This year I've been really rethinking my relationship with alcohol and so I decided to commit to Dry January to really kickstart 2025 and just test myself.
Heineken 00 is the perfect companion for Dry January because you feel like you're still participating when you're out for dinner with friends, out for drinks, whilst you're still meeting your lifestyle goals.
I'm a big beer fan so I also love the taste of Heineken 00 plus being alcohol free you can enjoy whenever refreshment calls.
Heineken 00 is available at your local Heineken retailer or for delivery at Heineken .com.
You must be 21 plus to purchase.
Enjoy Heineken responsibly and good luck with Dry January.
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Hello and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s.
The podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast, new listeners, old listeners wherever you are in the world right now.
It is so great to have you here back for another episode.
Before we begin I'm just gonna say I'm a little bit under the weather, I unfortunately have COVID, I know, so sad.
So if my voice is a little bit quirky and gross, please do not DM me saying that I sound weird, that is why it gets us all at some stage, so that's where we are at the moment.
But it's not going to stop us from talking about today's topic because today we're going to talk about how we can stop overthinking and worrying about the future.
I think it is such a common experience in our 20s to be filled with a lot of doubt, a lot of insecurity, a lot of uncertainty about what's going to happen, you know the world is so large, we have so many choices and there are so many unknowns that we can almost feel paralysed with anxiety and I have been
there, I'm sure you have too.
Maybe you're worried about your career choices, whether you'll find the love, whether you'll be happy in 10 years, making enough money or even bigger existential questions around climate change and the economy.
It can be really, really crippling but I also really do believe that understanding our reaction and our fear of the future from a psychological perspective can be really liberating.
So we're going to break down some really incredible concepts today that relate to overthinking the future from our natural stress response to the paradox of choice, the illusion of control, self -preservation, so much more so that we can find freedom from anticipatory anxiety about the future.
The way I see it is that when you worry about something you take away from the now.
And a really beautiful quote I heard the other day said that when you worry about something you experience it twice.
Obviously we can understand that and know that our fears about the future are irrational but applying this wisdom is a lot more difficult.
Trust me I repeat those words to myself so many times and I still find myself awake late into the afternoons, late into the evenings, paralysed about what my future has in store.
So alongside a discussion of the origins of future spiraling as I call it, we're also going to walk through some of the psychological tips from Buddhism to dancing and mind body work to stay present and to stop worrying so much about what the future has in store for us.
It's a big one, it's a deep and existential episode for sure so without further ado let's jump into it.
This episode is dedicated to the people like myself who find themselves spiraling and overthinking the future.
It's dedicated to the people who are already worrying for themselves in five years, who are constantly questioning their decisions, double guessing themselves and stressed about life's many unknowns.
I've been there, I am still there so let's break it down together and dive into exactly how we can stop overthinking and worrying about our futures.
I think it needs to be said anxiety about the future is an entirely natural response.
As much as it is frustrating and overwhelming, like I said before, life is full of a lot of unknowns and novel experiences and situations that we need to find ways to navigate, especially in our 20s.
Much of what we're going through, we are experiencing for the first time as adults and there is no guidebook, there is no amount of advice that is ever going to make us feel assured and that we're making the right decisions and that is really really scary.
I think our generation has also been forced to carry the burden of some really intense existential problems, you know, worrying about the state of the climate, the state of our environment, about nuclear weapons, how the bees are doing the economy and even a potential recession.
It's a lot to take on, it's a lot to carry, especially when we feel so hopeless and unable to change some of those situations.
You know, I'm always so surprised when I come across news articles being like, why are millennials or 20 year olds so anxious?
Why are they turning away from traditional jobs?
Why are they not happy with the way things are?
And it's like, well, when you're not sure you'll even have a future, how are we expected to not feel anxious?
I think that's an incredibly common experience that unites a lot of us in this decade and here's the thing, it's really normal to feel almost paralyzed or overwhelmed by the future but what I really want to do is explain some of the scientific and psychological reasons why that occurs, particularly
how it relates to concepts like stress and anxiety, how it relates to self -preservation and social comparison.
Firstly, let's break down exactly why some of us have what is essentially an elongated and chronic sense of anxiety when it comes to that big question.
What does the future hold?
What am I gonna do?
Stress is a natural response to uncertainty when we are exposed to an unknown situation such as the prospect of our future, our brain is naturally fearful because these situations, these unknown situations could contain danger and it wants us to be prepared so it releases hormones like norepinephrine
and cortisol to prepare our bodies entirely unconsciously to deal with what it perceives as a threat even if that threat is years away.
This feeling has another name, it's called anticipatory anxiety and this is the fear or dread you experience before an event even occurs.
So if you find yourself agonizing about the horrible unknown things that might happen, this is an indicator that you're experiencing anticipatory anxiety and it happens because our thoughts are focused on a possible future or a negative outcome that we don't feel prepared for.
So if you notice yourself intensely focused on fearful unwanted outcomes, if you find yourself becoming really hopeless or frustrated that you don't know what you're doing, if you're always expecting a bad outcome or having irrational thoughts about your future like you know if I don't make the right
decision now I'm going to be miserable by 30 or I'll be destitute or have nothing or I'm never going to find love, feeling that irrational sense of really intense fear and feeling highly apprehensive is a sign that you might have anticipatory anxiety towards your future.
You may have guessed this already but this has been linked across multiple studies to other conditions such as generalized anxiety disorders and depression.
That's because overthinking and a reaction of this nature is seen as a byproduct of both of these conditions.
The same neurons fire, the body experiences, the same thing.
It's just in response to a different trigger and in this case a highly abstract one.
It's in response to the trigger that is our future.
It's also no surprise that people who have already received a diagnosis for these conditions tend to report higher rates of anticipatory anxiety compared to the general population.
So that is one reason why some of us have this irrational or consuming fear and worry about the future.
So why do our brains do this?
Why do we find ourselves spiraling and worrying often when we don't even want to?
When we know it's illogical and it won't help this situation anyway, we can't predict the future but our anxiety likes to convince us that we can and this relates to the idea called the illusion of control.
So as a species we're not incredibly great with dealing with the unknown primarily because it makes us feel helpless and therefore in danger and this has a lot to do with self -preservation which is essentially our innate instinct towards survival.
We want to ensure our survival no matter what.
We want to be protected against potential danger or uncertainty.
So worrying about something like the future, mulling it over, trying to prepare, that feels strangely satisfying to us because it allows us to feel like we are in some way in control and can be prepared for what is coming.
So when we ruminate it eases our anxiety because it provides this sense that we are able to anticipate what will happen and know what to do regardless of the outcome.
So this explains why I don't know if you've ever had this this really intense sense of like oh my goodness I'm super lost I don't know what I want to do and you've sat down and you've almost journaled or written out all the exact steps to get you where you want to go you know you've made a five -year
plan and afterwards you feel a lot better you've put it on the page you've ruminated over it you've given yourself some idea of a way forward you probably feel a lot better because it brings you a sense of control and you feel that you've been able to anticipate what the future holds even for a second
so you're at peace.
Well we know this isn't true we don't have that control hence why it's called an illusion of control because as much as we try to turn a situation over and over in our brain as much as we try to plan and we sit worrying and contemplating so much of our future is decided by you know well by fate by luck
by circumstances we can never anticipate and that is not a bad thing you know as we always say on this show the best outcomes always occur when you let life surprise you.
Time and time again life has given me its greatest gifts not when I least expected them but when I didn't expect them at all and we're going to touch on this later particularly how we can become comfortable with uncertainty but that's another component of this right this illusion of control the reason that we
worry is because it gives us this sense that we know what we're doing.
There is this other unique aspect of our 20s that I think also really contributes to this experience to this natural worry about the future choice opportunities open doors our 20s are really sold to us as this decade when the world is our oyster it's at our fingertips we can do absolutely anything that we
want it's when life really begins.
This initially sounds amazing you know what's better than choice what's better than endless freedom to determine our own life path as independent curious people but choice in this instance can actually be a double -edged sword and I want to explain why back in the 1970s a number of psychologists they
wanted to understand how we make life decisions so what they did they went out into the world and they gave people a bunch of decisions to make and with that options to choose from but they found something really surprising when people were given too many options they became almost paralyzed and they
found it much harder to make a decision than when they had fewer choices and this is what we call in psychology choice overload or the paradox of choice we often think that having more options or doors open to us is incredibly liberating and it gives us agency but it actually has the opposite impact
making a decision becomes overwhelming becomes fearful because we have so many potential outcomes and risks that may result from making the wrong choice having too many approximately equally good options is mentally draining because each option must be weighted against alternatives to select the best
one and we become stuck I just I have to mention one of my favorite studies ever done here it was a study about jam not really about jam but involving jam so in two in the early 2000s these psychologists from Stanford University they decided to set up a store at a local farmer's market and on the first
day they displayed 24 different types of jams and then on the next day at the same food market they gave people the choice of only six jams and well what would you know but when people were only given six options six choices of jams they were much more likely to purchase a jar they were a lot less indecisive
because they had less options now this experiment as strange as it sounds it can be applied to the paralysis we experience when we're worrying about our future in our 20s and why we find ourselves almost unable to make a decision society our family our social environment they tell us that we can be
anything we can be a doctor or a lawyer or in marketing or a stay -at -home parent or a podcaster and you know what that's too many options we only want six jams we only want six options and when we begin questioning whether we're making the right choice whether we're closing any doors to prematurely
that's when we start to feel incredibly worried that's when that paralysis we were talking about that indecision that fear begins to take hold and the other element of this that occurs at this age whether you're 20 or even 29 is that we haven't had enough life experiences to even know or begin to grapple
with the idea of what we want to do what we even like what is going to make us happy we might have some idea but the truth is that we haven't seen enough of the world to even know what's out there so our basis for this choice when it comes to our future our evidence is limited we really don't know and i
know this can feel so scary but something that always reassures me is all those stories of the many wonderful people in the world who at 35 at 50 at 70 they change careers they try something completely new they go back to university they start again that is so incredible to me and an amazing reminder
that you are not locked into any future for yourself you have agency you can change there is nothing stopping you from deciding you know 10 years from now that you might want something different and just going for it i think it can be really easy to fall into this trap that society has set for us that tells
us that we need to have it all figured out that is a lie that is just not true life is so weird and full of change and possibility and it's yours to go after but before we move on i do just want to talk about that misconception for one second because where does that even come from i really don't know
and it is such a source of of panic and uncertainty for so many people so where did this myth that you need to know what you're doing begin and i have a few theories and of course there have been other people who've had their own theories and conducted studies to figure it out i don't think this will surprise
anyone but it has a lot to do with social comparison we are very naturally inclined to compare our progress and our decisions to those of others comparing ourselves to others it's a social instinct that orients us to what is perceived as normal by the group and we use that information to create judgments
about where we should be and where we're going but our minds are not that great at choosing realistic points of comparison and our society is also not great at showing us an accurate depiction of what life is really like for others at our age so often the people we end up comparing ourselves to are those
very few lucky ones who have somehow managed to figure it out or who have already achieved so much at this age this past week actually the forbes um 30 under 30 came out and i was seeing announcements and images about it all over my social media and my immediate reaction was to compare myself to these
people and to spiral and question you know what am i doing highly irrational but it was inherently derived from my instinct to measure my own personal development against someone else's our brain likes to choose unattainable examples to compare against which is entirely unhelpful but also out of our
control this is why when we often feel so worried about our progress it's because we're looking at the 0 .001 of people who do have it figured out and thinking that that is the norm but i'm going to tell you a secret right now no one knows what they're doing no one knows and even for that small minority
who do they certainly don't know what they'll be doing in five or ten years from now they're just like us in that sense and i did an entire episode on social comparison if you are particularly interested in this so listen to that if you want to understand more but i think it is this really complex interaction when we
think about our fears for the future it oil all kind of boils down to these four essential concepts right it's anticipatory anxiety that provides us with this illusion of control it's self -preservation and wanting to feel like we're prepared for whatever happens it's the paradox of choice it's being
almost paralyzed by having so many opportunities that we can't even pick and it's social comparison it's thinking that you need to be further ahead you need to be doing more than you're already doing because you're looking at examples of success that are unrealistic but i don't think that we need to
feel paralyzed by this fear i think that we can find freedom from worrying about the future and this has been a huge personal journey of mine this last year learning how to live in the moment and enjoy where i am right now trust me it's a difficult process you know even last week i was having so much
intense irrational anxiety about whether the decisions i was making right now were going to mean that i was happy in 10 years so you're not alone in that and what i really want to concentrate on next is how we can address our fears how we can address our worry and move forward how we can release ourselves
from this anxiety about the future overthinking is both destructive and also incredibly mentally draining it can make you feel like you are stuck in one place and i think failure to act on this habit can also impact our day -to -day life and exacerbate things like our anxiety levels or decision paralysis but we're
not here to ruminate on the bad but look forward to the things that we can do to counter this negative cognitive pattern the thing with fear and worry is that it's often trapped and contained to our brain to our thoughts so retraining our brain to quickly dispose of these thoughts is super crucial this doesn't
mean entirely eliminating the feeling of stress but instead changing our perception or our reaction to this experience when you begin to find yourself spiraling approach your anxiety with excitement excitement and anxiety feel remarkably similar they elicit the same racing thoughts the same feeling
in our stomach the same physical reactions so if you're sitting in bed really worried about what the future holds worried about where you'll be whether you're going to have you know what your parents had whether you're in the right place right now treat that feeling like excitement tell yourself i'm
excited by this feeling i am excited by this feeling i am ready to be surprised by life i am ready to see what happens that way you're no longer treating the somatic reaction as dangerous or something to be fearful of but as a positive experience one in which we have a positive perception of what what we're
going through right like everyone would much rather be excited than feel stressed or anxious but they create the same physical reaction so your perception of that your thoughts towards that feeling can actually change the nature of the reaction and how it's experienced by your body but also by your
mind sometimes that's not always possible you know there are some big questions about the future that it's hard to feel excited by like are rising sea levels going to destroy our way of life you know not a fun one but that doesn't need to stop us or it doesn't need to hold us back from reducing our
anxiety around that around that possibility um i had a therapist once offer me this tip and i found it really useful and maybe you will as well schedule time to worry the same way you schedule time to exercise or to do life admin each day give yourself just a 20 minute window to indulge in some light
overthinking i often find it more effective to write out exactly what i'm worried about in that time to just journal my heart out and when that 20 minutes is up i leave it all on the page and i walk away it obviously takes a lot of self -discipline but if you're up for it it can be incredibly effective
in separating your fear from your everyday life and experiences there's also times when we just need a distraction like i mentioned before worrying about the future can actually put a lot of pressure on our bodies it can spike our cortisol levels it can create insomnia heightened pre -existing mental
health conditions so we need to get out of our minds and into our bodies we can do this in a few ways but my favorite way to practice this is what my friend and i call crazy dance i know it sounds really funny and kind of simple in the name right but essentially i put on a song that i absolutely love
and i play it super loudly and i just spend five minutes moving and dancing in the most insane way possible moving my body however it wants to feeling the rhythm and how my body is responding and it brings me out of that physical anxiety and that physical reaction into a more present space you'll find
that it is a lot harder to contemplate the future and to experience existential dread and anxiety when you are grounded in the moment when you are grounded in what your body is doing where your limbs are going the beat of the music and it is incredibly euphoric i always come out of it with such a sense
of calm it also has the added benefit of just being a great reliever of nervous energy in the body i think exercise of any form is actually great for this but so are things like body scans and meditation or getting out into nature talking to a friend going to a movie anything to just give your brain a break
for a second you know you really deserve that peace and connecting with your body removes kind of the energy that your brain is devoting to your irrational fears and to your irrational anxiety the final strategy that i want to briefly discuss is a bit more abstract i would say and i think a bit more
difficult to apply but definitely still worth noting we have to learn to become comfortable with uncertainty with our fear of the unknown this philosophy has a lot of roots in buddhism and the belief that we can't change what happens to us so we just have to ride the wave and let life's experience almost
wash over us therefore by adopting this almost stoic philosophy this stoic ideology we assist our brain in eliminating the instinctual need to overthink or worry about what's going to come because we know that whatever it is we will find a way through we almost just become passive to it like if this is going
to happen it's going to happen i can't change anything to get to this point it's important to reflect on the times in your life when something unexpected happened something beyond your control and you survived you made it through bring that acknowledgement into the present day add it to your problem
solving toolkit as a reminder that you can and you have endured before there has been so many things in your life that were scary that you did not expect that you never could have predicted but you're listening to this right now you're still here you made it through i think it's also important to experience
the joy and the excitement in change by you know trying new things pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone into new situations so that you can become comfortable with the feeling of discomfort but also the reward that comes from that and just watch as you truly do become liberated from some of that fear
i'm not saying it it will be instantaneous but it will help and we can slowly get better at dealing with that worry about the future i think we've also spoken a bit today about anticipatory anxiety and i kind of highlighted some of the links between that and generalized anxiety disorder and depression sometimes
it is worth just getting help going to a professional person someone who's practicing to kind of assist you through the transition from fear to peace and i did a whole episode on this called i think it's like your guide to therapy in your 20s but i really do believe that if this is a problem that you're
personally going through receiving some professional help will be life -changing you know there's only so much i can do and only so much i can say on one podcast that is going to help you so i do really think it's an amazing opportunity to really connect with the basis of these fears to connect with the root
of your fear of the unknown and kind of move past it and on that i do just want to take a moment to remind you whatever you're worried about that is okay it's okay to not have the answers the future is super weird we know it's coming but we can never fully be sure of what it contains so it's entirely
natural to be experiencing fear and trust me when i say that you are not alone sometimes that's just one of the best acknowledgments to just know that whatever life kind of throws at you whatever the nature of that experience is you're never going to be alone in that that feels so comforting to me to
know that it will be shared it will be a mutual experience there will be other people going through it at the same time and i think as much as we are such adaptable creatures i really do promise that it it's going to work out and if you let life surprise you maybe you'll find yourself in an even better
place than you could have imagined life is really funny that way i think sometimes you expect all these things you spend so much time worrying about them and suddenly your life is in a completely different spot than you ever could have imagined it and you're just like wow i'm so glad i didn't anticipate
this because i'm so surprised and it's worked out even better than i could have imagined i hope that if you've made it this far you've learned something or at least feel a little bit less alone in your fear of the future i know that it's really normal to spiral it's really normal to overthink and as
a fellow 20 year old i have been going through this so much recently and i'm just kind of trying to get comfortable with not knowing and seeing what comes my way so i really hope that you enjoyed this little slice of the internet today this this episode it was an absolute pleasure to be able to explore
this topic a bit more and there was so much psychology and science that i didn't really get to cover so if you want a part two if you want a more scientific part two more research based i would totally be willing to do it because i think that this is one of those topics in psychology within the discipline
that there has been so much research into and it's just so incredibly valuable so please let me know and as always if you enjoyed this episode please feel free to pass it on share it with someone who you think might like it as well or leave a five star review on apple podcast spotify wherever you are listening
right now it really does help the show to grow i read all of your reviews and they make me so happy and so emotional so thank you to all of you who have left such kind words if you want to be involved with the community follow us at that psychology podcast on instagram it is a really great way to participate
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have a lovely week we will see you again next week for another episode this year i've been really rethinking my relationship with alcohol and so i decided to commit to dry january to really kickstart 2025 and just test myself heineken 00 is the perfect companion for dry january because you feel like
you're still participating when you're out for dinner with friends out for drinks whilst you're still meeting your lifestyle goals i'm a big beer fan so i also love the taste of heineken 00 plus being alcohol free you can enjoy whenever refreshment calls heineken 00 is available at your local heineken
retailer or for delivery at heineken .com you must be 21 plus to purchase enjoy heineken responsibly and good luck with dry january.
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