Past, future, and living in the present

Take a moment to stop and bring attention to your breathing. Breathe in, and then a big sigh out. Where is your brain taking you right now?

Today’s Bloganuary prompt will take us on a journey of mental health and the importance of living in the present ;

Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?

I am someone who has a lot of anxiety, and therefore I spend a LOT of time thinking about the future AND the past. I often find myself reliving scenarios or conversations I’ve had, and deconstructing it in a way that brings on dread and embarrassment. There’s no “why” to this, just an unfortunate thing that I do automatically.

I also find myself worrying a lot about the future. I’m sure many of you can agree that thinking about the future is stressful much of the time. The future IS something that is important to plan for- you need to consider what your plans are in life so you can organize them so they actually happen. No one just wakes up and walks into every amazing experience they’ve ever had, some planning at some point is necessary. However, thinking about the future becomes unhealthy for me (and I’m sure this extends to others), when I’m stressing out about things that are not worth stressing over, or things I can’t control.

Thinking about the future is important to plan and to dream, to set goals and to get excited about life! But when you’re constantly worrying about “what ifs” and the potential negatives in the future, that’s when anxiety can spike and your world becomes more stressful and a little darker.

Something I have personally been working on, as I teach my clients and work with them through the same concepts, is practicing being in the present and finding ways to reduce that focus on the past and future. Here are a couple tools we use in case you’re interested !

Grounding yourself back to the present

Meditation and mindfulness is often touted as a key tool to bring yourself into the present. Often times those who have a lot of anxiety to begin with have a hard time finding stillness as typical meditation teaches (that would be me for sure!)

I personally like mindful walking or mindful painting in a colouring book as my meditation as it clears my head and gives me ways to be present only in the activity. But if you’re finding yourself in a need for bringing yourself into the present without planned activities, the following 5,4,3,2,1 grounding activity is a great one!

If you don’t have something to taste in the area, maybe you don’t have a glass of water or cup of coffee, perhaps swap it out for a different sense! Taking time to focus on the items around you helps take you outside of your brain and into your body!

Your Circle of control

This is another tool I practice with my clients. Please note when I say we practice it’s because everytime you do this you’re often doing it because you aren’t thinking this way.

The idea is that when we are thinking a lot about the past or worrying about the future, we are often fixated on things we simply can’t control. For example, I’ve had to use this tool a lot recently around the state of the world. I can control my absorption of information and how I take care of myself mentally, but I don’t have much control over the violence and politics that are happening. I continue to come back to the circle of control to remind myself that learning and feeling is good but doomscrolling on social media until I’m physically not feeling well is not going to help anyone.

If you would like to try this circle of control activity, start with drawing out a circle for what you can control and what you can’t control (you can try influence later, these are the main two).

Then depending on how you want to do the circle of control, you choose your theme. I like to work with my clients to do a general overarching one, and then practice with specific life events. For example, if you’re stressing about starting university in September, but it’s January, that might be a good theme to make a circle of control for! You can also do this for situations that involve your feelings and other people. For example, we CANT control how we feel but we CAN control what we do about our emotions. So if someone else is acting out and hurting you, you can realize you can’t control them or what you’re feeling, but you can control your actions and perhaps you speak to them or walk away to maintain your safety.

Activities that bring you to a state of FLOW

When I was in my Undergraduate degree I took a course called Positive Psychology – and who knew I would refer back to it so much in my future! Positive psychology is the study of how to help humans thrive. Almost just how I share that my career as an occupational therapist helps people live their best life!

The term “flow state” was created by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It describes a mental state in which a person is completely focused on a single task or activity. When you are in a flow state, you are directing all of your attention toward the task, and often don’t experience many thoughts about yourself or your performance.

As an anxious gal, I find that finding activities that bring me into a flow state is the best way for me to come back to the present and be mindful because my entire being is involved in the activity.

Painting is a major one that brings me into a state of flow, but also setting up my space for a cozy Nintendo switch date or reading a good book brings me there too. Some people find flow when they are “in the zone” when playing sports or working out, some people enjoy baking or cooking to find flow… it can be anything really! As long as it takes lots of focus and is an activity that provides sufficient challenge, it’s great to bring you into flow!

One last note before I end this blog post is the importance of realizing that passive activity or activity that doesn’t challenge you is not a way to bring yourself back into the present. I’m sure you’ve found yourself before watching tv and stressing about what your week will look like, or scrolling through tik tok and trying to ignore your stress. This can also happen if the activity is not consuming enough – for example sometimes my body is too anxious and my mind lives too much in the future to enjoy a hot yoga class (which I typically love). If you find yourself ruminating in the past or stressing about the future, time to explore some different activities or strategies to support you!