Connor Beaton argues that anxiety is a distortion of the future that pulls you out of the present moment into imagined scenarios. Most of the time you're actually safe right now, but anxiety tries to prevent harm by predicting and controlling futures that may never happen.
Anxiety is a future based distortion that rips you out of the present moment and takes you somewhere into the future. It pulls you into a future based scenario. What's going to happen, what could happen. And your mind and your body start to try and predict, but you are not in the present. You are worrying about the future. Something that could unfold, something that should unfold, something that you need to happen, something that you definitely do not want to happen. But anxiety is worth always pulling you out of the present moment, where 99% of the time you're genuinely safe, you're genuinely okay, and you start to worry or be concerned about something that has yet to happen, or something's happening inside of you, and you are concerned that it's going to continue on indefinitely. Generally just a maladaptive strategy to try and prevent some type of harm, some type of issue from unfolding.
How to Raise Strong, Unshakable Boys in Today's Culture, with Dr. Shefali Tsabary
