Anticipation

Hello and welcome to the Calmcast, a time to feel calm and think clearly. I'm Claire Downham, the queen of calm, a transformational life coach. I was a burnt out head teacher who finally made the journey to calm after years of trying and I want to prevent you from having to do the same. The Calm cast is a series of short explorations gently guiding you back to your natural state which is calm and clarity. Just listen like you would listen to music with an open mind and curiosity. There's nothing else to do now. Let's relax into today's episode.

So today I'm going to talk about anticipation, which is all about looking into the future, isn't it? Now I think a lot of the time anticipation can seem like something that is exciting or that it's about looking forward to things. But also there are many a time when anticipation is creating a pretty unpleasant feeling in the present moment. And, and this is, this is how I, and I'd love to hear from you on this, but this is how I see this panning out. I think we, we, we start with a little thought about the future that appears, don't we? And it, and it, it makes sense to us to, to explore it further. It's, it's possibly a worrying thought. It's a thought about something that might go wrong perhaps. And so we begin to explore that thought. We add more content to it. We, we perhaps go through the entire scenario of what may be coming up step by step and we work out what we're going to do each step of the way. I spoke to somebody the other day who said that's exactly what they do. They work out the worst case scenarios and anticipate the worst case scenario that could possibly happen in any situation. And then they, they kind of work out how they would handle that and that that's their starting point in going into things. So I think we do all that, we kind of do all the working out and, and planning and work, deciding what it's going to look like. We create, we create, we create a monster really. I'm going to call it a daymare of the future. But the other thing that we invariably do is we think we know how we are going to be in the future. So we generally, I think, underestimate ourselves in the future. We think we won't be able to cope with things and that creates another level of fear. So we've already created a pretty scary idea about what the future is going to be like. And then on top of that we, we think we're not going to be able to cope with this. It's not going to be possible for us to be okay with this particular situation as it pans out. So what a combination of thinking that is. It's a lot, isn't it? It's. It's a lot of noise in our heads. It's a lot of busyness. Now, if you've got into anticipatory thinking. Oh, that was a bit. That was a bit of a mouthful to get out. But if you get into anticipatory thinking, then you. You'll know that you're there because it feels dreadful. You know, you're there because the feeling that goes with that kind of thinking is generally called anxiety or nervousness. It's. Your body will be shouting at you and being very noisy. There will be a grinding feeling in your stomach, there will be a heart pounding, there will be, you know, a shallowness of your breath, there will be sweaty palms. There will be all those physical responses to that kind of thinking. And the reason why there is that level of feeling that goes with anticipatory thinking is because you have a perfect system, which is probably not what you thought. I was going to say, when you have an anxious feeling, that's letting you know you've got future thinking, worrying thinking, anticipatory thinking, your system is made perfectly, absolutely, beautifully, to let you know about your state of mind when you make up, and it is made up, I know it looks real because you're using the power of thought, which is pretty much the most powerful thing in the universe. You're using the power of thought to create something that looks totally and utterly real. You know when you go to the movies and you see I'm looking over there because that's where the television is in my room. When you go to the movies and you watch a movie and there's all the special effects and. And you know, everything. Animatronics and. I don't know, all the things. C. CGC I don't know. Anyway, there's loads of stuff that goes into a movie to make it look real. All of that was created by. Via thought as well. But you've pretty much got the same level of creativity. You know, that's why you can close your eyes and imagine a pink elephant right now. You could do that right now and you could create the most spectacular pink elephant in the world. It might have glitter and diamonds and it might have massive ears and be able to fly and what you know, you can create an amazing pink elephant. The thing is, pink Elephants are pretty harmless. Whereas our anticipatory thinking is scaring us and we feel that fear. We know we, we are very amazing animals because we are still animals, by the way, in case you've forgotten, other animals only feel that level of fear when there's something actually happening to them. So, you know, the gazelle on the savannah needs all those hormones that you can feel when you're feeling anxious to get itself away from the lion. And when the, when the gazelle gets away from the lion, it's fine, doesn't think of, doesn't spend the rest of the day on the savannah going, oh, my goodness, my children, what, what's going.

To happen to them?

The lion's going to get them next time or I'm going to get eaten. And then what will happen to my children? And oh, what if, what if the lion had eate me today? You know, that's what we do. That's not what the gazelle does. Within 15 minutes, the gazelle is all calm again and we'll only get back into that state again when it actually is being chased by a line. Whereas we can do that just with the power of our anticipated rethinking. Especially when the layers I described happen, where there's create a horror story, create a slightly inept version of us in the future who can't cope and think that the whole thing is going to be an absolute disaster, but your body's letting you know. I mean, that is the power of an anxious feeling. We are being encouraged to subdue these feelings, to suppress them down, to get rid of them in whatever way is making sense to you right now, which may be drinking or smoking or eating things that are inappropriate, or it might be doing things like yoga and meditation and things like that. Whatever it is we're doing to manage our feelings, to make them go away is, is like switching off this amazing warning system that's letting us know our thinking's off. And when we act from a place of knowing that this feeling is letting us know about our state of mind, we do different things than what we would do if we thought that feeling was coming from somewhere else. You know, when we, if we think that feeling, the anxious feeling is coming from the things we're thinking about, we may continue to try and process those things to the point at which we've kind of found some kind of solution. And that's exhausting and creates more and more and more of the same feeling because it's more of the same thinking. When we realize that that feeling is Letting us know that our thinking's just really riled up at the moment. Well, it may make sense to do something different. Like for me, often just create some kind of pause, just get my feet on the floor, take a breath, give myself a moment. That's, that's totally different to what we do. If we think the feeling is coming from, from the thing we're pro. From the thing we're processing. And this is not me pointing to swap your thinking for better thinking. Because anticipation, of course, what we can do is swap all of that negative story and for this happy go, lucky story. And actually what happens then is that we're swapping one lie for another lie. That might feel better for a while, but in either case, you're missing what's happening in your wonderful world right now in the present moment. Life is unfolding right now, in the present moment. You are missing it if you're off in anticipation with thinking. So hopefully you found that a little bit helpful and it's given you some things to think about. But not too much thinking. Let it wash over you and see what comes up. When we see new things through this conversation, it comes from us. My words might help, but it's all inside you or waiting to be revealed.

Thank you so much for listening. There's nothing to do now, but it brings some awareness to how this is working out in your life. Listen regularly to experience longer and longer periods of calm. This has been the calmcast with Claire Downham, Queen of calm. Take care and keep listening.