Anxiety about the future: how to stop being a fortune teller

Anxiety accompanies a person throughout life. And if there is a normal manifestation of anxiety or excitement (for example, due to upcoming events), then this is only a plus for the person himself, as this will help him decide what exactly he needs to prepare for and how he should act.

But it often happens that a person is simply unable to understand that his anxiety is superfluous and does not carry any benefit. That is, he has such anxiety that does not mobilize his body for any specific purpose.

Such anxiety simply torments a person inside, and he cannot do anything about it. This is an empty anxiety that takes away all the strength of a person.

One of the criteria for this type of excitement/anxiety is the prediction of the future. I will not paint for a long time that a person is not able to predict the future. Nobody else had this.

We can talk about self-fulfilling predictions, but that’s a different story. It is determined by the behavior of the person himself, which leads to some “predicted” actions and situations. This has nothing to do with fortune tellers, predictors of the future.

But how can you reduce the impact of such predictions and realize that you are simply wrong in your predictions?

First, we need to understand that it is human nature to forget things. Especially if it’s an anxious person. Positive experience that speaks of the fallacy of predictions is often simply ignored by the person himself.

And this is exactly what we can work with.

The second point you can perform such a simple exercise.

1. Recall the situations that you predicted, but they did not come true. Try to search in your head for such information and be sure to write it down in a notebook. Unfortunately, it is sometimes very difficult to remember this, so it will be easier for us to work with the material that we have at the moment. To do this, do the following:

2. Track all your predictions in real time. For example, you said: “I will leave the entrance, and a brick will definitely fall on me.” The example, of course, is exaggerated, but it happens. If you found the strength to leave the entrance and found that the brick did not fall on your head, then make a note about this in a notebook. Create a two-column table for yourself. Call the first one “My Predictions” and the second one “What Really Happened.”

If you practice filling out such a table daily (or as you predict), then you will very quickly see that all (or very many) of your predictions simply do not come true.

This technique will help you understand that our predictions are just an imaginary anxiety that does not carry true information about reality. Our disturbing predictions are just disturbing thoughts that live exclusively in our head. But, as experience shows, for the most part they have nothing to do with reality.

event_note July 29, 2022

account_box Winona Tse MD

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