Helping teens and adults navigate stress and uncertainty with more confidence | Training practitioners to join the mission
Breaking the Worry Loop: Seeing how Fear about the Future is made of Bad Data
Today’s post is about how terrible we are at predicting the future, and yet we seem to trust our prediction skills 100%.
We recently got a golden retriever puppy. I expected a cuddly, fuzzy ball of dough. What we got was a squirmy, wild biting machine we mostly call by his nicknames, Baby Shark, Rowdy, and Hurricane Burt.
We’ve had him for 3 months and I have never ever snuggled him without getting raked across the cheek with a row of teeth.
Because of the way human thought works, when we decided to get a puppy, my mind dipped into my memory bank of past experience made mostly of cuddly instagram golden retriever videos. And they told me “Here’s the puppy experience you’re going to have.”
And I bought it.
The funny part is I’ve had 7 dogs, two kids, and a husband andI thought I knew what they’d be like.
And they were NONE of those things.
What I find so fascinating about thought and the future is when we’re looking forward to something, we seem to overestimate it and build up our expectations.
And on the other end of the spectrum, when we’re worried or nervous about things like job interviews, difficult conversations, or financial challenges, people seem to massively underestimate the future.
We come up with worst-case scenarios and we get frightened by them as if they’re premonitions.
The truth is our worst-case scenarios are not imported from the future by some kind of a time-travel feature. Instead they’re taken directly from our memory bank of past experience just like my idea of how cuddly our puppy would be.
So all our information about the future comes from the past. It’s tainted. It’s bad data.
“The truth is our worst-case scenarios are not imported from the future…they’re taken directly from our memory bank of past experience…”
In fact our ideas about the future are tainted in one very predictable way: the more fear we have, the more distorted reality looks.
The more anxious or insecure we are when we think about the future, the darker, more extreme, and more threatening our predictions become.
So even though our worst-case scenarios rarely, if ever, come true, they’re so scary and graphic we get swept up in the fear.
Fortunately we have the ability to reflect and have insight about our lives which provides a level of grace and protection from our own devices.
It turns out that the more understanding we have around how thought and reality work, the less we get caught up in our worry and fear.
That’s what today’s video is about.
erika bugbee
I’m a global coach who works with teens, individuals, couples, and practitioners that are open and motivated to change.
