When Your Fears Never Become Reality

The future, your future, brings with it a certain amount of anxiety. And the level of this anxiety varies from day to day and week to week. It comes from what you don't know about the future.

Not that knowing the future would help. That would just lead to different kinds of problems. But you do have a certain knowledge of the future.

You can plan things and they will happen, and you can often know exactly what will happen the next day, up to a certain point. You can even take this a step further and predict what will happen next based on what has happened in the past. But what you can't always be sure of are what things won't happen.

You can never say for sure whether certain things won't happen, and this, mixed with your fears and insecurities, makes for some uncomfortable times as you wait to see if those fears will be realized. And a lot of time is spent in this space as you wait for the next bad thing to potentially happen. But there must be something you can do.

You need a way to know if something won't happen. You can start by looking at the patterns. Your life follows patterns, and these patterns include the majority of things that happen to you.

One pattern you have in your life is time-dependent. Sometimes you are waiting for a specific bad thing to happen, and you are feeling horrible inside as you think about it. This feeling is the important part to focus on in this situation because sometimes experiencing the pain of anticipating the bad thing is more important than it happening.

So after a certain amount of time, if this feeling starts to lighten, then you'll know that the episode is over and the thing you are worried about won't happen. Another pattern includes the things that you find out about, either at work or in your private life, that you are not looking forward to doing. These are the things that give you anxiety as they hang over you, waiting to happen.

These things won't happen if the reason why you don't want to do them is that you think they will impact on you or your life in an extremely negative way. The things that damage you or your life are never things that you know about before they happen. They always come out of nowhere and happen suddenly and shockingly.

The last pattern involves other people. Sometimes the bad thing or bad news is seemingly controlled by a certain person, and it's impossible to guess which way they will act. But you can know what the outcome will be because this follows another pattern.

And it's to do with a choice you made in the past. When someone is going to decide something that affects your future, you are in that position because you have made a choice. So the outcome depends on how you made that choice.

If you made the choice with all of the information you could get and then chose the option that you could honestly say was the best for you at the time, then the person will not decide to do the thing that you don't want to happen. An important point to note about all of these patterns is that you need to see them happening in your life. You need to notice them working to build up the confidence in them as patterns that can be trusted.

If you can be aware of them, then you can better understand how your life is working, you can predict your future more accurately, and this will help you to feel safer because you'll see that your future is not as random as you thought.

When It Feels Worse Than It Should - Regain Balance

Our own lives are undoubtedly the most important thing to all of us. How we feel in every waking second of every day is experienced by each of us and is personal to us. We spend every moment with ourselves, and those small details make up the fabric of our lives.

And it’s the small details that are important to me. But I don’t think I was always THIS sensitive. I feel like the volume has been turned all the way up on the seemingly trivial things that happen in my life.

The small things mean a lot to me. Sometimes someone will say something to me, and my mind just keeps replaying it over and over. It’s usually something that doesn’t sit well with me.

Something that feels wrong, that just grates against my mind and leaves a sore spot. Or something will happen at work, and I just can’t forget about it. Again, something that rubs me the wrong way.

And it’s usually when someone is trying to manipulate a situation to their own ends or when they have misunderstood a situation. Of course, I can’t control what thoughts pop into my head, so it’s like my mind is beating me into submission by replaying these things over and over again. And when it feels like I’ve had enough, it stops.

And again, these are small problems that are made more important and annoying because of the constant repetition of them in my mind. And a lot of the things that give me the most stress are things that I’m sure someone on the outside looking in would think are trivial. Even I think sometimes that if I’m stressing about this small thing, then my life must be pretty good.

But the level of that stress is so disproportionately high that it’s like some torture. At certain times, my life somehow feels much worse than it should feel. Because of this magnification of the small things, I’m constantly micromanaging my life and making sure I pay close attention to all the small details because if I don’t, then it brings even more trouble for me.

Another part of my life where the dials are turned up is on social arrangements. I will turn down invitations to things which are most likely going to be fun because, for no rational reason, I feel strongly that I don’t want to do it. Of course, nobody truly knows why they like one thing and not another, or why they prefer to do this thing over that thing.

But the feeling I have is not exactly that I wouldn’t like to do it. When I get invited to something, I don’t want to do it because it feels wrong, like something I shouldn’t do, or it would be better if I didn’t do it. And until I deal with it and decline the offer, it will keep coming back to my thoughts again and again until I’m sick of thinking about it.

Fortunately, though, there is another way because often the thing that feels wrong will be canceled and will just go away by itself. So through my own actions and through things that happen outside of my control, I am able to always do the things that I should do and not do anything that I shouldn’t.

Knowing When Not to Act Is a Strength

I’m always waiting for my life to improve and I don’t mean that I’m just doing nothing but there’s a time for doing things and a time for doing nothing except waiting. But when I see the signs I am immediately ready to jump into action and do everything that I need to do. But between those times are the times that I just have to wait.

At these times it’s important for me to be very very patient because I can spend a long time in the waiting room. Overall in the last ten years my life has steadily improved and I can see that by comparing my situations then and now. I always divide my life into three parts.

My family, my job and everything else. Each part follows different rules and behaves in a different way. When I have change in my life it is only ever in one of the areas at one time.

All of the areas can’t change at once. And I need to look at what is possible and what isn’t possible to gauge where that part of my life is at. And there are things that I wish, and have wished, I could do, like take my kids to the beach.

But there has been a time when I couldn’t do that and I just had to accept that the “Family” part of my life wasn’t at the level where I could do that yet. And I’m even talking about the very small things in my life. There has been a time when I couldn’t have a certain food that I wanted and then a change happened and I could get it.

If you looked from the outside it would seem like such a small thing but to me it was important and I had to be patient while I couldn’t have it and when I got it I could see that that part of my life had changed and improved. These small signs are important for me because if I’m hoping for something bigger I can think that “if I can’t have this little thing then it’s definitely not the right time to have this bigger thing yet. Then there are the times when everything seems to be going well but suddenly it will be like someone has pressed the reset button on my life.

Something will happen, something disappointing, and I’ll feel like all of the gains I’ve made have now been erased. And I feel let down by my life and I’ll wonder if my life has really changed? Disappointment is a very strong feeling that repeats in my life.

And even when I think I’ve moved away from the area where I could feel so low something happens and I get dragged back into it. At these times I feel betrayed. My life was going so well and everything was clicking into place.

I was believing that good things could happen for me and that I could make that final change in my life that means it would never be able to go back to the way it was before. And on many occasions I have been so close to that point but just before the big change something happens and then the whole process unravels and I’m back where I started. This is accompanied by that familiar sickening feeling in my stomach and the crushing disappointment of another opportunity gone by.

Looking back at those times I can see that those opportunities weren’t right for me and if I’d looked more closely I could have seen that there was always something about them that wasn’t right. But each opportunity was a different direction my life could have gone in and now it seems to me more like a list that I was exploring and crossing off as I went until I finally found the right thing for me.

A Simple Test for Knowing You’re on the Right Path

Every day, from when I wake up to when I go to bed, my life is a series of choices. And each choice for me is important. What to wear, what to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, what I should say to someone, what to do in a work situation, how to spend my free time.

I make choices all day long, and I never want to make the wrong choice or make a poor choice or fail to make a choice. I want to make the right choice every time. Each choice is important because it affects me.

It could affect my body condition, my relationships, or my future. Likewise, if I do things in the wrong order or not in the best order, then it affects my life. With so many choices all day every day, it’s difficult or impossible to make the right choice and do the right thing every time.

And although I can never really know whether I’m doing the right thing until I do it, there are clues that I need to recognize to see that it’s the right thing. Recognizing the clues and what is a clue is the key for me. Doing the right thing sometimes, of course, means not doing what I want to do and doing something I don’t particularly want to do because it’s the right thing to do.

I can’t be selfish in my choices, but that doesn’t mean the result can’t still be good for me or that I can’t sometimes do the thing I want to do; it’s just that it needs to truly be the best thing to do. And that means that I need to be sensitive to which way things are going. People’s reactions, especially people close to me, are a big clue as to whether I’m doing the right thing or not.

It sometimes happens that someone says that I should do something, and when they say it, it’s like a straight punch that hits me. The truth of it really rings a bell, and I know that it’s the right thing. But just as important as choosing the right thing to do is recognizing when I should stop doing something.

If people have an abnormally strong reaction, much stronger than the situation warrants, then my alarm bells go off, and I know it’s a clue to stop doing what I’m doing. Or if something seemingly simple becomes impossible to do, then I know it’s a clue to give up. I sometimes feel as if I’m being blocked, and this can be mentally too.

I get uncharacteristically confused, and in the end, have to give up what I’m doing. This is a clue to stop. These clues are everywhere, and at first, I didn’t recognize them as clues, or I couldn’t interpret their meaning.

And that was okay because I was learning. But as I got better at picking up the clues, I could look back and see where I had gone wrong, and this helped me to get it right the next time. And there is always a next time.

My life isn’t that different every day, and situations repeat themselves all the time. So I can always find the same clues again and then make the right choices. Each choice is very important to me because it changes my life.