How to stop worrying about the future

What you try to control, controls you

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

Maybe it’s the trauma, maybe it’s me, but I am what you might call a worrier.

Sometimes I find it hard to sleep, lying awake planning.

And then this, and after that, but if this happens…

My mind concocts plan Bs, works out worst-case scenarios, follows the rabbit holes of every possible path, seeming to enjoy the stress it causes.

I used to applaud myself for this, thinking it a good thing to prepare for any outcome, but somewhere along the line I realized the stress I put myself under was neither healthy nor productive.

In fact, it almost ruined my chances of achieving my dreams.

The stress of being a control freak made me wonder whether I could handle doing meaningful work. I considered quitting writing and finding a mindless office job that I could do in my sleep but that wouldn’t torment me because I cared too much.

Then I realized — allowing my shortcomings to shortchange my potential wasn’t an option.

This pattern repeated with every single job I’ve ever had, from journalist to real estate agent and even to my toxic PR job I didn’t even like.

I couldn’t allow my personal challenges to thwart my potential.

I needed to grow, to learn how to let go and stop worrying about the future.

Otherwise the things I tried to control would control me.

Late last year, I decided I wasn’t going to start a Substack.

Writing my blog has been the peak of my week since 2014 when I began, and the Substack model of developing a community of readers who potentially support you financially seemed like an absolute dream.

That’s exactly why I didn’t want to do it.

I imagined myself writing blogs, feeling the pressure to please paying customers, and the stress of it burning me out again. (I’ve since decided the upgrade will provide access to a membership community with monthly themed guidance, journal prompts and exclusive chat — support to walk your unique path in life, and not just extra posts.)

The gift of burnout was that it lasted long enough to fully detach from everything leading up to it.

The frustration of trying to grow my Instagram. The pain of pouring my heart and soul into courses and books, sometimes falling short of expectations that were probably too high. The sadness of incorporating these disappointments and failures into my life story, reality clashing with a fantasy of fast, linear growth.

I imagined restarting and immediately achieving every goal I’d ever wanted because ‘I learned the lessons.’

The exact opposite was true. I spent months last fall creating a beautiful planner, goal journal and habit tracker called The Most Meaningful Year and for the first time in my career barely broke even! Other offers received an equally cold reception, and that familiar pang of disappointment and rejection nearly initiated the same, tired response: cling, freak out, try to control.

Only this time I was detached enough to approach things differently.

The time came to confront my fear.

When it comes to inner work, I deal with my thoughts and emotions separately. I advocate the Feeling Awareness meditation technique I developed to process emotions and journaling to process thoughts.

Sometimes a clear delineation between thoughts and emotions is difficult, but I find a basic distinction helpful for reasons that will become clear.

One of the most powerful ways to unlock self-understanding is to sit with the energy of fear, anxiety and sadness and let it speak to you.

Because fueling the fear of releasing control is a web of other, interconnected fears, the specifics slightly different for everyone although also universal in a way.

One of the most powerful shifts I’ve made is noticing when my mind is spinning, planning, worrying, and instead of attaching to those plans and worries, I now realize it’s a fear-based response.

That realization creates space to sit and feel the feelings underneath to hear their messages instead of mindlessly reacting to the fear.

Over the past few months, I’ve listened to those fears: Fears that life will forget about me, that nothing I do will ever work, that I’ll let my younger self down by not achieving my dreams, that I’ll let down another version of myself for not finding her way.

The greater the fear, the greater the grip, and the greater the desire to control.

An uncomfortable truth is we have zero control over things that matter the most.

Everything can change in an instant. You meet the one you’re meant to marry. You’re diagnosed with an illness. A loved one dies.

We’re told that we must ‘make things happen,’ but never stop to wonder — is it really us who is doing the making?

What about the wedding I randomly got invited to, in a town where I’d moved just two weeks prior, where I met my husband?

What about the early-stage lump I found in in the shower even though I was only 27 and cancer was the last thing on my mind?

These are the turning points in our lives, the things that most affect us, and yet they comprise an infinitesimal fraction of life’s millions of moments. Not only do they represent a fraction of time, leaving plenty of time to worry, we have zero control over them.

We often underestimate the impact of fate on our goals and overall life direction.

Self-determination is a wonderful, powerful thing, but as society has become more secular, we forget the most powerful counterbalance to personal responsibility: God.

All the hard work in the world is nothing without a little luck. How many artists die broke but find fame posthumously? How many talented people never break through at all, and how many business fail not from lack of effort, but bad timing?

We control our efforts and responses, but not our outcomes, and find it hard to accept that some situations may not end the way we want.

Releasing control requires coming to peace with the worst possible outcome

This likely won’t inspire everyone reading, but if you’ve made it this far, you’re probably strong and soulful and willing to be hardcore.

The deepest truth of all is that we must find peace with wherever life takes us, whether we like it or not.

As Viktor Frankl said in Man’s Search for Meaning, we don’t have control over the situations we find ourselves in, but we do have control over our response.

If you can find peace regardless of what is, you retain your power.

Feeling helpless when life spins out of control is natural, but focusing on that helplessness leads us to force things, which only creates more misery. We reclaim our power by focusing on what we can control: our attitude and responses.

As

Mike Sprouse

eloquently wrote in his recent blog The Backwards Law:

“The more we strive, the further our aspirations seem to slip away. Said another way, the more desperately we pursue something, the more elusive it becomes.”

If something is truly meant to be, we don’t need to force it. Our imaginations tend to be limited by what we believe is possible, and by what already exists. Yet our destiny, our fate and unique path is defined only by the unlimited force that created us.

Most times the worst possible scenario won’t happen, but coming to peace with it provides a sense of lightness, a inner powerful knowing that you can handle whatever comes your way.

Exploring the layers of fear to release them

First, I connected with my younger self. I imagined lofty expectations of being a best-selling author and world traveler who lived somewhere beautiful by the ocean.

Her response shocked me: All I ever wanted to do was leave New Jersey and fall in love. Those other things sound nice, but you already have everything I wanted.

I spoke to the fear that life will forget about me, and it said: Life is currently asking you to be content with where you are and who you are. Fate never forgets because fate is something inside of you. It can never be taken away.

I spoke to my inner genius, the Hungry Ghost

Bonnie Chung

wrote about, and it said: I will drive you into the ground because you must achieve at all costs.

That didn’t feel good, so then I spoke to another part of me, and she said: I just want to have fun and enjoy my life. You worry so much, I just want to let it go.

I thought I was clinging and controlling so hard for something. To make someone else proud or myself proud, or to prove to the world that I could do it.

Once I realized the only thing driving me so hard was a Hungry Ghost, all the other fears began to fade away.

We think we give ourselves grace for “life happening,” but fail to see that’s LIFE HAPPENING!

That IS life. Life is an adventure of seeing what happens. The interruptions, delays, annoyances, setbacks, trials and traumas are not merely uninvited detours but invitations from life to wake us from our slumber, eyes deadlocked on what we think will make us happy, and shake us into realizing that everything we can’t control is everything that truly matters.

Rather than invoking fear, I hope it invokes excitement, an invitation to engage with the unpredictable pulse of life itself, develop a relationship with it, and allow the strength of that connection to ground you amid inevitable turbulence.

I don’t mean to gloss over the many painful experiences life serves. Suffering, loss, death and pain are part of the human experience, but it’s no coincidence that those are the moments in which we also feel most connected to others, most focused on what’s important, most shaken from the slumber of rote living.

Those are the moments we’re forced to abandon our goals to attend to life, and in doing so, realize what life is about, what truly matters. Family and relationships and togetherness and love. Creativity and expression and service and passion. Courage, strength, fearlessness and humility. These are the things we can anchor into, that allow us to ride life’s inevitable waves. 

Earlier this year, I thought relapsing into burnout and having my plans for YouTube derailed was The Worst Thing Ever.

I had to face my fear that fate forgot me and realized: If this isn’t meant for me, something else is.

But then I tuned in and was guided to Substack. One of the first articles I wrote blew up and attracted more than 30 new readers to On The Road. On Thursday, about three weeks after posting my first blog, I hit 100 subscribers!! (Thank you!!!)

And I’m reminding myself there will be ups and downs, that not every blog will receive so much applause, that there will be times when things go in the so-called wrong direction.

Fully learning to stop worrying about the future will require returning to my pain and my fear as many times as it takes, probably forever because our lessons are cyclical, not linear.

But as a new chapter dawns, and the vast glowing empty page dissolves the pain of the past, I’m heartened by my choice to trust fate, to open my heart up and say, “I give up! Show me the way.”

What’s meant to be will be, and if it’s not meant to be, nothing I do can force it. All I can do is my best and let go of the rest.

Trusting in life requires that we trust our fate, trust that if we allow ourselves to grow as we were designed to grow, we will become who we’re meant to be.

That just as the acorn can’t help but become an oak tree, our souls carry a similar unique imprint, a destiny from the start.

That fate isn’t something I need to make happen, but something I must allow to happen.

Because ultimately, I don’t have control. And maybe that’s a good thing.

Thank you for reading!

Would love to hear your experiences in the comments:

• What’s a time when fate intervened and something amazing or terrible happened in your life?

• What is your experience with letting go of the fear of control? What’s worked for you? What hasn’t?

• When was a time you shifted your attitude or perception and life opened up for you?

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Love you all so much,

Suzanne