The anxiety that comes from looking ahead

Do you hungrily embrace the notion of the future? or do you suffer from pre-traumatic stress disorder? Some travel hopefully; they enjoy the journey. For us, it’s more of a schlep. a schlep towards… the future. Time regarded as still to come, in which anything could happen. and this simple concept of uncertainty forms the bedrock of our anxiety.

This looking-ahead business is hugely panic-inducing. our relationship with the future is not a cool-hunting, road-mapping, five-year-planning one. it’s an abusive one, in which worrying about what’s to come can properly de rail the here and now.

because here we are. Where? Well, here. and now. but how? how did we get here? actually, it’s more like ‘here’, isn’t it? That hugely pressurised concept of the present. or worse, the fashionable ‘moment’. here we are – but are we in the moment? We’re meant to live in the moment but also positively visualise the future, and that is hugely anxious-making.

it makes dread our default. We are dread-full: we find, when the anxiety is really bedding in, that we can’t look forward to anything. The worry about the future doesn’t arm us so much as cow us. There’ s macro-dread over things like career changes and house moves, as well as micro-dread regarding the smallest, most innocent plans, to the extent that the prospect of cancellation becomes something akin to sexual fantasy: ‘come on, cancel me… cancel me harder… i’m cancelled! i’m cancelled! i’m cancelled! oh god, it feels so good.’

how much anxiety is too much anxiety? Well, in the quest to answer that question we stumbled upon a whole new fertile furrow of worry: the anxiety test. This is used by doctors to assess whether someone is experiencing pathological levels of anxiety– compulsive, uncontrollable, unreasonable levels of it.

it is called the gad-7 and comprises seven questions relating to generalised anxiety Disorder – each one a variation on the theme of ‘feeling nervous, anxious or on edge?’ and ‘afraid as if something awful might happen?’. you must look back over the preceding two weeks and answer ‘not at all’, ‘several days’, ‘more than half the days’ or‘ nearly ever y day’. but where is the ‘twice an hour and more at 3am’ box? We both took the test and were instantly diagnosed with severe anxiety. no wonder we’re stuck in the quicksand of worry.

and, if ever things seem to be going really rather well, do we dare be happy? are we courageous enough to voice our optimism? or is that just an appalling way to tempt fate? Them alice of pretraumatic stress disorder turns the future into a monstrous beast and relegates the present to a place where we are just waiting for the fun to start. is up pose the thing we are trying to grasp is this: enjoy the high times. The low times will surely come and go – but do not compromise the sunshine by anticipating the shadows.