Anxiety Needs a Future

I recently drove out to Joshua Tree National Park, alone. It's remote and dry, and I was nervous before I even left. The heat was extreme, and for the past few days I'd been getting faint after short walks. Alone in a desert with a body that had been giving out on me is a reasonable thing to be worried about.

So before I set out, I asked myself a plain question: what do I actually need to do here?

I packed water and extra drinks. I decided I wouldn't push myself to complete any hike beyond the minimum. I dressed for the heat. My gas tank was full. I picked up a protein bar and a second snack, just in case.

What I was doing in that parking lot has a name, and it's something I end up talking about with clients constantly. Anxiety, in its simplest form, is worry about a future we can't control. And anxiety needs an open question to survive on. Give it a closed one, a list of concrete tasks, and it starts to lose its grip.

Think about people who lived through hard winters in the past. They knew what was coming, that they couldn't control it, so they focused on preparations. Autumn wasn't spent worrying about the cold ahead. It was spent working: chopping wood, bringing in the harvest, storing food, mending what needed mending. There was no ambiguity about the task. The winter was certain, the work was clear, and the work absorbed the worry. By the time the cold actually arrived, most of what could be done had already been done. What was left was living through it, which is a different thing than dreading it.

But winter is the easy case. The threat is known and the work is obvious. Most of what we actually worry about isn't like that at all. Will the round close. Will they leave. Will I still have this job in six months. There's no woodpile for any of it.

The move is the same, it's just harder to find. What is the one thing available to me right now? Often the answer is much smaller than we want it to be. Sometimes it's a single conversation, or one document, or an hour of work on the thing we've been avoiding. Small is fine. The point isn't that the task solves the problem. It's that having a task changes where your mind is standing.

Which brings me to the other half of it. When you catch yourself anxious, look at what you're actually thinking about. It's almost always something in the future. A meeting that hasn't happened. A conversation you haven't had. An outcome you don't yet know. Anxiety lives out there, ahead of you, not here.

So if you're already doing what you can, bring your mind to the present by using your body. Your breath. A short walk. Whatever gets you into the present moment, because anxiety needs a future to live in.

By the time I started walking in the park, the plan was already in place. Water in the car, snacks in my pocket, a clear sense of my own limits. And still, I noticed the pull of the future trying to creep back in. So I walked. I breathed. I stayed with what was in front of me, which was dry heat and red rock and the next step.

Treat your emotions as data. When the anxiety comes, two questions: What is this feeling actually pointing at? And is there something I can do about it right now, or am I just rehearsing?

Best, Patricia