Renee twisted her hands as she sat on my couch. “What if the plane crashes when we go to Japan?” she asked. “I am terrified of that. The idea of just going to the airport makes me nervous, and the Pacific is so huge.” Her husband had planned a trip to Japan to celebrate their 55th birthdays, but Renee’s anxiety was undermining her anticipation. “What if the engine catches fire?” she blurted. She had entered therapy months earlier because she was anxious after a bad car crash, but this topic now dominated the session.
“Renee, your thinking is very common among people with anxiety.” I explained. “You either think about frightening things that happened in the past, or your mind jumps into the future. And when you think about the future, you think about it in a specific way. You think about the ‘catastrophic future’.” There are three ways to think about the future, the first is to predict an ‘awesome future’. In that pattern of thinking, everything turns out wonderful. The flights are smooth, the food is fabulous, everyone in Japan speaks English, the cherry blossoms are blooming, etc, etc. This is popular among American self-help speakers, who tell their audiences that the universe wants them to live in abundance and prosperity.
Anxious people never think about an awesome future. This is not much of a problem, it is fairly unconvincing anyway. Unfortunately, anxious people do not think about the second kind of future either. This is the ‘decent future’. In the decent future, people move toward a goal, encounter an obstacle, put forth effort, come up with a solution or compromise, and eventually reach their goal. The obstacle is frustrating, it takes effort, but in the end, things turn out pretty decent. In this scenario, the flight has some turbulence, and it rains hard for 3 of the 7 days. However, they take a trip to Nishiyama Hot Springs, and enjoy being in the oldest hotel in the world. There is one bout of nausea from a wee bit of food poisoning, but it clears up. All in all, the vacation is fairly good.
Anxious people do not think about a ‘decent future’ either. The future that anxious people contemplate is filled with hysterical screaming on airplanes, empty fuel tanks over the Pacific, and earthquakes. It is the ‘catastrophic future’. The characteristic phrase is “what if….. (some terrible thing happens)?” The minds of anxious people contrive scenarios of doom, pain, and misery, and they live in fear.
Yet there is a very important truth, one that can bring calm to a mind fevered with anxiety. It is simple. It is irrefutable. It is that the future does not exist.
It does not. The future is not real. It is a zero with the rim knocked off. The future simply does not exist. Even though Google has vacuumed up all the information in the world, it cannot bring you a video of next Friday. With all its hundreds of billions of dollars, and brilliant engineers, Google cannot show you the future. Because there is no future.
Google can certainly show you last Friday. It can machine-gun you with millions of data-points and videos about the past, because the past has occurred. But the future is a white void to the most technologically sophisticated company on the planet. We will experience the passage of time[i] and eventually move into the future, but it is not real.
What is real is the present moment. This sliver of time. Now is real. Right now is actual. I asked Renee to check with her five senses. Her senses are the bridge between the world and her mind. What were they telling her about this moment in time? What did her sense of taste tell her about the present? She said “I still taste a bit of my coffee.” Her sense of smell? “Um, nothing” she said. Sense of touch? “I feel my sweater on my skin” she reported. Hearing? “The hum of the fan, and your voice.” Sight? “I see you, and your bookshelf.” Now for the clincher question. I asked “What do your five senses tell you about how safe you are in this present moment?” Her brown eyes widened slightly. “I am completely safe right now” she said.
She was right, of course. I smiled at her and sipped my tea. She smiled back, her charming dimple appearing briefly. The moment was peaceful. Then, that sliver of time slipped from the present into the past. I put down my mug, and we were now in a new moment, a new present. The immediate future had become the actual now. And if she scanned her five senses, her eardrums, her visual cortex, her tastebuds, her olfactory bulb, the touch and pressure sensors on her skin would have flashed information to be sorted into her brain, and she would have concluded in this new present that she was entirely safe at this second.
Renee was not anxious anymore, because she was focused on the present moment, on reality. She had shifted the lens of her thinking from the mythical, non-existent, catastrophic future, to the actual, palpable present. Her nerves were whisking messages to her brain in real-time that everything in her field of perception was totally chill. As the saying goes ‘It is all good.’
This pattern of thinking is quite uncommon. We do not pause, and monitor this instance, and notice, nay relish, that everything is fine in this moment of time. We do not savor the moment of calm, the way one savors a piece of fresh fruit. If we would, if we appreciate this slice of time of safety, this immediate interval of security, we would relax. We would be at rest, not in anxiety.
If we change the focus of the lens to this present moment, then the fear of catastrophic outcomes, whether they are plane crashes or a recurrence of cancer, vanishes. There is no future. Reality is now, and you are safe at this exact moment.
That does not mean that no planes will ever crash, or no one will ever have a second diagnosis of cancer. It does mean that you are safe at this moment, though. You can relax in it. The paradox is that the more relaxed you are at this moment, the chances of your cancer recurring drops. The greater your fear, the higher your risk of recurrence, as discussed in the previous post. In the next post, we will look at a different way of thinking about your future, to decrease your fear, and your risk of recurrence.
Dr. Eric Kuelker
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