Fear of the future. How does it arise, how to remove

how it arises, and how to get rid of it. I'm sure this will be the best article of all time, because 70% of the time, fear arises for the future. Out of 10 times, every 7th you are afraid of the future.

Fear is an emotion that only occurs in real-time. You can only experience fear here and now. And you can be afraid of just two directions:

Your plans for the future

What happened in the past

Fear doesn't arise for anything else, so you only need to focus on these two areas.

If we are talking about the fact that you are worried about your plans, then you are worried not about the future as such, but about the outcome of your plans. For example, now I can think of that death with a scythe will come to me today and kill me while I sleep. It doesn't give me fear. The point is, I'm not going to implement any of this. Fear for the future arises when you plan that something will happen in your life. You plan either that you will do something, or how you will feel, or where you will be, or what you will be told.

Thought - this is a plan that you form in your head. The plans themselves are neutral, they do not carry any assessment. And the outcome that you see in this plan is your perception. If you think that in the future, as part of your plan, a negative outcome will occur, then you have fear.

To help you understand better, I will give you a couple of examples. The plan begins with the word "thought." For example, I thought to do something, go somewhere. I thought how the day would pass - what if there would be anxiety all day. I thought about how I would feel during the day, suddenly there would be anxiety all day.

I thought about how I would feel - this is your plan, it is neutral. And the outcome that you see - suddenly there will be anxiety all day - this is the perception of this plan.

Or thought to go to bed - that's a plan. Here fear will arise if you perceive it as follows - suddenly I cannot fall asleep, there will be insomnia.

That is, I plan to go to sleep, like all people on earth. But I see a negative outcome that I will face insomnia. Thought to stay alone at home is a plan. When you are about to do this, you might think, "What if I feel bad?" It turns out that you are already seeing a negative outcome. I thought to call my client - what if he tells me something negative. Or I thought to call the girl and go to the cinema with her, what if she would send me. That is, any plan of yours is neutral in itself and you are afraid for the outcome of this plan.

Let's define why you are afraid of the outcome of the plan. After all, not all people have fear. The fact is that, unfortunately, you see only two outcomes in your plan. Take the situation - I thought to go to sleep. You think whether you will fall asleep or not, whether there will be insomnia or not. If you stay alone at home, you think about whether it will become bad or not. In the case of a girl, she will agree or refuse. If you go outside, a panic attack will happen or not. As the day passes, there will be anxiety, there will be no.

That is, you are using black and white thinking. You see only two options - good and bad. Imagine you have a powerful stream of confidence in something, 100% certainty. If you have to evaluate what will happen in the future, and at the same time there are only two options, then your reserve of 100% of energy is distributed between these two options.

Often, if there is a negative experience, then you are 70% sure of a negative outcome, and only 30% of a positive one. It turns out that you are already 70% convinced that there will be a bad outcome. Commensurate with how convinced you are and fear arises. Relatively speaking, a person is going to go to sleep, sees the outcome - what if I cannot sleep. He believes in this outcome by 90% and immediately has the strongest fear because he is convinced that he will have insomnia. This conviction gives him fear.

Why does fear arise? Because you see only two outcomes: good and bad. Believe already half or more than half in bad. What to do? Take a piece of paper or open notes on your phone or something else where you can write down because it's useless to do it in your head. You need to write numbers from 1 to 10 in a column. First, it is advisable to write a plan that you intend to carry out. For instance:

A- thought to go to sleep

B- what if I don't sleep

S-alarm

If you write not according to the ABC scheme, it's not a big deal. The main thing is that you understand what you are examining.

Our task is to understand that in life there are so many options between good and bad. There are so-called intermediate options, which are neither good nor bad. In each situation in which you see only two options, you need to describe the rest that are in between. Because you don't have these options, fear arises. There will be other options, fear will not arise.

Write down the worst option - insomnia: "I won't be able to sleep all night" in the first place. 10th option, write out the most positive: "I fell asleep immediately, I will sleep right until the morning." Your task is to fill in the remaining options between 1 and 10. And each next option should be slightly better than the previous one. For instance:

1. "I can't sleep all night"

2. "I'll fall asleep for an hour in the morning" - it is a little better.

3. "I'll sleep three hours all night."

4. "Sleep at midnight"

5. "I'll sleep more than half the night"

6. "I will hardly fall asleep, wake up several times and hardly sleep again"

7. "I will fall asleep for a long time, I will wake up once and hardly sleep again"

8. "I'll fall asleep quickly, wake up once, quickly fall asleep again"

9. "I will fall asleep for a long time, but I will fall asleep until morning"

10. "I'll fall asleep quickly and sleep until morning"

Thus, you kind of create a bridge from the worst option to the best one. You have built such a log bridge from one bank to the other. When you see other options, your consciousness expands. Before that you had black and white thinking, now you see all the options.

It's like a color blind person sees all colors in black and white. That is, any green sees as black, any beige sees as white, any yellow sees as white, any blue sees as black, any red sees as black. If the light is light, he sees it as white; if the color is dark, he sees it as black. It turns out that a person has a black and white world. And then he takes it and starts painting each color. His world becomes colorful. He sees many colors and now understands that black is not enough.

Thus, you reduce confidence in the worst option. It is the worst option that causes you to experience intense fear. Once you have outlined the options, your anxiety is reduced by reducing your confidence in a bad outcome. Because your 100% confidence is now split not 50% by 50% between the two options, but 10% between each option.

But there are nuances here. You need to write options that are convincing enough for yourself so that each option is believable. You need to write options that you believe in so that a piece of your confidence will be passed on to him. It is necessary that they do not differ from each other, you cannot write bad versions first, then good ones, you need to make a smooth transition. Write at least 10 options, sometimes more is required. It is necessary to make smooth and logical transitions, and not only try to reduce the number of hours: "I will sleep for an hour, two, three, four …". We say that there is an option that is objectively worse and objectively better, you need to use not only a mathematical approach but try to make the options look better than the previous ones.

You can sleep for 6 hours, but it can be good enough for you. But you can sleep for 6 hours in total, wake up 15 times a night - it will be worse than if you fell asleep for 6 hours and woke up in the morning. You need to specifically formulate your options.

Thus, by working through your plans, you can easily remove 70% of your anxiety.