This week, I want to say a few words about what I have learned about the nature of my own fear. More specifically, a large portion of my anxiety (a milder word for fear) relates to thinking about the future to the point that it becomes overthinking. However, when I am in the moment of taking an action, during the action, I rarely feel fear. I usually don’t feel anything at all, and at least for me, the total absence of emotions itself is a very good feeling.

If you tend to overthink, or feel anxiety about the future, I hope that something in this note can help you to process that and find the antidote to your anxiety—action.

Are You an Overthinker?

Let’s face it, you probably are. But I’ll humor you and offer you some questions to determine if you are:

·       Do I have difficulty making a decision, or choosing a direction and committing to it?

·       Do I seek excessive reassurance about my decisions?

·       Do I have racing thoughts?

·       Do I focus excessively on what can go wrong?

·       Do I feel the need to plan for every possible outcome?

·       Do I spend a lot of time thinking about what I am going to do, and not doing it?

In my case, overthinking manifests mostly as the last bullet: spending a lot of time thinking about what I want to do and not doing it.

Anxiety Is About the Future

I’ve noticed that whenever I think about the future, I feel anxious.

My anxiety manifests when I think about any future period, no matter how near in the future it is. For example, when I’m writing, I feel at peace when I am writing this sentence. Thinking about the next paragraph, however, will make me feel anxious.

In my view, the anxiety here connects to uncertainty. Uncertainty is closely connected to fear, as uncertain situations and outcomes carry the risk of harm, which naturally triggers the fear response for any animal. The future is always uncertain. Even when I am thinking about the next paragraph, the fear is connected to “what if I don’t know what to say, what if people don’t like what I write, what if I forget something important.”

To move out of this type of fear, there are two paths: one is to become comfortable with uncertainty by putting ourselves in uncertain situations repeatedly (not the topic of this note). The other path is to move our orientation from the future into the present.

(There’s also a third type of paralyzing fear, which is when a person feels overwhelmed by a large and complicated task. This is procrastination, and the solution is to break it down into chunks. Discussion for another day.)

Peace Lies in the Present

If the future is about anxiety, the present is the place of peace. (The past is often about sadness, which I’ll talk about some other time)

Whenever I manage to “be present,” (which is a real thing and isn’t just self-help gobbledegook), my anxiety melts away. In the present, I’m not thinking about what could go wrong (the future), nor am I thinking about what I have done wrong in the past (sadness or anger). I’m not really thinking about anything, which feels pretty good to the overthinker in me.

I can offer you one technique for how I get myself out of a future/thinking orientation and into the present. Most of the time, I am tuned into the inner world and my thoughts (generally expressed as words or language, not visual but as speech). For me, speech is how I am putting information into the world.

I flip my frame by turning my attention outward, rather than inward, and tuning in to my senses. Rather than putting information into the world in the form of speech or language, what information can I take in? What information are my eyes taking in? What do I hear? What do I feel on my skin? Smell or taste?

There are other techniques to connect to the present. You can find your own. My suggestion is to do the reverse of however your mind normally operates. If you tend to get stuck in past events, look at what is happening in your immediate environment right now. If you are disconnected from your body, engage in movement that connects you to your body.

From the Present, Take Action

When we are no longer paralyzed by fear, we can take action. Action is itself an antidote to fear—action begets more action, and every time we act, we become less fearful of the consequences of action.

That’s why I end most of my exercises with an action step. Feeling emotions is great and all, but ultimately I want to be a champion for us (both you and me) to take action in the world, to achieve whatever we want in our financial, career or personal lives.

Action has a momentum of its own. I’ve talked in previous notes about the shaky edifice upon which our negative beliefs are built—once our negative beliefs are confronted with evidence to the contrary, they can crumble pretty fast. The same is true in terms of action dispelling fear. Every time we act, and the bad thing we were afraid of doesn’t happen, it gets easier to act the next time.

The frame I like to think of here is being an athlete or a dancer, a person who is tuned into the present moment, and acts through instinct or intuition, rather than deliberate thought. It’s not that deliberate thought or strategic planning are bad, but rather that most of us overindex on planning and underindex on following our intuition in the moment. The identity that feels powerful for me is, “how can I become a man of action?” (I could use the non-gendered “person,” but “man” in this context carries a stronger emotional charge for me.)

The exercise will be a guide to adopting a stronger action orientation for yourself, by getting into the present first.

Exercise

Journal on the following or discuss with a friend.

1)      Noticing

Under what circumstances do I tend to overthink? What environments, situations, times of day, or even states of nourishment/rest or lack thereof tend to provoke my overthinking tendencies?

What emotions are connected to my overthinking?

Take a moment to feel the emotion itself, if any.

2)      Connecting to the Present

Get yourself to a state of overthinking, and feel and accept whatever emotion comes with that.

Now connect to any resource that helps you get into the present. This could be tuning in to your senses, getting your heart rate up, dancing, getting lost in music, walking in nature, whatever.

What do you notice about your emotional state changing? Is it an emotional state that feels good, that you would like to welcome more often?

3)      Creating a Bias Towards Action

What habit or ritual can I implement that helps me connect to a present orientation more often, the orientation that often naturally leads to action? Whatever action I took to connect to the present, how can I train myself to do it more often, daily, hourly, or even moment to moment whenever I notice myself overthinking?

Starting with once a day is fine. If you don’t know what works for you in becoming present, your work is to try things (be a scientist) until you find something that works for you.

For once, the exercise is not about taking an immediate action! It’s about practicing the habits that allow us to become present, which ideally lead to us taking more action naturally.