Can’t wake up. Can’t stay awake. Loss of appetite. Withdrawing from people. Create extremely negative scenarios in your head. No matter how hard you try, you can’t quit worrying about real, perceived, and future events that may not come true. But what will you think two weeks from now?
After struggling with anxiety while running a startup, I let a line slip out to a mentor that has turned into a mantra: “Two weeks from now this won’t even matter”. And you know what? It’s often true.
A study published by the National Institute of Health found that participants with General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) reported that 91.3% of their feared outcomes did not come true! Roughly 30% of the worries had better-than-expected outcomes.
This is not about pretending like tough times do not exist. It is about not allowing short-term problems to consume long-term emotional energy. Allowing each uncomfortable situation to create a crisis trains us to overreact to every situation. If you want to run a successful business and/or lead a team, you will find disasters every day that will consume every waking moment.
What can we do to help get through these tough times? Write out all of your worries. Putting it down on paper gets it out of your head. Not that you will forget them, but you will start to look at them objectively. Keeping a journal, developing a routine check-in, and discussing your thoughts with a mentor will help you compare reality with perception.
Some of the worries lose their power once we name them and take steps to resolve them. Others won’t turn out as bad as we thought and may even be better.
If a problem seems overwhelming, ask yourself these questions:
- Will this still matter in 14 days?
- Will it matter to me, the people I care about, or my work, health, or finances? This is the “significance factor” outlined in Reasoned Leadership.
- What is fact, and what is prediction?
- A client calling with a question about an email is a fact. Assuming they think I am incompetent is a prediction.
- What is the smallest useful action I can take today?
- Send the email. Ask the question. Spend 20 focused minutes on the issue. Make the appointment. Have the conversation.
- Once I have taken the appropriate action, can I stop rehearsing the outcome?
- Preparation is useful. Replaying worst-case scenarios is not.
I carry a coin with me that helps me if issues or the weight of work to do begins to feel heavy. It reads, “Things that bugged me two weeks ago no longer do today”. A constant reminder that I should not give a two-hour, two-day, or two-week problem permanent residence in my brain or allow myself to make negative assumptions about the outcome.
The Two Weeks From Now philosophy is not permission to avoid life. Instead, it is permission to stop treating every bump in life as a cliff. Take the useful action. Learn what the moment has to teach. Then refuse to carry it longer than it deserves.
Special Notes: If you want to join a group where you can talk with others about these anxieties, consider our Men’s Group.
“Two Weeks From Now” is an original concept developed by Shawn Bauman. This framework, including its associated language, structure, and application, may not be used, adapted, or republished without prior written permission from the author or Auxesis LLC.
The loop described herein, an emotion generating a fear, the fear hardening into an assumed fact, the assumed fact driving how we act, is the same mechanism that Reasoned Leadership’s 3B Model addresses in individuals and organizations. Emotion drives bias, bias drives belief, belief drives behavior, long before anyone stops to check whether the belief was ever true. The distinction between fact and prediction is that check.
