A Prescription for Dealing With Anticipatory Anxiety

I used it on my recent family trip to Asia.

Photo by Donald Merrill on Unsplash

I tend to use an unscientific and unprofessional word to describe anxiety: It sucks. One major reason it sucks is that anxiety can be hugely difficult to eliminate, especially the free-floating sort that has no easily discernible cause.

But there is one type that we can discern the cause and that we can exorcise and that is anticipatory anxiety (AA).

What do I mean by AA? It’s the anxiety we produce when we forecast how we’ll feel if things don’t go as planned and then we feel anxious about it. Without anything bad happening at all.

As Thomas Jefferson famously wrote:

“How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.”

The pain Jefferson references comes in the form of anxiety.

The Gerkens head to Asia

To illustrate this I’ll use the two week trip I just took to South Korea and Japan with my wife and three kids. Traveling with two teenagers and a nine year old? No anxiety there, right?

I wish.

Traveling, of course, presents numerous opportunities for falling into the anticipatory anxiety trap. Here are a few examples I faced in Asia where I could have succumbed.

-The first bout of potential AA came in the days before we even left. Because of the Iran War gas price spike, air fares also spiked. Bottom line: I paid $10,000 for five round trip tickets to Asia, far more than I’ve ever paid. So in the days before we left, the temptation to fret about our Uber to the airport being late, getting stuck in traffic on the 405 freeway and my youngest kid not being able to check-in online for reasons we couldn’t determine, was front and center.

-We booked a nonrefundable river raft trip north of Kyoto for which we had to arrive at 9 am. That meant getting the teenagers up early, never an easy task. So the potential disaster of, “I just want to sleep. Leave me alone,” could have crept into my psyche the night before and through the night, resulting in lousy sleep for me.

-We also booked a nonrefundable Japanese tea ceremony in Kanazawa. My teen daughter and I needed to take a taxi from our hotel and meet the other three there. Would my wife, son and other daughter be able to find the place, which was inside the labyrinthine Kenroku Gardens? Would the taxi the hotel called for my daughter and me show up on time?

Fortunately for us, we made it to LAX no problem and got to the raft trip and tea ceremony without any problems.

But that’s not the point. Because this article is about eliminating any of this anticipatory anxiety in the first place.

So the truly good news is that I didn’t have any AA with these three examples or any other part of our trip.

Michael Singer’s invaluable teaching

Why not? What was my magical remedy for not doing what most people do, which is worry and get anxious over stuff that might happen?

The answer lies in a teaching from Michael Singer, my main spiritual guide.

The teaching boils down to this: Handling what life throws our way.

Before you click away to check your Instagram because this sounds so simple and ridiculous, let me explain.

The reason we subject ourselves to anticipatory anxiety is because we don’t think we can handle something.

“If we miss our flight to Seoul, I’ll be out $10,000 and I won’t be able to handle that!”

We get tense and anxious about this in the days before and day of the flight because, in an unconscious and insidious way, we think that will lead us to be more aware and “on the ball” in getting to the airport on time and all the rest.

I think we also get uptight and anxious so that if the worst does happen—we miss the flight—we will have already girded our insides to handle the blow.

We’ve handled adverse situations in the past

But here’s the thing. We do handle it when things go south in our lives. Whether it’s canceled flights, missed appointments because we got stuck in traffic or thousands of other examples, we do handle it.

It may not be fun and pretty, but we’re still here, right? However bad the awful event, it didn’t kill us.

And that leads to the crux of this piece so please lean in and focus.

The worry is unnecessary

We’ve already proven we can handle things in life so it isn’t necessary to torture ourselves with anticipatory anxiety. In other words, why worry about missing the expensive flight to Seoul if I know I can and will handle it?

I used this teaching to stave off AA on all three of those examples of my family trip to Asia…and many more.

What specifically did I do? Each time an anxious thought arose like —

“Boy, I hope the Uber arrives on time and we don’t hit traffic on the way to the airport,”

I would nip it in the bud by saying to myself,

“If we miss the flight, I’ll handle it.”

A critical point to realize is that AA overtakes us in myriad situations for a simple reason: It’s automatic. We don’t even think about it.

We worry just…because we’re used to it

When we start wigging out the night before we travel, it just happens.

What Michael Singer’s teaching does is merely get us to look at the reality of things…

We have handled things in the past, so why get all spun up in anticipation of things going wrong?

That previous sentence is key to the whole shebang. So step one is embedding that truth in your noggin. You’ve handled it before, so why worry?

Step two is to practice becoming aware when you notice anticipatory anxiety thoughts arising and telling yourself that if whatever adverse event happens, you’ll handle it.

It’s that simple.

The takeaway

I hope this all makes sense to you because it is profoundly helpful.

Think of the hundreds, actually thousands, of times in your life that you have gotten unnecessarily anxious about something coming up in the near future.

Now think of how how much calmer and peaceful your life will be when you eliminate that anxiety going forward.

Ahh…