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Every man dies once. The anxious man dies every night, and wakes each morning to be sentenced again.
The disaster you fear, if it comes at all, will hurt you for its duration. The fear of it hurts you now, and tomorrow, and every day between here and the thing itself. If the disaster arrives, you will have paid twice. If it never arrives, you will have paid for nothing.
Either way, the interest is collected in advance, and the currency is your life.
Think of anxiety as an executioner who works for free. No one hired him. No court sentenced you. He simply appeared one day with his hood and his blade, and you let him in because he claimed to be useful. He said he was protecting you. He said that by killing you a little each evening, he was preparing you for the real execution, whenever it comes. And you believed him, because his voice sounds exactly like your own.
One death was the contract. He rehearses hundreds. The diagnosis, the layoff, the betrayal, the accident, the humiliation, each staged in full costume, each felt in the body as if it were occurring. Your heart does not know the difference between a rehearsal and a performance. It races either way. Your stomach knots either way. The executioner has discovered that he does not need real events at all. Your imagination supplies the gallows, and he supplies the schedule.
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Seneca named this precisely in his letters to Lucilius.
We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
The line gets quoted today as consolation. Seneca filed it as an accusation. He had watched men made wretched by futures that never came, and he noticed something the wretched never notice about themselves. The suffering felt involuntary to them, like something happening to them, when it was something they were doing, every hour, with great effort and total commitment.
The whole argument turns on that distinction. Chrysippus taught that fear is a judgment you are making. A future evil is approaching, you decide, and therefore some part of it must be suffered now. It may feel like weather passing through you but it is still a judgment.