Overthinking about the future and forgetting that we live in the "now"
I have plans. Big ones, small ones, plans I think about before I sleep and plans that greet me when I wake up.
And because I care about them so much, I want them to happen now.
I anticipate the good parts. I rehearse the hard parts. I prepare for scenarios that haven’t even shown up yet, fears I’ve already decided are coming, futures I’ve already started living inside my head.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I stopped being here in the “now.”
The present became background noise. Something to get through on the way to later. I was so far ahead of myself that the version of me sitting at this desk, breathing right now, had already been left behind.
That’s how overwhelm works, I think. It doesn’t always come from too much happening. Sometimes it comes from feeling too much about what hasn’t happened yet. The anxiety is real, but it’s being spent on a moment that doesn’t exist yet.
And then, because I noticed, because some small part of me went hey, wait, I tried to stop. All at once. Everything, suddenly, full stop.
It didn’t go well.
My mind didn’t know what to do with the silence I forced on it. The thoughts didn’t disappear. They just kept arriving, except now there was nowhere for them to go. Stopping all at once didn’t bring calm. It brought a different kind of noise.
I think that’s the part nobody really talks about.
“Stopping” is not as easy as it sounds. When you’ve been running on anxiety for a while, stillness doesn’t feel like relief right away. It feels strange and uncomfortable, like your nervous system doesn’t trust it yet.
You can’t think your way out of overthinking in one move. And you can’t force yourself into the present just by deciding to be there. It takes a little more patience than that. It takes a while for our mind and body to adjust.
What actually helped, even a little, was not trying to fix everything at once. Just noticing one small thing. The temperature of the room. The sound outside the window. The fact that right now, in this exact moment, nothing is actually on fire.
The future I was so anxious about is still the future. It hasn’t arrived. And the present, the one I kept skipping over, has been here the whole time, waiting for me to live it to the fullest.
The plans are still there. They’re not going anywhere. The fears and worries, too. But they don’t need to be lived right now, today, all at once.
You are allowed to put them down for a moment. You are allowed to be in the room you are actually in, doing nothing more than just being here.
You are allowed to just “be.”
I hope you find this insightful. Remember:
It’s not going to be easy,
But it’s not impossible.
Your friend,
Brian.