My own insanity and its bad coping strategies

How do you handle situations in which you're waiting to find out an outcome that you can't control?

Encourage yourself? Hope for the best? Relax and try not to worry about it? Not. Me.

My strategy is this: Figure out all the possible horrible outcomes, and then start to deal with them preemptively.
For instance, today, when the professor was talking about the midterm grades, this was my internal dialogue:

Oh my gosh, what if I failed? I don't fail things! It's over. I've failed.

What if I got like a 4 out of 20? Okay, okay, so I got a 4. I could still work harder on the final and the final project and bring my grade up to a C. This is a pass/fail class, not even in my GPA.

But what if grad schools can still see the C? NYU Steinhardt and Columbia Teacher's college ... They might think I slacked off while abroad! No no, I'll just do better in my other classes. They'll just think I challenged myself.

But what if I fail the whole class completely? All right, I have an extra space in my schedule. I can still graduate on time.

And then what if I don't get scholarships to grad schools? Does that mean I can't go to the schools I want? Well, maybe I still get in and just don't get loans. So it costs me a lot more. That's okay.

And then what if I'm paying off student loans until I'm forty? That's okay. I can learn to budget. It will make me thrifty. And that will make me be happy for the things I have and not a greedy money grubber.

See? Everything will be all right.

I swear to you all on my Starbucks addiction that I thought every one of those things while missing the lecture the professor was giving.

And then I got a 13. Since I was already prepared for a 4, a 13 was looking pretty good.

Feel free to use that strategy.

Of course, if you're not me, it might be counterproductive to completely restructure your life every time you can't control something.