I’ve read that when you think about the future, you are being anxious. I think that a lot of my thoughts have some relation to the future, with a common chain of thoughts being: “I don’t know this -> I feel inadequate -> anxiety”. When this feeling has actions that I can directly take, it generally has had a helpful, motivational impact on my life. For example, I feel some inadequacy in my fitness -> I go to the gym. However, when I don’t have direct actions that I can come up with, this often spirals into a cycle of anxiety and browsing information in an attempt to address how I feel. An example might be feeling some inadequacy about career success -> browsing linkedin.

It’s pretty difficult to develop self-awareness about anxiety or how you feel in this state, but if I take a step back, my anxiety added unecessary stress to my life. This feeling will inevitably pass and return in waves regardless of what I do. The thoughts associated with this anxiety are going to be silly and unrealistic, but I think one thing that I shouldn’t do is to sit and let this feeling pass. If this feeling can motivate some action, then it should be addressed. I’ve been trying to adopt an “action-based” mindset, where the idea is that your results, how people view you, and how you view yourself are all based on the actions you take. People don’t understand how you feel if you don’t express it, they can only see your behaviors and make a judgement based off of that. I construct an image of myself based on external feedback from the world. So if I want to accomplish something, change something, I should do something.

But if I want to take some action, I need a direction to take my action into. I think writing will be helpful for this. When things are written down, we have more clarity of thought, I know exactly what I want to express. Once this is defined, action in a specific direction can be taken.