Every Little Thing’s Gonna Be Alright: How to Reduce Stress by Looking Ahead

First off, I’d like to mention that the inspiration from this post came from a great little book by Dr. Richard Carlson called “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and It’s All Small Stuff”. It’s a quick read with a lot of great, easy to digest points and suggestions for reducing stress and finding a more balanced life. A lot of what Carlson offers are already things that I had learned in the past (including the one I’m sharing in this post), but as time goes by we have a tendency to forget some of life’s most essential lessons. This book does a great job of providing clear, actionable advice, and I highly recommend it. Thanks to David Cain at Raptitude for pointing me in it’s direction.

Anyhoo…

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Have you ever noticed how whenever a stressful problem rears its troublesome head, it tends to obstruct all else? Maybe you’re having an argument with your partner, and it doesn’t matter how many great days you’ve shared, a day of anger is suddenly the only one that matters, the rest be damned.  Or maybe you have a job that usually keeps you pretty happy, but today the pace just won’t give you a moment to relax, and you can feel the rising urge to tell your boss (who you usually don’t mind either) exactly where he can take the job and shove it.

It can be any of a million things, from the small (you’ve lost your phone, the cable cut out, the kid next door threw a rock through your window…) to the large (you lost your job, your girlfriend left you, somebody died…). It seems to swallow up the very future, like some blackhole that draws in all that is good and leaves behind nothing but irritation, stress, depression, anger, remorse, or any of the other many negative emotions that problems often draw out.

The thing that we tend to forget when we are stressed out or confronted with a problem is that time passes and our individual troubles go with it. The stress, anger, sadness, or depression that accompanies each problem can seem to be so massive that it will never subside, but that kind of thinking is like assuming that an eclipse of the sun is permanent.

Here’s a suggestion: the next time you’re feeling a negative emotion due to some problem, imagine where you’ll be in one year and whether or not that problem will hold any significance in your life.

Think about it. The lost phone will be replaced. The window repaired. The fight with your partner forgotten. The broken up relationship moved past. The deceased friend or relative a memory of someone once loved.

When you look at your problems through the “year from now” lens, they take up a lot less space in your perception. It reminds you how things pass, life goes on, and that what is bothering you now is only a small fraction of what is actually happening in your life.

This technique won’t solve every problem that you bump up against, but it does provide a chance to develop a better perspective on where you focus your energies. Instead of wasting all of your attention by focusing it on every problem that pops up, you can look forward by a year and remind yourself that time passes and that you would do better to focus on doing the things that make you happy – not simply grasping to the things that make you feel negatively.

And if you think looking forward by one year will make you immediate problems and stresses seem insignificant, try looking forward by five, ten, twenty, or even fifty! I would be willing to bet the farm that a lot of the things that I concern myself with now will be laughable when I’m eighty.