Have you ever been to a fortune teller? And they told you the same things that they tell everyone, but at the time you thought, well it might be true, so I’d better keep it in mind just in case?
Or have you ever heard anyone say, “I don’t know where the time/ years have gone, it seems like only yesterday that I was …. “
I’m sure you have and you’ll notice that with both of these scenarios, they are about time, and how it slips by so quickly very few of us ever say that the years from teenage hood to now was slow, it may have been painful, but it wasn’t slow.
But Because Of Your Anxiety, Aren’t You Just Squandering Your Life Though?
Over the last 18 days, you’ve had 432 hours to live with. And of those how many were spent truly living and not worrying?
You see going to see a fortune teller at your local fare, is usually a bit of fun, but looking back on the time lost growing up isn’t, and yet for anxiety sufferers, we squander our time trying to predict the future, and it’s costing us our time, time we can never get back.
Anticipatory Anxiety The Time Suck
I was thinking about one of the symptoms of anxiety, anticipatory anxiety, the thinking style that tries to predict the future so that you can be prepared for the worst that might happen.
So if you are invited to a social event, and you have social anxiety, for the days or weeks prior to that event you will spend your time trying to prepare yourself emotionally for what might happen.
If you are going to make changes to yourself in any way, you will spend hours and hours trying to prepare yourself for how this might negatively impact you.
If you need to confront someone or you are giving a work place presentation, you’ll again spend hours, days or weeks trying to predict what could go wrong so that you are emotionally prepared.
I’m Not Scared of Spiders, I’m Just Scared of What Might Happen
The running theme here is that anticipatory anxiety is all about what might happen, not what will happen, but what MIGHT happen. And if you look at all the what if’s you’ve spent time thinking about, you’ll notice that rarely if ever your ‘what if’s’ ever came true.
But you spent the time you have now worrying about it, thinking about it, talking about it, dreaming about it, dreading it, and wishing that it did not occur. All that time and energy that you think isn’t amounting to much is in fact sucking your life force from you and leaving you with precious little time to enjoy your here and now.
The 24 hour You That Never Was Truly Happy
To prove my point, I want you to think about any day from your teens upwards to now that you had 24 hours straight of happiness.
If you’re 30 you’ve had 366 Months, or 11157 days, or 267768 hours or 16066080 minutes since your birth, but how many times could you say you’ve had 24, or even 12 hours straight of happiness?
You probably did as a small child, but I bet you anything that you cannot count 24 hours straight where you didn’t ruminate, worry, get upset about, what was going to happen sometime in the future.
Go on try it for yourself and see.
You Might As Well Have a Make Believe Life Because, like the Workaholic You’re Never In Your Real Life
When I thought about this, I couldn’t find one day where I even had a 12 hour stint of pure, unpolluted happiness, calm, serenity, and peace of mind. I’d be lucky if I could find in my entire adult life a 6 hour period even, and yet because I didn’t realise this, I have spent all of my time, worrying about the future, thinking about the future, pondering about the future, trying to create a better future not realising that I’m paying for my make believe life with my actual real life.
The Devil And You
It’s like one of those films where the mythical Devil comes down to earth looking for a saint to turn into a sinner. That saint has to be someone who is willing to gain something now for penance later. And they gladly enjoy the benefits now only to find that all along they were never really living a good life, because their mindset was so firmly on what they didn’t have but wanted, what they wished they weren’t feeling but were feeling, that they missed out on the time that they had.
You get what I’m trying to say here, don’t you?
If the Devil visited you and you had to pay the price with say the life of your favourite pet, you’d rue the day you made that deal, yet, anticipatory anxiety is robbing you and me of our life force. Time is ticking and we are squandering this on not being present, but trying to make our future something better than it is now, when what it is now isn’t that great either.
Can you see the irony here?
Sometimes this introspection can be such a pain, because once you see what you are really doing, then you can’t ever go back to ignorance, and changes then have to be made. And of course this is a good thing, to make changes to be happier now, but if you are always anticipating and preparing for some mythical time in the future, then sadly you are losing out on living your life now.
So what can we do about this?
Relax, Don’t Worry, And Don’t Try And Prepare For The Future
Well it’s not as easy as saying, relax, don’t worry, it will all be alright, but the change to make your day to day life now that little bit better could be as simple as awareness of what you are doing now.
For instance, now that you’ve read this letter, you’re more aware of how your thinking is stopping you from living as much of your life as you could now, in this moment, because you’ve spent it worrying about the future.
And given that awareness changes actions, what will you do differently?
Will you continue to create a future that you have no control over, or will you start to think-
“Do you know what [your name] what if I stopped trying to anticipate the worst that might happen and use some of that time in enjoying now?”
What do you think might happen as a result?
Here’s to saving time, and saving more of your life to enjoy
Speak soon
Elaine
