For me, often my anxiety/worry will start with something logical, my husband is not home from the airport after a trip when I reasonably expect him; but then my imagination gets in there and, before I know it, there's been a plane crash and he's lying in the hospital between seriously injured and dead :-) or the taxi bringing him home has been in an accident and (repeat ending).

I start helping myself by backing up to what I know for sure. His plane was supposed to land at X time, I assumed/decided it would take Y time to get his luggage, a cab, and ride home so he should arrive around Z o'clock.

Notice how the italicized words allow for a lot of work. One first checks to see if the plane landed on time or not. If it did, then one can decide to add more time to getting through the airport or can check on traffic, see if there's been a slow-up on his normal route home for some reason, or just add time there too, in case there's a problem.

As a fail safe, I think of bizarre scenarios that I know have actually happened; for example, the reason he was late in this particular situation I'm thinking of was the plane route got bizarre and he had to go from Raleigh, North Carolina to Boston before coming in at Baltimore. When I visited the former Soviet Union in 1968 we did that too; we left Leningrad and went to Moscow, which is southeast of Leningrad, before going west to Poland. Just this February I flew from Miami to a Caribbean island a couple hours away but we got halfway there and had to return to Miami and sit all day for a fix to our plane; the Caribbean island didn't have the means to fix the problem and, though we could have gotten to the island fine, by law the plane would not have been allowed to take off again without being fixed so it would have been stuck on the Caribbean island and the people there wanting to come back to Miami wouldn't have had any way to get there.

So, when I get anxious, I try to laugh, realizing that sometimes reality is even more fantastic than anything I can imagine; how mundane and obvious is an "accident?" Anyone could imagine that! Your imagination is much better though, you're a worrier! Make it a better problem Make the plane captain a wingman to another plane's crew that has problems and the plane has to fly to another airport, talking the crew in like in Top Gun :-) Get out all your worst, ridiculous-sounding fears and parade them; my husband probably fell in love with the woman sitting next to him and has gone off with her for a weekend of wild sex and will call any minute to tell me he had to stay and work at the original location (maybe he did fall in love with her but he's 150 pounds overweight, will be 70 in August, and is bald; I think he'd remain mine if the, at-first-sight rule, was applied to people falling in love with him, never mind about the weekend of wild sex at his age and weight :-)