8 Reasons Why You Are Always Anxious About The Future

By

1. You project your past mistakes onto the future. And you reinforce self-fulfilling prophecies to cope with your fear of change because you think that worrying will protect you from the fearful, hypothetical failures of the future, which you think are guaranteed since you believe that your personal history will repeat itself.

2. You are more afraid of others getting angry at you for failing in a common life path than failing to live up to your fullest potential on your own terms. You believe that a safe future entails securing good opinions from others and never making a fool of yourself or going against conventional norms. However, the conflicting desires from your image-conscious self and your true self put you into a state of debilitating anxiety and being anxious about both of these things doubles the amount of time you spend worrying about what you want to do and what you think you should be doing.

3. You still have regrets. You ruminate over major life decisions you’ve made in the past, which may include choosing an unsatisfying career path, allowing other people’s decisions supersede your own, not speaking up when you should, being in the wrong relationships, or not managing your money well enough. You believe that you can never recover from any mistake and you’ll be worse off in the future since you think that it’s too late to change anything now.

4. You haven’t created a work system that is customized for you. You feel guilty for not being where you think you should be since you have tried to copy someone else’s routine, which isn’t working for you. Looking at other people’s measures of productivity makes you feel terrible about yourself because they seem to be wealthier, more well-liked, less stressed out, and healthier than you. You blame yourself for not being productive enough, not working fast enough, and not making enough money. Because you are so consumed in guilt, you believe that your future won’t be secure and you always worry about every little thing you’re doing wrong in contrast to those who seem to be doing everything right.

5. You have a scarcity mindset. You believe that a bright and secure future is reserved for those who are either born to wealthy and influential families or people who are born intelligent and work hard in conventional career paths (doctor, lawyer, accountant, programmer, or engineer). You vacillate between trying to better yourself and allowing self-doubt and fear to cripple you and keep you stuck with this limiting and conditional mindset.

6. You know what you want, but you postpone things, making any major life changes and doing something new that will help you get to where you want to be because you are too afraid of losing what you have and failing at creating your own path in life.

7. Your projections for your own future are based on statistics of people losing their jobs, having too much debt, not being able to find jobs, and not having health insurance. Because the majority of people are burdened by these things, you believe that failure is inevitable for you too. This discourages you from exiting the rat race, pursuing personal growth, and securing inner peace because you’re too focused on struggling for short-term survival and trying to avoid being in pain (but ironically, this causes you to feel more pain and crippling anxiety).

8. You don’t spend enough time in the present. You allow remorse and guilt to cloud your view of the past and bleak statistics to skew your view of the future. You don’t spend enough time reflecting on what you are capable of now. You spend more time thinking about what has gone wrong and what could go wrong instead of taking the time to act now, commit to changing one thing at a time, simplify your goals, and create a lifestyle that facilitates your ability to transcend your limiting mindset, your external circumstances, and most of all, the fears that have controlled you for so long.