WELLBEING ADVICE COLUMN
FUTURE FEARS

Many of us are plagued with fears about how things will turn out in the future. A fear of outcomes. We are future pacing a reality wherein we see ourselves or others failing. How can we stay out of the outcomes business and remain present?

“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.” Mary Oliver

In our wellbeing advice column, All Hands and Hearts’ (AHAH) Director of Wellbeing responds to an AHAH team member who writes in for advice on how to be more present and manage fears of the future.

Thank you for sharing your experience about the ways fear colludes to personify a vision of the future tarnished by failure. 

Fear is a dominant thread woven throughout the fabric of human existence. It serves us well in situations when we’re in danger, shocking us into hyperawareness about the next move to make, or no move at all. As a disaster response organization, these experiences are very familiar to us. Additionally, we must also consider that when we’ve been in situations where fear and intimidation have been wielded as weapons, their effects become insidious in our lives in different and unexpected ways. Negative experiences in the past can actually predispose us to feel that the future will be darkened by defeat.

In response to this, I have often shared with clients that, ”As humans, we are terrible gods; we always write the future with a poisoned pen.”

Working in a humanitarian organization, in addition to any traumatic experiences we may have had in the past, our nervous systems are frequently flooded with adrenaline and cortisol over periods of intense stress. This can cause people to suffer from adrenal fatigue related health conditions and/or ongoing and persistent anxiety about the future.

This research gifts us with the knowledge that living with future pacing fears and present anxiety, does not mean that we’re bad, weak, or failures. It means that we may be suffering from personal and professional stressful and traumatic experiences that could have ramifications on our physical and mental health. We are now empowered to make choices that can help us to live nurturing lives. We can learn to accept our tenderness, our battles with insecurity and anxiety and meet ourselves with compassion, rather than criticism; with care, rather than neglect. 

Naturally, healing from the casualties and attributing factors of these fears takes time and a committed healing journey; as read in the final quote from the study, “…this may reflect the need for comprehensive individualized care…” 

So let’s start by giving ourselves permission to not force a reactive decision to dedicate to that intensive process immediately. Instead, what we can do is to take the first few steps towards developing coping skills that we can utilize in those moments of insecurity.

RETURNING TO THE PRESENT MOMENT

• Sit in a safe place
• Feel the connection your feet make with the ground
• Take 3 deep breaths:
  • Allow your exhale to feel like a releasing sigh by using the weight of gravity to aid in pushing the air out
• Looking around you and say aloud:
  • Five non triggering things that you SEE
  • Four things you can TOUCH 
  • Three things that you HEAR
  • Two things you SMELL
  • One thing you TASTE in this moment

JOURNAL CUE

• Write about situations where you most commonly feel insecure and fearful about future outcomes
  • Then write about what you can do in those situations to:
    • Return to the present moment
    • Practice self-care

Thank you for writing in and sharing your experiences and questions about future pacing fears. I hope these activities aid in strengthening your ability to remain present and trust in your future self.

Please contact me if you would like to share more about your experiences, how you processed the content and the activities in this blog, or have further questions about causality focused counseling options.  

Thank you for your courage to reach out and share your question!