Everyone experiences stress about the future at some point in their life. It does not matter how old you are or what stage of your life you are currently working through; it is perfectly normal to fret about the future. However, at some point, it is important to realize that you cannot control everything all of the time. Oftentimes, it may feel helpless as you have no control over the events that will occur over the course of your lifetime; yet, that is the beauty of life: it is unpredictable.
While you do not have the ability to completely control all of the outcomes of your life, you do have the ability to control the way that you handle the situations thrown in your direction. Understanding this can be difficult because trying to stop your worries about the future can seem nearly impossible; I do not even know if it is completely doable. Yet, it is simultaneously freeing and frightening when you begin to wrap your mind around the idea that the course of your life is unpredictable. Stop wasting your time fretting about what you do not even know for sure will occur. (And even if this one specific event does occur, there is still a chance that it will not occur exactly how you imagine that it will.)
Looking forward to future events is exciting and setting goals that help guide the direction of your life are normal to do. It becomes unhealthy when you become fixated on the future fretting about the negative things that may or may not even happen. In doing so, you become less aware of what is happening right here, right now. You lose the ability to completely and thoroughly live in the moment that you are living in because your body is one place, physically, while your mind is wandering off to some unknown, distant place, mentally. In order to be your best self, your body and mind both need to be working at the same time and place; this will create a state of total awareness to fully immerse yourself into the current moment.
Through living in a state of mindfulness for the present moment, there is a good chance that you will be able to reduce unnecessary stressors in your life. While it is important to know that stress is inevitable, and a normal, required part of life, longterm stress promotes health problems. Thus, by letting go of some of your frantic worries about the future, you can not only cultivate a sense of better involvement, but you also have the opportunity to relieve some anxieties that you are not even completely sure will happen. Save yourself all of the trouble involved with emotional stress and psyching yourself up about how you will handle big (or even small) situations in the distant future.
Stop being a worrier; rather, start being a warrior, and conquer this moment that you are experiencing right now.
