In an episode of the old program The Twilight Zone, a man awakens in his home and cannot open his dresser drawer. It emerges that he has accidentally voyaged too far forward in time. He learns that every minute of every day is constructed separately by a team of carpenters and that the particular minute he finds himself in is not yet ready for occupancy.
This sounds far-fetched, but it is precisely what we do with the imaginary land in which we spend much of every waking day: the future. We make it up. We cannot be certain that an undetected asteroid won’t strike in the night, obliterating our—or everyone’s—future entirely. Every vision of the future we have is just a fantasy.
You do not own a crystal ball. The future is always uncertain. It will probably be a mixed bag of good and bad, but most of your feared catastrophes will never happen. Many of us are uncomfortably aware that we spend an inordinate amount of mental effort imagining disasters that are extremely unlikely (the firing, the terminal diagnosis, the bankruptcy), and almost no time contemplating the more probable outcomes (going to work next week having not been fired, being told the blood tests are fine, getting through the financial squeeze). This is a perfect path to misery. To get there, you should believe wholeheartedly the anxiety-ridden horror films you play on the screen of your future.
There’s an added treat to the fact that the future is uncertain. Whereas each of us has only a single past, the future has the advantage of multiplicity: we can create endless variations. Consider the possible outcomes of an upcoming business trip, the likelihood of each outcome, and the amount of time you might spend thinking of them:
We can do this for everything in our lives. We can worry both about not getting the job we just interviewed for and about getting it and failing in the role. We can create situations with ten different resolutions, all bad, and we can feel the pain of all of them. We can be rejected by potential partners a thousand times without ever making an approach.
Try it. Think of something negative that could conceivably happen in coming weeks (or perhaps an item from your “Three Bad Things” exercise) and about which you have been worrying. Turn that thought into a miniature drama, a made-for-me movie, with color and surround sound:
Now here’s the tricky part. You know that this image is a possibility, not a fact. It has a certain likelihood of occurring, which means it has a corresponding likelihood that it won’t. See if you can shift it from something that might happen to something that surely will. Then plug in the emotions and react to the knowledge that this is your path. The track has been laid, and this is where it goes. Then construct a chain of events, turning your brief scenario into the first act of a movie:
This moment, too, is a choice point of multiple possibilities. Select the worst and create a new film of that outcome:
Continue on, laying each piece of track downhill, section by section:
You may find that at some point your catastrophizing begins to lose its grip on your emotions, just as stamping on an accelerator pedal while stuck in snow may cause the wheels to spin. It becomes difficult to make yourself feel the magnitude of the disaster. No problem. Simply wind it back a few steps to the point just before plausibility was lost. Play and replay the movie to that moment:
People often wonder how the very fortunate can ever be miserable. They have wealth, health, partners, family, and friends. What’s not to like? As often as not, this strategy is key to their feelings. The higher the rollercoaster goes, the longer the coming drop can be. The better your life is, the more miserable you can make yourself by the contemplation of losing it all.