How to Stop Worrying About the Future

It was 3 o’clock in the morning. My eyes were closed but internally I was wide awake. 

“How could I have been so stupid? The red flags were so obvious!” This, and many other remarks like it were rolling through my mind, like a treadmill ratcheted up to full speed. My heart pounded. My mind replayed past events and judged me horribly for them, then bounced forward to the future, visualizing a hundred ways that things might go wrong based on my previous screwups. 

Between the voice in my head ping-ponging around, to the pounding of my heart beat, I may as well have been in a nightclub on the Friday before a 3-day weekend. In actuality, I was safely in the comfort of my own bedroom, which was so peacefully still and quiet except for the sweet screech owl who lives outside our bedroom, who perforated the silence every few minutes with some hooting. Well, that and the earsplitting raucous of my inner world.

What Does it Feel Like to Worry?

This is what it looks like when I worry about the future. During the day, I will often find myself distracted, sometimes drifting off at times I should be paying attention to other things to fantasize about a horrible future or feel disgusted by something that happened in the past. When it’s time for bed, I’m exhausted because I’ve been multitasking all day, with my attention teetering between whatever momentary task I was doing and my worry. I’m able to drift into sleep pretty easily, but my worry returns front and center at each interval of waking during the night, resulting in a nightclub-esque frenzy of activity just beneath the surface of my skin at 3 o’clock in the morning.

I have often been prone to worry. Worry is the belief that things are most likely going to go the wrong way in the future. Worry happens when we narrow down our attention so that we’re only considering the negative possibilities that might happen, and we either ignore or undervalue the possibilities of things going right in the future. Those of us who worry have probably grown up with people in our family who worry, and we learned to worry through the process of monkey-see-monkey-do. Or perhaps we learned to worry because so many bad things happened to us before that bad things happening in the future seems like a given. However we learned how to worry, it becomes a default way of filtering and deriving meaning from our experience. Those who worry view the future with completely different possibilities than people who don’t worry. Worry is not a faucet one can turn off; it’s a pipe that needs to be redirected.

How To Stop Worrying About The Future

As I lay awake that particular night, staring at the ceiling and twiddling my thumbs (a very familiar pastime indeed), something unique happened. I saw my worry in a new way. I understood, for the first time, that the mechanism that lies underneath my worry--whatever it is that sets my worry into motion--was a healthy mechanism. That thing, whatever it is, is the thing inside me that solves problems and moves things forward. Worry is one way of achieving forward movement, but it’s not the only way, and it’s not the most balanced way to achieve it. This became uncontroversially clear to me. It bubbled up from within and said: Hey, B--there’s alternatives to worry and you can teach them to yourself. 

How To Stop Worrying Step 1: Notice That You’re Worrying

I don’t think the above thought would have occurred to me had I been wrapped up in the content of my worry. That thought could only arise when I was watching my worry from afar. It was still close enough that I could see deep into the weeds and feel the sick feelings it created in my body, but I was not identified or merged with it. It was over there, and I was over here. It did not consume me.

A field of options opened up. Suddenly, worry wasn’t the only way to look at things. Sure, it was one way, a very loud way, a very loud obnoxious way to view life. But noticing the worry creates distance, which allows space for alternatives. 

How To Stop Worrying Step 2: Empathize With Yourself

“I should have acted on that gut feeling at the time. If I had acted on my instinct, I wouldn’t be in this mess now! I can’t believe I was so stupid. What an idiot, I am.”

Worry is a judge, not an empathizer. My worry didn’t care that I did my best, it didn’t believe I was good enough to do the right thing in the future, and it didn’t think I deserved much. Worry makes moral judgements, it doesn’t bring me a cup of tea and listen attentively to my feelings and needs.

As I distanced myself from my worry, I felt the cruelty of its comments. I hear worry’s banter all the time, but I don’t often feel the impact it has on my body. It all sounded so mean all of a sudden. Usually, I’m enmeshed with my worry, and I buy into its perspective hook, line and sinker. With space between me and it, it now seemed absurd to bite onto its bait. 

Only a few moments ago I was calling myself a stupid idiot for ignoring early warning signs that would have prevented the current terrible situation I’m in. Now, I could clearly see an alternate storyline, one in which I did a great job with the limited information that I had, that situational factors and constraints led me to behave the way I did, and that mistakes like this happen regardless of how smart I am at trying to prevent them. It no longer made sense for me to believe single-mindedly in the story of my worry. 

As the minutes moved forward, I became more understanding of how things happened in the past. I stepped back into the world I was living in when those moments occurred--the same moments my worry was berating me for now--and I felt compassionately for the person who meandered through those situations like a true forager. (Or hunter.) (Or warrior.) 

How To Stop Worrying Step 3: Focus On What You Want to Create

Between the distance and empathy, I was feeling much calmer. I still didn’t have a resolution. In a few hours, I would need to get up and write an email admitting to my shortcomings and potentially risking the future of the relationship. 

In true worry fashion, scenarios of yelling and throwing and punching and revenge rolled through my mind. But I had enough space for something else to emerge. It was a quiet voice emerging from deep within with a reminder of something I’ve always known, but have long forgotten: Focus on what you want to create.

I didn’t want any of worry’s scenarios, that’s for sure. But what did I want to create? I’d never really thought about it before. 

“Well...I want to build trust with my email recipient even as I’m delivering bad news. I want to treat him with respect, and I want him to email me back with respect.”

My body started to feel lighter. Tension began loosening up, as if I had just started an old car engine after attempting four or five times. Visualizing what I wanted to create produced forward movement on the problem. It didn’t clear up the knot of worry in my belly completely, but it brought me enough peace that I was able to fall back asleep for a few hours.

Life After Worry

I woke up groggy in the aftermath of my worry storm. I also had more direction on my problem. 

I poured my coffee and sat down in my office to write the dreaded email. With my fingers poised over the keyboard, I noticed when worry wanted to hop into the driver’s seat (which was often). I maintained my distance and held worry off the wheel. “I don’t want you to drive right now,” I said.

15 minutes later, the email was drafted. I did not put myself down in the email, which my worry would have wanted. I focused on writing in a straightforward, respectful, compassionate way, which my worry didn’t like. I read it through envisioning the recipient writing back with respect and understanding.

After a day of waiting, he replied. Whether by luck or design, his response was exactly in line with what I wanted to create. It was the very best case scenario. It was a scenario my worry was not even open to. My worry was so sure that the future was destined to be terrible, it had no space to entertain the idea that something wonderful might happen.

I had accidentally stumbled upon a way of working with my worry productively.

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