply confusing:

Even when we intellectually understand that our responses don’t make sense, that knowledge often fails to translate into meaningful change.

Once again, The Emotional Tail Wags The Rational Dog.

But when the underlying predictions driving a pattern truly shift, change happens without willpower. Our new responses become as automatic and natural as the old responses once were.⁵

So I want you to consider:

What “burning cars” has your brain been predicting?

Footnotes for the Scientifically Curious

1. More precisely, this includes the entire nervous system: brain and body. ↩︎
2. These predictions are influenced by:
   
   * Events that happened to us, especially when they are intense, unexpected, or emotionally charged.
   * Events we witnessed happening to others, particularly to people we identified with or depended on.
   * Things other people said that we absorbed and took on board, especially when they came from authority figures or were repeated over and over.
   
   In many cases, it isn’t a single dramatic event that shapes these predictions, but repeated low-grade experiences (e.g. repeated criticism, unpredictability, or things quietly not working out) that quietly strengthen expectations through sheer repetition over time. ↩︎
3. Some patterns are driven primarily by non-learned or ‘bottom-up’ physiological influences (e.g., endocrine or medical conditions such as thyroid dysfunction or perimenopausal changes, medication effects, sleep deprivation, pain, or substances). Rather than arising from prior experience-based learning, these factors can temporarily modify the brain’s predictive ‘landscape’. ↩︎
4. Quotation marks around terms like “anxiety”, “panic”, “depression”, and “trauma” are intentional. These words describe clusters of experiences and patterns, not distinct natural kinds. They’re processes, not things. Linguistically, they are nominalisations (verbs that have been frozen into nouns). ↩︎
5. Predictive processing applies across the brain. But the rapid Automatic Change I describe here is most relevant to psychological patterns shaped by life experience (anxiety, panic, trauma responses, everyday limiting patterns, etc.), rather than to conditions with strong neurodevelopmental or neurodegenerative factors (e.g. autism or schizophrenia). ↩︎